Leonard Edward Feeney | |
|---|---|
 | |
| Born | (1897-02-18)February 18, 1897 Lynn, Massachusetts, U.S. |
| Died | January 30, 1978(1978-01-30) (aged 80) Ayer, Massachusetts, U.S. |
| Occupation(s) | Priest,poet,lyricist,editor,chaplain |
| Known for | Feeneyism |
| Ordained | June 20, 1928 |
Leonard Edward Feeney (February 18, 1897 – January 30, 1978) was an AmericanJesuit Catholic priest, poet, lyricist, and essayist.
He articulated a strict interpretation of theCatholic doctrineextra Ecclesiam nulla salus ("outside the Church there is nosalvation"). He took the position thatbaptism of blood andbaptism of desire are unavailing and that therefore non-Catholics will not besaved.[1] This position is calledFeeneyism, coming from his last name.
Fighting against what he perceived to be the liberalization ofCatholic doctrine, he wasexcommunicated by theHoly See in 1953.[2] Feeney reconciled with the church in 1972, though never recanted his controversial views on salvation.[3]
He was described as Boston's homegrown version of FatherCharles Coughlin for hisantisemitism.[4]
In the 1930s, as aJesuit, Feeney was aliterary editor at theJesuit magazineAmerica.[5]
He was a professor inBoston College's graduate school, and then professor of spiritual eloquence at the Jesuit seminary inWeston, Massachusetts. Thereafter, he became the priestchaplain at the CatholicSaint Benedict Center, a religious center atHarvard Square founded byCatherine Goddard Clarke, in 1945; Feeney had first visited in 1941. He gave incendiary speeches on theBoston Common on Sundays, leadingRobert F. Kennedy, then aHarvard undergraduate, to write ArchbishopRichard Cushing of Boston requesting his removal.[6][7][8]
After April 1949 the affair became a public scandal when Feeney undertook in the press the defence of dismissedlaymen[9] who were teaching in the Jesuit College (founded inBoston by the Society of Jesus in 1863) that those who were not members of the Catholic Church were damned.[10]
Feeney criticized Cushing for, among other things, accepting the church's definition of "baptism of desire". Finally, in 1949, Cushing declared Feeney's St. Benedict's Center off-limits to Catholics.[11] That same year Boston College andBoston College High School dismissed four of the center's members from the theology faculty for spreading Feeney's views in the classroom.[12][13] In light of his controversial behavior, his Jesuit superiors ordered him to leave the center for a post atCollege of the Holy Cross, but he repeatedly refused, which led to his expulsion from the order. Cushing suspended Feeney's priestly faculties in April 1949; Feeney continued to celebrate thesacraments although hewas no longer authorized to do so.[14]
Around this time, Fr. Feeney began speaking onBoston Common, gathering large crowds of up to 2,000 people to his public meetings, both supporters and hecklers. According toThe Harvard Crimson, Feeney declared that in Catholic majority Boston, he wanted to "rid our city of every coward liberal Catholic, Jew dog, Protestant brute, and33rd degree Mason who is trying to suck the soul from good Catholics and sell the true faith for greenbacks".[12] Feeney would frequently throw visceral barbs back at his hecklers, describing them as "sexually degenerate, fairy, lewd, obscene, dirty, filthy, rotten, pawns, pimps, and frauds".[12]
On 8 August 1949,CardinalFrancesco Marchetti Selvaggiani of theHoly Office sent a protocol letter to ArchbishopRichard Cushing on the meaning of thedogmaextra Ecclesiam nulla salus ("outside the Church there is nosalvation"). This protocol had been approved byPope Pius XII on 28 July 1949. The document states: "[T]his dogma [extra Ecclesiam nulla salus] must be understood in that sense in which the Church herself understands it. For, it was not to private judgments thatOur Saviour gave for explanation those things that are contained in the deposit of faith, but to the teaching authority of the Church".[15][16][17]
After Feeney refused twice to oblige to theHoly See's summons to Rome to explain himself, he wasexcommunicated on 13 February 1953 by the Holy See for persistent disobedience to legitimate church authority due to his refusal to comply. According toCardinal John Wright, Pope Pius XII personally translated the edict into English.[11]
The decree of excommunication was later published in theActa Apostolicae Sedis.[18] His followers claimed that his excommunication was invalid.[14]
Following his excommunication, Feeney co-founded a community calledthe Slaves of the Immaculate Heart of Mary withCatherine Goddard Clarke.[1][19] This group later split in two, one of which became theStill River Branch, in good standing with the Catholic Church; the other is a schismatic group that holds to Feeney's views on Salvation.
