The recent death of William Oddie will be sad news for his many friends and former colleagues. A large personality in Catholic journalistic circles, his unmistakeable voice will be widely missed. Whether one agreed or disagreed with him, his articles were always compulsory reading both for their trenchant opinions and their vigour of expression.
From a Nonconformist background, Oddie graduated from Trinity College Dublin in 1964 and gained a doctorate from Leicester University in 1970. Despite being a self-styled atheist and secular humanist, he and his wife, Cornelia, married in an Anglican church in 1968. Reflecting on this in 2008 in an interview with Marcus Grodi on EWTN, Oddie said: “There’s something about a building in which people have been praying for 800 years that gets under your skin somehow.”
