Three Boston Irishmen of Yesteryear
And Catholic Teaching Today
Remarks
by Patrick Killough

before an invitational meeting of
the Cross and Shamrock Division
of the Ancient Order of Hibernians

Renaissance Hotel/Orchards Room
Asheville, North Carolina
Tuesday August 4, 2009
Is American Catholicism coming unwound?

Bishops publicly dispute about withholding sacraments from Catholic politicians for not opposing abortion. They chide House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s shoddy theology and indocility. Harvard Law School Professor Mary Ann Glendon turns down Notre Dame's prestigious Laetare Medal. Why? Because that University awards an honorary Doctorate to a non-Catholic President with disputed views on abortion and stem cell research. Pope Benedict then cordially receives that President. The Vatican also accepts Miguel Diaz, a prominent liberal lay Catholic theologian and Obama supporter as Obama’s ambassador. In Senate confirmation hearings, Diaz stays mum on abortion.

American “cafeteria” Catholics obey Catholic teachings selectively. Are they a loyal opposition? Or disobedient public sinners? Heretics?
What is going on?

Whence the widespread indifference to church teachings on morals? Can we pin a beginning date on these developments?

Narrow historical questions about disobedience form part of a larger puzzle: how secularized and accommodating dare an American Catholic be and still remain Catholic?
* * *

In the next 30 minutes I will

--take you back to American Catholicism as I experienced it as a boy in the 1930s, 40s and 50s;

-- then touch upon trends within 19th Century -- heavily Irish --  American Catholicism;

-- finally visit 1940s - 1970s Boston and three Irish Catholic leaders who foreshadowed today's divisions.

Once I am done, the floor is yours: enjoy 30 unscripted minutes of sharing your views. Tell us if you believe that Roman yesteryears shed light on the year 2009 or on Catholic America's divided deference to teaching -- as illustrated by Mary Ann Glendon on the conservative right, by  left-of-center Miguel Diaz and by far left Nancy Pelosi.

Like Christians in Muslim Pakistan or Jews outside Israel, from colonial days until today, American Catholics have faced three choices regarding their generally Christian Protestant majority milieu:

(1) Yield on or play down points of their Catholic essence or non-essentials to "blend in" with the dominant culture;

(2) Aggressively declare and defend their particular beliefs and proselytize other Americans;

or

(3) Circle the wagons and create a separate, non-interacting sub-culture.

* * *

My early memories
of American Catholicism

I was born in Jackson, Mississippi 74 years ago this month. My parents, Douglas and Rosemary, were Irish-American offspring of cradle Catholic parents. Monsignor Patrick O'Riley baptized me.

In 1940 we moved to Shreveport in the heart of the Baptist Bible Belt. At six I entered co-educational first grade at St Vincent Academy, run by Daughters of the Cross [1]. Those nuns, one directly from Ireland, prepared me for first holy communion administered in the school chapel. Corpus Domini nostri Jesu Christi custodiat animam tuam in vitam aeternam, amen, intoned the priest as he placed the wafer on my lips. No wine was offered. Nowadays either a priest, deacon or lay altar server simply says in English, "The body of Christ" or "The blood of Chrisit." In third grade Sister Bridget prepared me and other boys to be altar boys.

Louisiana law forbade blacks and whites to worship together. It therefore took courage for my parish to mark the right rear pew of our large church "Reserved for Colored."

We tasted no food or drink from midnight until we received communion. Just before my fourth communion, I drank from a water cooler in our Jesuit  church, then suddenly remembered: “O, no! Now I can't receive communion.” In my sophomore year in a Jesuit high school, I recalled the next day that I had forgotten to attend obligatory Mass on Ascension Thursday. That was my  first severe case of scrupulosity: had I committed a mortal sin?

During 12th grade retreat we boys learned from Father Auguste Coyle, S. J., one sure fire mortal sin: to touch a girl anywhere between knee and shoulder! And if we died before confessing our mortal sins to a priest or making a perfect act of contrition, it was off to hell with us. There was a lot of fear in popular Catholicism.

A cloud rose on the obedience horizon -- Father Leonard Feeney [2]. In 1934 that Jesuit priest from Boston had published a best selling book called FISH ON FRIDAY. Abstaining from meat every Friday of the year was a powerful sign of the American Catholic.

There were other externals which set us apart from non-Catholic Americans: priests’ Roman collars, nuns' starched wimples, rosary beads, novenas, appeals to Saint Anthony for things lost, stations of the cross, frequent confession, infrequent communion and bingo. In Lent and Advent, adults also observed a mild fast.

Then there was public worship: in Latin. At Sunday Masses, after reading with his back to the congregation first Epistle then Gospel in Latin, the celebrant ascended a high pulpit and reread the same texts in English. He then give a sermon, often with no discernible connection to the Scripture just read.

The faithful were restless for English: for rosaries, sermons, the rousing hymn, "Holy God, we praise Thy name." I devoured in grade school a little 1940 paperback  called  YOUR CATHOLIC LANGUAGE [2]. It was about the Latin of the Mass. 

I was taught four years of Latin in High School and four more in college. When I joined the U.S. State Department I listed Latin as among my languages. But State had no native speakers to test my claim.

Regarding education: the third Council of Baltimore in 1885 [3]  required parents to send  children to a Catholic school. In Catholic colleges students had to study some philosophy (logic sufficed) and theology to graduate. Since the days of Pope Leo XIII, seminarians were taught Thomism: both the Christianized philosopy and Aristotelianized theology of Saint Thomas Aquinas.

In a Jesuit college I studied a debate on free will between Dominicans and Jesuits lasting from 1584 till 1607 and weighed by four pontiffs. Finally, Pope Paul V told each side to stop calling the other heretical. Recall this papal precedent when I tell you more of Father Leonard Feeney and his revival of a fading dogma, "outside the church there is no salvation."

When I graduated high school in 1952, millions of American Catholics had had experiences like mine.

* * *

The Wider American Catholic Context

Catholicism survived the 11th Century schism with Eastern Orthodoxy and the onslaughts of Luther and other 16th century Protestant Reformers. The Church stayed afloat in Ireland and Poland. The secular humanist Enlightenment followed by the French Revolution almost did in European Catholicism and the papacy. But through two ecumenical councils, Trent and First Vatican, the church both hunkered down and defended itself while its missionaries vigorously spread the faith to pagans in North and South America, the Philippines, China and Japan .

In America, only one Catholic signed the Declaration of Independence, Charles Carroll of Carrolton, Maryland, whose family had been clan chiefs in County Tipperary.

Another Carroll, John, once a member of the recently suppressed Jesuit order, and signer Charles's distant Irish-American cousin, became the only American bishop ever elected by fellow priests. He advocated Mass in English, inherited and tolerated lay control of parish finances and delighted in separation of church and state.

Throughout the 19th Century American Catholics breathed in values of early English non-conformists, Independents and Baptists -- including their deep distrust of any established national religion. Catholics reveled in their First Amendment right  to exercise their Catholic faith. As  state and national laws increasingly treated every Christian denomination, Jews, Mormons and others as equal before the law, Catholics too grew increasingly tolerant -- even ecumenical in a way.

The Roman Curia became worried. In 1898 Pope Leo XIII lamented an "Americanist" heresy. An America with a unique way of being Catholic was unthinkable. To fight Americanism, Rome appointed WIlliam Henry O'Connell bishop of Portland, Maine.

By mid-19th century, popular devotions imported from southern Europe, often aiming for anticipated miraculous interventions in personal lives, were heavily promoted by priests and bishops. Devotions contributed to a powerful non-ecumenical Catholic sub-culture. At the same time the numbers of American Catholics and their parochial schools soared. [4]

Let me mention again the ancient dogma "extra ecclesiam nulla salus," "outside the church there is no salvation." Saint Francis Xavier baptized thousands convinced that if he did not, non-Catholic pagans would all go to hell. In 1886 the third council of Baltimore in its popular catechism put things differently: baptism remained necessary for salvation but baptism now took three forms: water, blood and desire. That interpretation seemed acceptably American to most Catholics. The same council empowered pastors to withhold the sacraments from parents who sent their children to non-Catholic schools without permission [3].
* * *

THREE BOSTON IRISH CLERICS
1859 - 1978
Cardinal-Archbishop William Henry O'Connell
(1859 - 1944)

Consider the title of James M. O'Toole's biography of the first of our three Irish Catholic clerics of the Boston Archdiocese: MILITANT AND TRIUMPHANT. That indeed described American Catholicism rolling into the 1940s. Catholicism was fighting and Catholicism was winning. Now take in the book's subtitle: WILLIAM HENRY O'CONNELL AND THE CATHOLIC CHURCH IN BOSTON, 1859 - 1944. [5] O’Connell proved "the assertive kind of hero leader" that Catholic Boston accepted.