Feeney reconciled with the Catholic Church in 1972 without any recantation from his part on his positions on salvation.[20][21][22] This reconciliation without Feeney's recantation, reports theNational Catholic News Service, "came about at least in part through the intervention of CardinalHumberto Medeiros of Boston who had attended lectures at St. Benedict's during his days as aseminarian. CardinalJohn Wright, head of the Vatican'sCongregation for the Clergy, reportedly personally brought the matter to the attention of theCongregation for the Doctrine of the Faith".[22]
Feeney made few public appearances in his final years, because he was suffering fromParkinson's disease and a chronic heart ailment.[21] He died inAyer, Massachusetts, on January 30, 1978.[22]
For Feeney's death, CardinalAvery Dulles, who had previously been a pupil in Feeney's lectures, shared his reflection on and personal experience with Feeney.[23]
Feeney was editor ofThe Point, which ran a mixture of theological and political articles, some of them brandedanti-semitic by Feeney's critics. The newsletter frequently contained sentiments such as:
the Church has never abandoned her absolute principle that it is possible for an individual Jew to scrap his hateful heritage, sincerely break with the synagogue, and cleanse hiscursed blood with the Precious Blood of Jesus. (October 1957)[24][25]
Those two powers, the chief two in the world today, areCommunism andZionism. That both movements are avowedlyanti-Christian, and that both are in origin and direction Jewish, is a matter of record. (September 1958)[26]
As surely and securely as the Jews have been behindFreemasonry, orSecularism, or Communism, they are behind the "anti-hate" drive. The Jews are advocating tolerance only for its destructive value — destructive, that is, of the Catholic Church. On their part, they still keep alive their racial rancors and antipathies. (July 1955)[27]
TheAnti-Defamation League of B'nai B'rith monitoredThe Point magazine for at least 14 editions. In 1955, the League exchanged correspondence with theFederal Bureau of Investigation regarding possible criminal investigation of Feeney and his followers, but no investigation was started.[28]
As aHarvard undergraduate,Robert Francis "Bobby" Kennedy attended a meeting of students at which he stood up and challenged Feeney, later storming out following the priest's assertion that there was no salvation outside the Catholic faith.[29] A similarly negative reaction to Feeney's teaching was recorded by British novelist and Catholic convertEvelyn Waugh, who wrote of visiting the priest while in the United States:[30]
I went one morning by appointment & found him surrounded by a court of bemused youths of both sexes & he stark, raving mad. All his converts have chucked their Harvard careers & go to him only for all instruction. He fell into a rambling denunciation of all secular learning which gradually became more & more violent. He shouted thatNewman had done irreparable damage to the Church then started onRonnie Knox'sMass in Slow Motion saying 'To think that any innocent girl of 12 could have this blasphemous & obscene book put into her hands' as though it wereLady Chatterley's Lover. I asked if he had read it. 'I don't have to eat a rotten egg to know it stinks.' Then I got rather angry and rebuked him in strong words. His court sat absolutely aghast at hearing their holy man addressed like this. And in unbroken silence I walked out of the house. I talked to some Jesuits later & they said that he is disobeying the plain orders of his provincial by staying there. It seemed to me he needed anexorcist more than an alienist. A case ofdemoniac possession & jolly frightening.
A few years later Feeney wrote critically of Knox and Newman in his collection of essaysLondon is a Place, with an unsympathetic passing reference to Waugh'sbiography of St. Helena:[31]
on the list of [Knox's] recurrent callers, was Mr. Evelyn (pronounced Evil-in) Waugh, whose father, a London publisher, supplied his sons with early printing privileges in pornography, before one of them (Evelyn) turned to hagiography, and whitened his sepulchre with the life of a saint.
In 2003, in an article forThe Jewish Week newspaper, editorGary Rosenblatt wrote:[32]
In a lesser-known case,Richard Cardinal Cushing excommunicated a priest, Leonard Feeney, in 1953, for preaching that all non-Catholics would go to Hell. Even though Father Feeney's words were based on the Gospel,Cardinal Cushing found them offensive, in large part because his sister had married a Jew, said Carroll, and the Cardinal had grown close to the family, sensitizing him to the Jewish perspective towardproselytization.
{{cite book}}: CS1 maint: multiple names: authors list (link)Feeney was excommunicated in 1953 for disobeying his religious superiors and refusing to accept a Holy Office decision that non-Catholics who worshiped God in good faith could be saved.
After World War II, Boston was to acquire a homegrown version of Coughlin in the form of Father Leonard Feeney, a charismatic but openly antisemitic Jesuit priest, whose highly vocal insistence that Catholicism was the only path to salvation gained him a youthful following, but also roused intense anger among Jews and Protestants [...]. Feeney's Sunday speeches on the Boston Common required a police presence to avert violence. His fiery rhetoric also divided a great many Catholics, who feared his oratory would stir a backlash that would block their entrance into the American mainstream. Although Feeney was excommunicated in the 1950s for violating Catholic doctrine, it came too slowly to satisfy many Jews who held strong memories of the Holocaust.
The national Catholic weekly has also occasionally featured authors whose later antics brought it some embarrassment, including the articles and poetry of a literary editor with a brilliant mind and a talent for comic verse, Leonard Feeney, S.J. Feeney published frequently in America and earned a certain amount of fame for his numerous books, including a book of essays, Fish on Friday. He grew much more famous a few years later for a different reason: his excommunication from the Catholic Church in 1953 for refusing to accept the church's definition of the dogma extra ecclesiam nulla salus ("there is no salvation outside the church"). Though Feeney was reconciled to the church in 1974 (Avery Dulles, S.J., wrote his obituary for America), his establishment of his own schismatic religious community, the Slaves of the Immaculate Heart of Mary, and his long fight with church authorities overshadowed his literary genius until his death in 1978.
{{cite book}}: CS1 maint: multiple names: authors list (link)