Parish of heretics.

On January 1, The Washington Post fired its most liberal columnist, Colman McCarthy, who had written his quirky, loving, humanitarian commentaries for the Post for the past eighteen years.

Colman McCarthy is a pacifist, a bit of an anarchist, a Catholic, an animal-rights advocate, an ardent bicyclist, a stalwart opponent of injustice, a teacher of nonviolence, a friend to the homeless, a foe of the death penalty, a leftwing pro-lifer, and a fine writer. He understands the primacy of word choice, and has an allergy to cliches.

He knew all along that he was an interloper at the Post.

"As a columnist who espouses nonviolent solutions to conflict, I haven't been on a beat crowded with competitors," he wrote in All of One Peace, a collection of his columns published in 1994. "Most of what passes for the liberal media are liberal on the safe issues: gun control, civil rights, the First Amendment, curbing your dog. Saying no to the military ethic that saw the United States kill people in Grenada, Libya, Panama, the Gulf, and Somalia; or dissenting from the legal violence that destroys one-and-a-half million fetal lives a year; or protesting the killing of ten million animals a day for food; or condemning U.S. sales of weapons to 142 of the world's 160 governments; or stationing troops in sixty-two nations--not much of that is on display."

Yes, I disagree with him on the abortion issue.

And yes, as a village atheist, I do not relate to his religiosity. But ours is a parish of heretics, and this parish welcomes true believers, too.

I recall a visit Colman paid to Madison more than ten years ago. When he walked in the door of our office, he said, "I've come to Mecca." I laughed out loud. After he gave a talk at the university here, he told us: "Being a pacifist is the easy part. The hard part is being modest. I want to work on that."

This tendency toward self-reflection is a big part of Colman's sweetness. He looks through this inward eye even in his very last column for the Post.

"It's too easy only to blame militarists, racists, and other believers in violence," he wrote. "What is harder is self-examination, moving beyond carping by looking inward to ask the personal question: What more should I be doing every day to bring about a peace- and justice-based world, whether across the living room or across the ocean?"

I like that emphasis on "the living room."

Despite Christopher Hitchens's caustic lament last month about the slogan "the personal is political," I believe Colman is right to dwell on the personal. Even on the acknowledgments page of his 1994 collection, he extols "the daily works of peace." And he adds: "If it's not in the dailiness, what does it matter?"

In a letter dated April 17, 1996, Robert G. Kaiser, the Managing Editor of the Post, told Colman that "it will soon be time to end the run of your column for the Post."

Colman's syndicated column was evidently not making a big enough profit. Kaiser gave him to the end of the year, and said in Clintonesque fashion: "I hope you can come to see this decision as a form of liberation that will allow you to escape the grip of a twice-weekly deadline." How magnanimous of him!

Colman didn't let on to his Washington friends until his last column came out. They were shocked.

"It's outrageous," said Sidney Wolfe, director of Public Citizen's Health Research Group. "No one else at the Post represents the homeless or twenty other constituencies that Colman represents."

Wolfe, along with Ralph Nader and Robert Weissman, the editor of Multinational Monitor, organized a protest outside the Post one day in January.

"Do something about the media's rightwing tilt," their leaflet said. "With McCarthy's departure, and the continued presence of columnists like Robert Novak, James Glassman, and Robert Samuelson, the Post is now poised to challenge The Wall Street Journal for title as the nation's leading op-ed page for the established powers."

The Post's op-ed page is also competing for the prose-of-clay award. The remaining columnists are dozers, not dazzlers. Monochrome meets monologue.

I'm not surprised, I suppose, that The Washington Post let Colman go. He has style, for one thing.

But more than that, he doesn't play the Washington parlor games; he'd rather spend time at a homeless shelter than at a Georgetown soiree. He never kisses up to the powerful; he embraces the powerless.

That's why he stuck out like a scarlet tanager in the pages of The Washington Post.

And that's why I'm pleased to publish his piece this month, "Love in Action."