Kathryn Jean Lopez
Kathryn Jean Lopez is a senior fellow at the National Review Institute where she directs the Center for Religion, Culture, and Civil Society. She is also religion editor of National Review magazine (where she has been on the editorial staff, including as editor of National Review Online, for over a quarter century). She is published widely in Catholic and secular publications and is also a nationally syndicated columnist with Andrews McMeel Universal. Lopez is author of A Year with the Mystics: Visionary Wisdom for Daily Living. She speaks frequently on faith in public life, virtue, and prayer.
Lopez writes frequently about religious freedom and persecution and serves on the boards of the Shrine of the North American Martyrs in Auriesville, N.Y. and the Institute for Catholic Humanitarian Service at the Franciscan University of Steubenville in Ohio. She has long put a priority on pro-life issues, including foster care, adoption, marriage, and family and is on the boards of Springs of Love, a foster-care and adoption ministry, and Witness to Love, a marriage-mentoring program. She also serves on the Board of Regents at the University of Mary in Bismarck, N.D. Lopez is a certified spiritual director and trained abortion-clinic sidewalk counselor.
Lopez currently serves as chair of Cardinal Dolan’s Pro-Life Commission in New York. She frequently hosts forums and other conversations on the dignity of human life. She spoke at the rally organized by the Mississippi Attorney General’s office outside the Supreme Court the morning of the oral arguments in the Dobbs case that overturned Roe, highlighting resources for women and the human faces of abortion.
Lopez is also a media fellow at the Religious Freedom Institute. She is co-author of the book How to Defend the Faith without Raising Your Voice. She wrote the afterward to Cardinal Timothy M. Dolan’s COVID-19 book I Am with You: Lessons of Hope and Courage in Times of Crisis. She is a contributor to recent books which include Women Who Pray: Eleven Catholic Women on the Power of Prayer, Mind, Heart, and Soul: Intellectuals, the Path to Rome, and St. Patrick’s Cathedral: The Legacy of America’s Parish Church. Her “Caught My Eye” feature can be heard weekdays on The Catholic Channel on Sirius XM, Channel 129.
Among other honors, she was inducted into the National Council for Adoption’s Adoption Hall of Fame in Nov. 2021 for Media Excellence and was awarded the annual Washington Women in Journalism Award for Outstanding Journalism in the Periodic Press from CQ Roll Call in 2016 for writing about genocide against Christians in the Middle East and religious persecution. She has an honorary doctorate from The Catholic University of America.
At the opening Mass of the Year of Faith in Rome in October 2012, Pope Benedict XVI presented her with a message to women throughout the world.
Speaker at these events:
