I. for alibris.com

Title of this review:  Was This Ultra-Conservatism's Last Stand?, July 25, 2008


"The Boston Heresy Case" has been called a "Last Hurrah." Gaining rapid national notoriety, the Case flowed inevitably from the noisy, impolite, raucous bellowing "from the housetops" by Jesuit Father Leonard Edward Feeney and around 80 young Catholic men and women, his followers.

After smoldering for a year, the bomb went off in late 1948. Father Feeney and members of the Saint Benedict Center in Cambridge Massachusetts accused prominent Greater Boston Catholic theologians of teaching outright heresy. They also wrote to the Pope that Boston Archbishop Richard Cushing was tolerating this heresy.

And what was the alleged heresy which had taken over not just the Boston Archdiocese but most American clergymen? It was that God held out a hope of heaven (never mind how faint) for persons who died unbaptized.

The Feeney people disagreed and they had 1700 years of church fathers, councils and papal statements to back them up. An old Latin dogma asserted: extra ecclesiam nulla salus, i.e. "outside the (Catholic) church there is no salvation." During the hottest phases of the the controversy, from 1948 to 1958, the dogma even earned its own acronym in national media: "EENS."

Author Gary Potter, a convert from Protestantism, in the course of his two years research came to believe that Father Feeney, Saint Benedict Center Co-Founder Mrs Catherine Goddard Clarke and 80 or so hard core disciples were right. AFTER THE BOSTON HERESY CASE tells their story. It also advances the thesis that it was the immigrant, minority Church's happy experience coming of age in the USA which eventually brought the entire Catholic world to rethink EENS and in the Second Vatican Council (1962 - 1963) to reach out in friendship to Jews, Muslims, Buddhists and unbelievers in general.

The Saint Benedict Center "movement" began badly and grew worse (Feeney was silenced as a priest in 1949 and excommunicated from the Catholic Church in 1953). But he and his followers were quietly and charitably reconciled to Rome after 1972. And they were not required to retract one word of their narrow interpretation of the old dogma. Their original center has now spun off seven organizations (by another count eight) in several states.

After moving in 1958 to a rural Massachusetts setting, the Center's 12 married couples elected to take vows of celibacy. Their 39 children were raised on their farm as if by nuns in a strict Catholic boarding school or orphanage. All in all, what happened at the Center and its spin-offs is a fascinating, perhaps unique but under-researched modern Catholic experiment in Utopian living.

Further book length studies have been written since Potter's history. Most notable is FROM HARVARD TO HARVARD: THE SOTRY OF SAINT BENEDICT CENTER'S BECOMING SAINT BENEDICT ABBEY. This 2006 work is by Abbot Gabriel Gibbs, one of Feeney's earliest and truest followers. Another eminent Catholic who fell early under the influence of Mrs Clarke and Father Feeney is Catholic convert, Cardinal Avery Dulles, son of Eisenhower's Secretary of State, John Foster Dulles.

Thanks to the warm memories of pre-1948 and post-1972 Leonard Feeney by Cardinal Dulles and other American bishops and cardinals, the public image of Father Feeney continues to mend. At one time voices of Jesuits and other critics, including novelist Evelyn Waugh, were not slow to call Father Feeney a mental case, a drunkard or a fanatic. But his immediate followers always held him and Mrs Catherine Goddard Clarke to be very holy people. Some of what Feeney advocated, including receiving communion under species of both wine and bread, is now universal Catholic practice.

A last hurrah for traditionalist Catholicism? Hardly.
Hurrah, yes. Last, not for a long while yet.


http://www.alibris.com/booksearch?isbn=0962099465



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 II. barnesandnoble.com

Title of this review:  A Pope excommunicated his most loyal American follower

Reviewer's Rating of AFTER THE BOSTON HERESY CASE * * * * *  (FIVE STARS)

AFTER THE BOSTON HERESY CASE is the story of one man, Reverend Father Leonard Edward Feeney, S.J.  (1897 - 1978). He and four score adult members of Cambridge, Massachusetts Saint Benedict Center in 1948 accused local professors at Catholic colleges of teaching heresy and Archbishop (the future Cardinal) Richard Cushing, of allowing them to do so. Feeney and Saint Benedict Center co-founder Mrs Catherine Goddard Clarke inspired their young followers to abandon studies at Harvard University and even Catholic colleges because their professors taught theological and moral error. Thus began 'the Boston Heresy Case.'

