The Humvee he was in flipped into a canal when the driver, a soldier from the Army's 3rd Infantry Division, swerved to avoid incoming fire.

Both men apparently drowned. You might not know his name. I never met him, but to me and many others, his death hit hard.

Kelly was a reporter who worked in and around newspapers and magazines whose positions on the life issue are notoriously hostile. But he was on our side, he was one of our best, and now he is gone.

At the time of his death, Kelly was the editor at large of The Atlantic Monthly and chief editorial adviser of National Journal. He had previously been editor of The New Republic, a left-leaning political magazine, but was fired by the magazine's owner apparently for Kelly's recurrent criticism of the Clinton administration. After this he began a syndicated weekly column for the Washington Post.

It was here where I first came to notice Michael Kelly. I was a counsel to the House Judiciary Committee at the time, and Kelly's articles on the Monica Lewinsky scandal were forceful and true. When my colleagues and I would pause from the arduous work on impeachment, reading Kelly on Clinton was like breathing fresh air.

But Kelly's keen journalistic eye was not only trained on the moral bankruptcy of those current events.

Near the beginning of the partial-birth abortion debate, Kelly credited pro-lifers with achieving the historic feat of changing the terms of the abortion debate fundamentally. That we did. And with irony, he wrote of the “sadly radical” position of the American Medical Association that, except for rare circumstances, “all third-trimester pregnancies should end in birth, not abortion.”

“The ground has shifted,” he concluded.

He took to task the New York Times for treating as a legitimate argument the “monstrous” position of some academics that mothers who kill their newborn infants should not be judged as harshly as people who take human life in its later stages because newborn infants are not persons in the full sense of the word and therefore do not enjoy a right to life. He suggested this barbaric position might be a result of the widespread acceptance of abortion and the great devaluing of human life that flows from it.

Not only would he take up the subject himself but also as editor of the New Republic Kelly published others' articles on topics such as partial-birth abortion, abortion clinic protests and Jack Kevorkian. This no doubt raised eyebrows among longtime New Republic subscribers. Let's hope it opened minds, too.

Articles on his death say things like “fiery columnist” and “iconoclastic.” This rings true. But you got the sense that his fire and brimstone were not for the joy of it. Kelly had a knack for wrenching the truth from his subject and presenting it with the vigor of a true believer. He had a strong moral compass.

In the talks I give on abortion I often quote from a column he wrote in the aftermath of the Sept. 11 terrorist attack on the inability of people to make a moral judgment.

“Not to be judgmental about it, but two cheers for Alison Hornstein,” it begins.

Ms. Hornstein had written a column for Newsweek about the struggle she observed among her fellow Yale students and professors in discussing the terrorist attack. Why the struggle? Kelly wrote, “Because to address it would be to make a moral judgment, and to judge others is, for Ms. Hornstein's generation of properly educated young elites, the great taboo.”

When he finds that Ms. Hornstein demurs from a strong judgment — opting for the out that it doesn't matter where you draw the line as long as you draw it somewhere — he offers her some free advice.

“Ms. Hornstein,” he wrote, “push on. Go the last mile. Go out on the limb of judgment. Mass murder is indeed objectively bad — and not just in your opinion. Others may disagree — but they are wrong.”

“Ms. Hornstein, it is not less important where people choose to draw the line,” he concluded. “Draw the line, Ms. Hornstein. Draw it where you know it belongs. Dare to judge.”

This was what Michael Kelly could do with a column — bring it to life and cheer its subject on to the truth.

I learned of Michael Kelly's death while driving and listening to Sam Donaldson's morning talk show on AM radio. He had died just hours earlier. Donaldson was clearly shaken by the news. When I tuned in he was apologizing for not taking a caller who wanted to criticize the attention he was paying to this reporter's death, saying that every day military families lose loved ones in the war without the same attention. Donaldson acknowledged the truth of this but asked his listeners to try to understand and give him a moment.

“Kelly was a journalist,” he said. “He was one of our family.”

Michael Kelly was one of our family, too: a Catholic and a pro-lifer. He was a welcome voice for life in the most unexpected places, and he will be greatly missed. Let us pray for his wife and two young sons, the family that will miss him most.

Cathleen A. Cleaver, Esq. is director of Planning and Information for the Secretariat for Pro-Life Activities of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops.