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George
B. Pepper
The Boston Heresy Case
in View of the Secularization of Religion: A Case Study in the Sociology of Religion Lewiston, NY. Edwin Mellen Press. 1988. xix, 209 pp. ISBN: 0889468567 ISBN-13: 9780889468566 Series: Studies in Religion and Society, #18 reviewed by Patrick Killough I. For
barnesandnoble.com
Title of this review: How America Unraveled Catholics' Faith Reviewer's rating of THE BOSTON HERESY CASE * * * * * FIVE STARS G.K. Chesterton defined
paradox as 'truth standing on its head to gain
attention.' Father Leonard Edward Feeney, subject
of the book, THE BOSTON HERESY CASE, added sizzle
to Chesterton's definition. For from the early 1950s until 1958 Feeney
and eighty or more
members of Cambridge's Saint Benedict Center went
to Boston Common every Sunday afternoon for 7 1/2
years, stood truth on its head, shouted, insulted and raged
to win converts to their rigorously narrow beliefs.
They were flanked by mounted policeman who kept the peace while at times students and faculty were bused in from Brandeis University. Often exchanging vicious taunts, the latter were supporting, against Feeney and his Center, the making available to Roman Catholics of a chapel on the campus of that Jewish university. Iona College Professor Pepper's 1988 work studies 'The Boston Heresy Case' in three parts, each addressed to a different audience. The author himself (Introduction xvi-xvii) concedes that any curious reader could love Part One, 'History of the Boston events', while his eyes might glaze over at Part Two, 'Sociology' and/or Part Three, 'Theory of Secularization of Religion.' The book's range is ambitious but limited. It deliberately offers neither biography nor psychology of the players in The Boston Heresy Case. Most famous of those still living players is co-founder of Saint Benedict Center, Cardinal Avery Dulles, S. J., son of Secretary of State John Foster Dulles. Religions, especially Christianity, make cases for members becoming deliberately Godlike in all situations of daily life. This internal mission ignites a powerful drive to unite church and state. And such a model has dominated the west since the days of Emperor Constantine. Since its revolution of 1776 America, however, has chosen a different way, learning as no nation before it to combine a religion that is permitted to persuade, not command, with personal freedom and a citizen's right to choose what is paramount and meaningful in daily living. Feeney and his followers, although excommunicated for nearly two decades (1953 - 1972 in Feeney's own case), were devout Roman Catholics. In World War II, American churches warmly supported their government in the war against Japan and Germany. That atmosphere was thus notably different from the later 60s and 70s Catholic and Protestant opposition to the Viet-Nam war. Uniquely, Feeney's Saint Benedict center was shaken by the 1945 atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. To Center members that A-bombing of non-combatants was a brutally un-Christian action. Why were church leaders silent? What kind of America could accept such horror? Where had the church gone wrong? The Center's fanatical response: 'the Boston Heresy.' Archbishop Cushing was tolerating the teaching of a heresy: that non-members of the Catholic church might just conceivably avoid hell and go to heaven. George Pepper applies insights from a dozen major sociologists to frame and explain what was behind the Boston Heresy. He summarizes his results in two final Epilogues. Feeney and disciples saw the 1940s Roman Catholic Church as embodying Christ's complete truth for America. Yet it seemed to Father Feeney that his Church, in order to become popular, to fit in comfortably with American Protestants and Jews, to raise funds for universities and hospitals, was surreptitiously removing important dogmas up into storage in an attic. The 100+ men, women and children of Saint Benedict Center would not leave the Catholic Church and form a new sect. They would, instead, noisily and publicly grab Catholic Church leaders by the throats in a desperate rhetorical effort first to save the Church, then to save America. But Rome was responding to America's secularization through compromise: relaxing old disciplines and reinterpreting old beliefs. The Second Vatican Council in 1962-63 would rebuke Saint Benedict Center by putting major new emphasis on outreach to other faiths. Father Feeney and his past-oriented friends were inevitably ground flat between mills of modernization, rationalization and the draw that a secular future had for a huge majority of American