Kate O’Beirne, ‘quiet apostle of the Catholic faith,’ dies

From CNN:

The political world lost a legend this weekend. Kate O’Beirne, longtime Washington editor of National Review and longtime panelist on CNN’s “Capital Gang” passed away Sunday of cancer. Kate O’Beirne was a legend for all the right reasons. Kate was a fierce conservative woman during an era when she would have said women were rarely described as conservatives and even more rarely described as fierce. Kate O’Beirne wasn’t just a conservative, she was conservative with a pronounced New York accent, something even more rare. And she could make an argument better, faster and with more wit than almost anyone else in Washington. Every Saturday on “Capital Gang,” Kate would take on the likes of Robert Novak, Al Hunt, Mark Shields and Margaret Carlson. Sometimes she would take them all on at once. Their debates were often verbal knife fights that were as heated as they were illuminating.

In the National Review, Ramesh Ponnuru wrote:

Kate was a quiet apostle for the Catholic faith, taking great satisfaction in the people she had brought, or brought back, to it, and cooking for priests who would “eat me out of house and home.” Reverence was never a chore for her. Leaving last year’s National Catholic Prayer Breakfast — one of her final public outings — she saw a favorite priest tipping a bellman, she thought, inadequately. She gently corrected him: “Father, you took a vow of poverty, not him.”

Eternal rest grant unto her, O Lord, and let perpetual light shine upon her…