I did not know that Captain Pugwash was a Catholic until I recently encountered him making his confession—of the sin of envy, at the success of the Muppet Show. Longstanding readers of the Catholic Herald may have suspected this already; while Pugwash’s creator, John Ryan, was busy delighting millions with the adventures of his eponymous pirate and his other popular creations, he was also the paper’s in-house cartoonist for over four decades.
Ryan might well be regarded as having been a Catholic of the establishment: his father, Sir Andrew Ryan, was a distinguished diplomat; at Ampleforth he was a contemporary of Basil Hume, with whom he remained on friendly terms until the cardinal’s death in 1999; his elder brother was Columba Ryan OP, a distinguished priest-philosopher. Nevertheless, his talent for drawing, which had been evident from a young age, enabled him easily to engage readers of the Catholic Herald as they grappled with the burning topics of the day.