Catholics. -OOO- Recommended related reading: Leonard Edward Feeney, S. J.: THE LEONARD FEENEY OMNIBUS. Catherine Goddard CLARKE: THE LOYOLAS AND THE CABOTS. Robert CONNOR (pseudonym for Robert Colopy): WALLED IN. Gabriel GIBBS: HARVARD TO HARVARD. http://search.barnesandnoble.com/Boston-Heresy-Case-in-View-of-the- Secularization-of-Religion/George-B-Pepper/e/9780889468566/?itm=1 Black Mountain, June 18, 2008; revisited June 12, 2009 =-=-=-=-=-=-=- II. For amazon.com Title of this review: Never Mistake A Mystery for a Puzzle Reviewer's Rating of THE BOSTON HERESY CASE * * * * * Who was Leonard Edward Feeney and why should we care? He was a first generation Irish-American with a Spanish grandfather. He was born 1897 In Lynn, MA and died 1978 in Still River, MA. He became a Jesuit priest and a famous poet, with a graduate year at Oxford as well. Father Leonard Feeney was also a nationally known religious broadcaster and for four years an editor of AMERICA magazine in New York. Why should we care? In the late 1940s, residing in Cambridge, MA, across the street from Harvard University, Feeney and 100 or so young followers began to despair of America and even of American Catholic intellectual culture and Catholic dogmatic orthodoxy. Defying his religious superiors, Leonard Feeney and his young followers attached to Saint Benedict Center preached every Sunday afternoon for 7 1/2 years in Boston Common. Their message: to save your souls, become Catholics and submit to the Holy Father, for there is no salvation outside the Catholic Church. For his pains Feeney was expelled from the Jesuits, silenced and eventually excommunicated by direct action of Pius XII. That excommunication was not lifted for 19 years. And that only because it occurred to enthusiasts for the Second Vatican Council (1962 - 1963) that reaching out to non-Catholics was not very convincing if you did not first reach out to heal ultra-Catholic Father Feeney. Already afflicted with Parkinson's disease, Father Feeney was reconciled in 1973 to his Church, as were most of his younger followers not long afterwards. He and they had created "The Boston Heresy Case" when they accused Jesuit professors at Boston College of teaching heresy and Boston Archbishop (and future Cardinal) Richard Cushing of condoning their heresy: namely, that maybe, just maybe non-Catholics might make it to heaven. Professor George M. Pepper in 1988 laid out the best short history to that time of the Boston Heresy Case, based on interviews with major participants still living and research into sometimes reluctant archives. He then took insights from sociologists beginning with Max Weber to understand what Father Feeney, his Archbishop and Pope Pius XII had been up to. Historically, Feeney and Feeneyism lost their noisy, rambunctious crusade. But they revived interest in an ancient dogma fast fading from American Catholic consciousness, "extra ecclesiam nulla salus." ("EENS"), that is, "outside the Church no salvation." They forced theologians and popes to dust off, take the old dogma seriously and publicly give it a kinder interpretation during the Second Vatican Council (1962 - 63). Since the Reformation the world had been going steadily more this-worldly, secular, rationalistic, specialized. American Catholics had tried manfully to come to terms with America's freedom of religion and had been slapped down by two popes for their "Americanism" and their "modernism." A 100 years earlier, Leonard Feeney would have been a hero. In the 1940s and 1950s he seemed at best a minor prophet of evils to come. Pepper credits Feeney with a dim inkling of the chaos of America's coming (1960s) chaos and moral sliding. Despite his historically arguable and lucidly presented solution (EENS) to America's and the Church's backsliding, Feeney and followers came across and are widely remembered as mean spirited, hateful, anti-Semitic, fanatical, sometimes nasty-mouthed minor Cassandras of doom. He preached return to an older world of "integral Catholicism." But time and taste were against him. After page upon page of fascinating scholarly insights into secularization, "the heretical imperative" and other sociological constructs, Professor Pepper hoists Father Feeney very simply and prosaically with the priest's own words: "There
is a great difference between a problem and a mystery. In the one you expect to find a
solution, although you are in darkness about it when you tackle it for
the first time. In the other you never expect to find a solution, but
keep on getting more and more light as you go on. A problem is
exhaustible, a mystery never" (Feeney, YOU'D BETTER COME QUIETLY, 1939,
p. 22).