Author Gary Potter, a convert to traditionalist Catholicism from Protestantism, spent two years researching this book, decades after he and thousands of other Americans had first noticed the Boston Heresy Case. He does not conceal his growing admiration for certain aspects of what Feeney, Clarke and the others did: their intellectual honesty, their courage in speaking truth to power, their resilience after four leading members were fired from teaching jobs at two Jesuit schools, after Father Feeney's 1949 expulsion from the Jesuit Order and his 1953 excommunication by order of Pope Pius XII.

The Center members did not go quietly into the night. They stood by their guns. They thundered every Sunday afternoon for 7 1/2 years, protected by mounted policemen, at increasingly hostile audiences in Boston Common. Church authorities spoke against them for preaching intolerance and for stirring up avoidable hatred among Catholics, Protestants, Jews and, indeed, every kind of Non-Catholic.

Curiously, the fight seemed to go out of Rome. Not all of the Vatican's actions against Feeney had followed proper canonical procedure. After the 1962-63 Second Vatican Council, love and brotherhood were in the air and new hands on the Church's tillers in Rome and Boston. In 1972 Father Feeney was quietly and, with dignity restored, reconciled to his Church. Shortly thereafter most of his lay men and women followers were reconciled as well. Today there are eight offshoots in several American states of the original Saint Benedict center. Most are back in regular standing with Rome, and all profess themselves to be staunch, conservative Catholics. No one was compelled to retract his or her harsh, narrow interpretation of an ancient Catholic dogma, in Latin 'extra ecclesiam nulla salus,' Englished as 'Outside the 'Roman Catholic' Church there is no salvation.' All maintain that docrine today. But most agree that holding the opposite view does not make a man a heretic.

In 1958 Chaplain Feeney and about 100 followers decamped a few miles west of Cambridge to a farm they had bought in the Still River section of the town of Harvard. Harvard had played host to three previous utopias, Shakers, Bronson Alcott's Fruitlands and a Single Tax district. In Still River twelve married couples felt inspired to profess vows of celibacy and live apart in semi-monastic quarters. Their 39 children were raised as if in a Catholic orphanage or boarding school, with ever decreasing interaction with their parents. They were indoctrinated with Father Feeney's views of the need to crusade for the one, true Roman Catholic faith against all its enemies, notably including Jews, Protestants, Masons and liberal Catholics. The 39 children for a time were strongly encouraged to join the adults in taking private religious vows witnessed by Father Feeney. A few did. By the 1960s some of the parents were beginning to take their children out of Saint Benedict Center for life in 'the world.'

Gary Potter retells the Saint Benedict Center movement story both sympathetically and critically. He records the wide-spread negative views of men like novelist Evelyn Waugh who thought Feeney raving mad and those of Feeney's ever loyal followers and of some early acquaintances like today's Cardinal Avery Dulles who knew him before he launched 'the Boston Heresy Case.' Feeney, Clarke and their followers were an odd lot of rebels: ultra-conservative in their faith, hyper-loyal to the Pope who excommunicated them. In eight different successor foundations the Saint Benedict Center movement remains alive and growing today. It deserves far more study by historians, theologians, psychologists and sociologists than it has had to date. -OOO-

Also recommended:

 -- George B. Pepper: THE BOSTON HERESY CASE IN VIEW OF THE SECULARIZATION OF RELIGION -- 1988.

-- Abbot Gabriel Gibbs, HARVARD TO HARVARD: THE STORY OF SAINT BENEDICT CENTER’S BECOMING SAINT BENEDICT ABBEY -- 2006.


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Heresy-Case/Gary-W-Potter/e/9780962099465/?itm=1


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 III. amazon.com

Title of this review: You may hold that non-Catholics may go to heaven -- and not be called a heretic.

* * * * *

Leonard Edward Feeney was born in 1897 in Lynn, Massachusetts. After high school, where he was a classmate of the future Cardinal of Boston, Richard Cushing, Feeney became a Jesuit novice. By the time he was thirty he was a published poet. From the late 1930s until 1948 when he and around 80 followers launched "the Boston Heresy Case," Feeney's reputation among American Roman Catholics soared to a level approaching that of his friend, the popular radio personality, Monsignor Fulton Sheen. Feeney's FISH ON FRIDAY became a best seller. He wrote a charming biography of the early American Saint Elizabeth Ann Seton. He was for four years literary editor of AMERICA magazine, the national Jesuit weekly. His admirers included Presidential candidate Al Smith, Clare Booth Luce and the future theologian and cardinal Avery Dulles.

