The acclaimed cartoonist and creator of Captain Pugwash was a wry observer of Catholic affairs

Unlike our continental cousins, English and Irish Catholics have never worried too much about being the butt of jokes. We’ve laughed along with Father Ted, Dave Allen, Mrs Brown’s Boys and many more, rather than take offence. It has long been – in the case of English Catholics – the best way of handling being a religious minority in what used to feel like a hostile environment.

John Ryan understood that all too well – except he wasn’t just laughing off others’ send-ups of Catholics, he was creating them himself, as an artist, animator and insider. In 1964 this Old Amplefordian began an extraordinary 43-year stint as the Catholic Herald’s cartoonist, his weekly front-page slots often featuring his scheming but inept Vatican insider, Cardinal Grotti, whose puns – all delivered deadpan from behind the dark glasses he sported with his biretta – managed both to illuminate and find fun in whatever was current in Rome.

And what times they were! Ryan was fortunate to be working against the backdrop of the great debates of 1960s and 1970s Catholicism around implementing the Second Vatican Council. How he tackled such rich material is being celebrated in “Sink or Swim?”, a free exhibition that runs until April 13 in the suitably ecclesiastical setting of the Weston Room (formerly the Chapel of the Masters of the Rolls), at the Maughan Library, King’s College London.
It has been curated by historian Dr Alana Harris and Ryan’s graphic designer daughter, Isabel. For Australian-born Harris, “Sink or Swim?” (which was first seen at Ushaw College, Durham, late last year) is a companion piece to her study of the same turbulent period, published last autumn as The Schism of ’68: Catholicism, Contraception and Humanae Vitae in Europe, 1945-1975.