Pepper then argues that in the Boston of 1949 Father Leonard made the mistake of treating a profound mystery as if it were a mere problem, while Rome sailed majestically the other way. The mystery was salvation. The mystery was the role of the Catholic church as the Jesus-ordained instrument for saving all who are saved, whether Catholic or not. What is salvation? What is faith? What is the Church? Why are so many good, holy men and women -- Buddhists, Muslims, Jews, agnostics -- uninfluenced by Christ's church? Try to insist that those questions are puzzles to be solved rather than mysteries and you inevitably get something wrong. The Church moved on into new dimensions of what one sociologist calls "mellow certainty." Leonard Feeney died a priest in good standing. He had sacrificed fame, respect and sacred Jesuit obedience to defend an ostensibly losing and now long lost cause. Yet his influence slowly and steadily grows today, especially among dogmatically orthodox, liturgically ultra-conservative Roman Catholics. If you love the old Latin Mass, you are likely to tip your hat (or biretta) to Leonard Feeney. -OOO- Your Tags: roman catholicism, sociology, the boston heresy, leonard feeney, americanism, modernism, vatican II http://www.amazon.com/Boston-Heresy-Case-Secularization-Religion/dp/ 0889468567/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1213826083&sr=1-1 Black Mountain, NC 06/18/2008. Revisited June 12, 2009 =-=-=-=-=--=- III. for target.com TITLE OF THIS REVIEW: How a near genius mistook a religious mystery for a puzzle, REVIEWER'S RATING OF THE BOSTON HERESY CASE * * * * * July 20, 2008 Reviewer: T. Patrick Killough "Flexible Aristotelian" (Black Mountain, NC, USA) There are three important broad-gauged book length treatments of the 1948 - 1972 "Boston Heresy Case. In reverse chronological order they are --(1) Abbot Gabriel Gibbs, HARVARD TO HARVARD (2006) --(2) Gary Potter, AFTER THE BOSTON HERESY CASE (1995) and --(3) the book under review, George B. Pepper, THE BOSTON HERESY CASE IN VIEW OF THE SECULARIZATION OF RELIGION (1988). In addition there is an even earlier study of the experience of a boy and his four brothers growing up in the Saint Benedict Center compounds in Cambridge, Massachusetts and after 1962 in the rural town of Harvard, Massachusetts: --(4) Robert Connor (Pen Name of Robert Colopy, Jr.) WALLED IN: THE TRUE STORY OF A CULT (1979). George B. Pepper's book is easily the most detached and sociological of the four books. Its method is to apply ideas from a number of disciplines to try to understand Father Leonard Feeney, S. J., Mrs Catherine Goddard Clarke and around 80 young adult followers who together created "the Boston Heresy Case." George Pepper helps us grasp the Feeneyites as middle and upper class Americans, as Catholics, as highly educated, as Utopian and as rebellious. Pepper begins with a clear synopsis of the "facts" behind the Heresy Case. He then draws insights from general theorizing by a dozen sociologists of religion and secularism to try to make sense of Leonard Feeney and his ultra-conservative mostly young Roman Catholic followers who tried to stop the slide of their religion and their country into increasingly worldliness. Of special use is Pepper's drawing upon a 1949 Harvard University senior thesis on Feeney by Thomas F. O'Dea, later updated and converted into a book, SOCIOLOGY AND THE STUDY OF RELIGION (1970). Theory after theory is drawn upon to understand Feeney's secession from the American Catholic mainstream. Each sociologist brings something to the effort to explain what happened. But no theory in the end proves adequate. Leonard Feeney and Feeney's followers were highly educated, some verging on genius, American middle and upper class people. So out goes O'Dea's likening them to Puerto Rican street gangs! If they were a cult, they could only be a "reformist cult." Only in America, where most people had "assimilated" and learned to take all major faiths as more or less "equal" for the sake of civil religion, harmony, good