Always in terrible health, half his stomach having been surgically removed in his early Jesuit years, diminutive Father Feeney had a mean talent for mimicry and was a master of English prose and poetry. In 1944 his Jesuit superiors, acceding to a request by the charming co-founder and director of Saint Benedict Center in Cambridge, Mrs Catherine Goddard Clarke, appointed Leonard Feeney to be chaplain and spiritual director of the recently founded Center just outside Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts. At the end of World War II, many returning war veterans sought out the Center for its exciting rediscovery of old "integral Catholicism," including the philosophy and theology of Saint Thomas Aquinas. They complained bitterly that Harvard was teaching the Axis ideologies they had just been fighting.

August 1945 devastated the Center's main-stream Catholic complacency. Two atomic bombs were dropped: on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the latter the center of Catholicism in Japan. How could this happen? An atrocity slaughtering thousands of innocent women, children and non-combatants. Why were most Americans cheering? Why did the bishops not lead the nation in mourning? Center leaders sensed that America had lost its moral and theological moorings. And they thought they had discovered the reason why: the American Catholic Church was no longer militant, crusading to bring all men to Christ through baptism and personal submission to the authority of the pope. It was going "Americanist," assimilating to the Protestant establishment, grateful to be increasingly accepted socially. It was that simple.

Center men and women anchored their crusade to save America by bringing all men to Christ and the pope in an old dictum dating to the third century, "extra ecclesiam nulla salus," i.e. "outside the (Roman Catholic) Church there is no Salvation." Center members informed Rome that Catholic theologians in Greater Boston, tolerated by Archbishop Cushing, were tolerating a horrible heresy: that non-Catholics, or indeed anyone not baptized, might through the mercy of God conceivably be saved and attain to heaven.

The archbishop denounced them for preaching intolerance. He forbade Feeney to celebrate mass, witness weddings, hear confessions or preach. The Jesuits expelled him when he refused an assignment to leave Saint Benedict Center and teach English at Holy Cross College. The Vatican summoned Feeney to Rome to explain himself. When he declined to go until he knew in writing the charges against him, he was excommunicated by personal command of Pope Pius XII.

End of story? No way.

For 7 1/2 years Father Feeney and many male and female followers drove from Cambridge to Harvard Yard. There, protected by mounted policemen, they preached love of Christ and his mother at times to hundreds of hearers. Heckled by Brandeis University students and faculty, Father Feeney was drawn into strongly anti-semitic statements.

In 1958 a hundred or so followers of Feeney and Clarke removed Saint Benedict Center from Cambridge to rural Still River. There, on a very old farm, 24 married men and women brought their 39 children. The parents were permitted by Feeney, contrary to canon law, to profess vows of celibacy and to turn their children over to a few "Older Sisters" to be raised in something resembling a strict Catholic boarding school or orphanage. This was one of the most striking examples of a Catholic Utopia ever attempted on American soil.

Journalist Garry Potter traces Saint Benedict Center's evolution to 1995. Through review of earlier scholarly monographs, Center reminiscences and his own interviews, Potter developed considerably empathy for the Center position. Like others, he criticizes the canonical  and pastoral insufficiency of Rome's initial treatment of Father Feeney and his followers. Potter admires the courage and originality of the hyper-traditionalist American men and women whose efforts to be good Catholics proved to be too far outside the nation's "Americanist," assimilating main stream to be ignored.

The story had (and has) a happy ending. In the warm afterglow of the Second Vatican Council, the very ecumenical spirit thundered against by Feeney and followers touched the dissidents. Most of them were graciously and without onerous conditions reconciled to Rome by 1974. There are now eight post-Center communities and most members are in full union with the Vatican. One original follower of Father Feeney is now a Benedictine Abott and has written his own recent history of the Saint Benedict Center movement, FROM HARVARD TO HARVARD. There is no evidence that any of the original "seceders" has any doubts that all men must be become baptized Catholics in order to be saved. But most are now more peaceable and willing to refrain from calling their liberal opponents heretics.  -OOO-




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-Case-Potter/dp/0962099465/ref=sr_1_1?ie=
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07/27/2008