The last time I spoke at length was Senator Chuck Colgan was at a Virginia Catholic Conference gathering. Both Bishop DiLorenzo and Bishop Loverde were in attendance at the time, with several other Catholic members of the Virginia General Assembly.
…but there was one lion, and most folks in the room knew it.
Chuck Colgan at the time was in his mid-to-upper 80s, and still as mentally sharp and kind as ever. Colgan never worked the room; he didn’t have to. In twos and threes, folks would come up to him and quietly shake his hand to either reminisce, talk about the state of affairs, or just ask how the family was.
My turn arrived after the vast majority of the room had paid their respects. The conversation was more than cordial, and I thanked Colgan for his consistent Catholic ethic and above all his defense for the dignity of human life. Colgan shrugged with a smile, as was his way, and said something to the effect that doing the right thing when it came to defending human life was an easy thing — Democrats knew where he stood and that was that.
The passing of State Senator Charles “Chuck” Colgan at the age of 90 marks the passing of an era. For the better part of two decades, Colgan was a man who was defined not only by his love for George Mason but for his defense of the dignity of human life.
Within Catholic circles, he was the very last of the “conservative Democrats” in the tradition of Robert F. Kennedy. Whenever Colgan stepped outside the evolution of a rigid leftist orthodoxy, Colgan was known to smile and in his soft-spoken way, shrug and quip, “Well… they’ve been mad at me before.”
The Democrats in Richmond knew better than to take a swing at Chuck Colgan, even if Republicans had to be reminded every four years why it was a bad idea.
Yet Colgan was a reminder that the Virginia Way still survived, even as far north as Prince William County. When budget impasses threatened a shutdown, Colgan would be found on the side of the working class, voting up budgets he rarely agreed with in toto.
More than any other elected official, Colgan was the one responsible for George Mason University’s location in Manassas and its incredible growth over the last three decades.
Whether Colgan’s legacy will survive the modern Democratic Party remains to be seen. Case in point, Democratic Governor Terry McAuliffe has already pledged to gun down a pro-life bill Colgan would have undoubtedly supported — introducing European-style restrictions on abortion that would prevent babies from being aborted past 20 weeks.
It is worthwhile noting that the vast majority of Catholics within the Democratic Party share McAuliffe’s viewpoints, or more accurately the viewpoints of the abortion industry — spearheaded by taxpayer-fueled Planned Parenthood that just spent $38 million dollars on federal elections last cycle. March down the list: Kaine is held in thrall to the abortion industry, Connolly is held in thrall, literally every Catholic Democrat in the Virginia General Assembly is held in thrall — and the notable exception? Has gone to God.
Former VA-05 Congressman Tom Perriello may have been the last pro-life Democrat elected in numbers by this modern Virginia Democratic Party, and with Colgan gone, what little room there was for the old school Catholic Democrat that sought out conservative means to liberal ends — the tradition of RFK — is practically dead and gone (or exterminated by time and pressure).
That is worth noting in the passing of Chuck Colgan. Yet for Catholics, there’s always the reminder that the blood of the martyrs is the seed of the Church. Colgan’s saving grace was that he was not expedient in a time where Democrats — even though they gerrymandered the lines — could not hold on to the upper chamber.
Colgan was an enduring reminder that conscience still has a place in the public square, that no one should have to check their faith at the door to public service. In an era where secular religions approximate sacred ones, where every -ism seems to carry equal weight and claiming superiority over every other ideology, there is no shame in professing one’s Catholicism with equal strength — not as an ideology imposed upon others and as a weapon of coercion, but as a common foundational understanding that crosses party lines and undergirds civil society. If Colgan’s legacy teaches us anything, it is that he never allowed his political camp to override who he was at heart — a practicing Catholic who believed in the dignity of human life.
We live in an era of ideologies that demand authenticity in the public square. It’s a dangerous world where the political left has forced its own dogmatism on the moral fabric of America, and the authoritarian revolution of populist sentiment within the political right should rightly alarm most observers. Colgan’s enduring example — not a refusal, but a sincere affirmation of conscience in the face of ideological dogmatism — is a triumph of the sincere over the authentic, of nuance over purity tests, of values over principle.
What a sorely needed lesson in today’s political world.
REQUIESCAT IN PACE, Senator Colgan.