manners and "serene certainty," could the Boston Heresy Case have happened. In disestablished America it would have been socially unproblematical for the Feeney people to "secede" from Rome and set up a new religion. But in their minds they stayed with their Faith, isolated, misunderstood, suppressed, but remaining the truest of all Catholics. Clearly they had thought that all they had to do was call their insights to Rome's attention to have them approved. And their keystone insight was nothing more than a literal interpretation of a dogma held without quibble for 17 centuries: extra ecclesiam nulla salus: there is no salvation outside the church. As recently as 1899 Pope Leo XIII had solemnly warned against "Americanism," and Catholics' making too much of America's political liberty of conscience and freedom of expression. Ancient religious truth was not to be watered down in the USA or its message softened in order to win converts. Yet when Feeney's Saint Benedict Center in Cambridge appealed to Pius XII to support their crusade against laxist heresies in Boston, they lost. The best part of Pepper's THE BOSTON HERESY CASE are the four pages, 193 - 196, where he pulls all together and gives his own conclusions. In summary, --(1) In 1899 Pope Leo XIII may have succeeded for a time reining in Americanist bishops. But from then until World War II Irish and other immigrant Catholic laymen went merrily their Americanist, assimilating way, prospering, making friends with Jews and Methodists and rejoicing that their religion was as socially welcome as any other. --(2) Most American Catholics had no explicit quarrel with the old dogma Father Feeney had dusted off: "outside the church no salvation." Roman Catholicism, that is, was the only true religion. But neither had lay men and women or, for that matter, American theologians before Feeney paid that dogma any attention. And laymen were certainly not going to make trouble for themselves by rubbing the noses of friendly Baptists into an exclusionist dogma. --(3) In his 1934 best seller, FISH ON FRIDAY, Father Leonard Feeney had famously distinguished between a puzzle and a mystery. A puzzle can be solved, a mystery cannot. A mystery can only have a little light shone in upon it now and then. Rome decided that salvation of non-Catholics was real but the mechanics of non-Catholic salvation would always be a mystery. After the Reformation, Protestants, for instance, retained some effective Catholic tools of salvation, but had stolen them from Catholics! The Feeney people treated the old dogma as mathematically true forever and a contemporary tool for solving the "puzzle" of why Americans were losing their ancient faith. Their mistake. That mistake caused Feeney to lose his priestly faculties, to be expelled by his Jesuit order and to be excommunicated for 19 years before a gentle post Second Vatican Council reconciliation in 1972. THE BOSTON HERESY CASE is a great book. Any layman can draw upon its method for solving problems or shedding light on mysteries. State the problem. Describe its history and development. Review the scholarly literature on the case. See if the case can be generalized into hypotheses clarifying other issues. It works. Father Feeney's burning issue was: what must I do to be saved? Can I be saved if I am not a Roman Catholic? Whatever we think of his answers, who dare deny that these are as important matters as there can possibly be? -OOO- http://www.target.com/Boston-Heresy-Case-Secularization-Religion /dp/0889468567/sr=1-1/qid=1216240440/ref=sr_1_1/602-9433905-3927044? ie=UTF8&index=books&rh=k%3Ageorge%20b.%20pepper&page=1 http://www.patrickkillough.com/books/pepper_boston.html ====-=-== IV. for epinions.com not reviewed as of 6/11/2009 http://www.epinions.com/reviews/The_Boston_Heresy_Case _in_View_of_the_Secularization_of_Religion_A_Case_Study _in_the_Sociology_of_Religion_by_George_B_Pepper =-=-=-=-=-=-=-=- V. for biblio.com not reviewed as of 6/11/2009 http://www.biblio.com/books/217406885.html =-=-=-=-=-=- |