Ralph McInerny -- Notre Dame professor, Thomist scholar, Catholic controversialist, co-founder of Crisis magazine, and mystery novelist (Father Dowling and beyond) -- was laid to rest today in the Basilica of the Sacred Heart of Notre Dame.McInerny was on the other side of the political fence from most readers of Commonweal and I had my own disagreements with him.Yet he deserves some honor for his long and distinguished career -- and for a certain imaginative joie de vivre and literary flair that marked even his polemical writings -- something that seems in danger of passing out of the younger generation of public intellectuals in the Church.He was the author of works like Praeambula Fidei: Thomism And the God of the Philosophers and What Went Wrong With Vatican II: The Catholic Crisis Explained but also Requiem for a Realtor and Rest in Pieces.May he rest in peace.ZENIT article here.