William's parents had left County Cavan in 1850 for Lowell, Massachusetts. The family motto is "victor in arduis," "victorious under pressure." It seems no coincidence that O'Connell's episcopal motto was "vigor in arduis," "energy under pressure." As bishop and archbishop, William O'Connell meant to be firmly in charge.

The future cleric was always intellectually sharp, a good debater, imperious, unloved and never a team player. As a young priest he  presided over the North American College in Rome. Only one person in the Catholic Church, the Pope, ranked between the Archbishop and God.

Polyglot O'Connell had musical taste, composed hymns, collected art works and enjoyed long winter vacations in Jamaica. "Gangplank Bill" an admiring Boston press styled him for his frequent voyages. He joined country clubs. He built churches, schools, hospitals. He appeared often before the Ancient Order of Hibernians [6]. The archbishop tried mightily to subject autonomous convents and religious orders to his will. In his archdiocese ten orders of nuns outnumbered nearly 600 priests three to one [7].

Both O' Connell's dioceses were orderly, disciplined armed camps and their bishop the chief sentinel. At baptism the laity enlisted as privates in Rome's army and their duty was to obey orders. Rome appointed ultra-Romanist O'Connell to Boston in 1907 to smother the Americanist heresy. In his lifetime Massachusetts and Boston became Catholic strongholds and O'Connell embodied their new muscle. Irish Catholics owned Massachusetts politics. On the rare occasion their archbishop opposed legislation, a pending bill went nowhere.

Gangplank Bill was the first American bishop to earn enormous status outside his denomination. O'Connell enlarged the civic, secular role of the Catholic hierarchy in American society.

O'Connell was ordained priest in Rome in 1884, not yet required to swear the Oath Against Modernism imposed in 1910 by Pope Pius X. O'Connell, in any event, would not have been tempted by Modernism -- a European offshoot of secular humanism generally defined either as "the ambition to eliminate God from all social life" or the tamer "liberalism of every degree and shade."  Like the Index of Forbidden Books, the oath against modernism died the death after the Second Vatican Council.

Catholic teaching was “semper idem,” it never changed. Its defined dogmas and the unexamined Baltimore Catechism were good enough for William O'Connell. The Faith was triumphing in New England and surging all across America. Why change the conservative, sectarian ways through which a winning horse was winning? As O'Connell famously said,

"The Puritan has passed; the Catholic remains." [8]

He believed that all non-Catholic institutions were crumbling. America’s only hope was in Catholics and their “immutable code of morals." The wider American Catholic world of devotions grew concerned only when prayed for miracles did NOT occur. [9] Yet not long after O’Connell, the Faith stopped winning and worldliness conquered America’s heart. [10] O’Connell’s Catholicism was an end, not a beginning.
* * *

Cardinal-Archbishop Richard James Cushing
(1895 - 1970)


In 1944 Richard Cushing succeeded William O'Connell as Archbishop of Boston. [11] American Catholicism was by now a mature, respected force.

For his poor Latin, young Dick had been turned down by the Jesuits. But from his earliest days as a diocesan priest Cushing was a prodigious fund-raiser, particularly for foreign missions. "Let's take up a collection" was his mantra. He rode in roller-coasters with nuns, danced jigs with old ladies at parties and loved little children, especially the handicapped.

Cushing wanted to be buried at Saint Coletta's home for the handicapped. He knew the children there would pray for him.

"Cardinal O'Connell has a tomb right here ... but I've never seen anyone out praying for him." [12]

In the 1960s Cushing, by then a Cardinal, recorded the following exchange with  Pope John XXIII, who had made him one:

"I said, 'Are you a theologian, your Holiness? All I know about theology is in Catechism Two.' He said, 'Shake hands, you'll never be in trouble.'"  [13]

At the Second Vatican Council, Dick Cushing raised his voice both for religious tolerance and liberty of conscience as well as for freeing Jews from collective guilt for the crucifixion of Jesus. Cushing's sister Dolly was the beloved wife of Dick Pearlstein, a Jew, who with his father ran Boston's best men's store. The Archbishop loved Dick. So God better love him too.

Like Pope John XXIII, Cushing was someone radically new. A  theologian, Cardinal Avery Dulles, John Foster's son, put the seismic shift in dogmatic thinking this way. One day people mysteriously stopped thinking narrowly and ferociously about baptism by water and the salvific need  to be a Catholic professing the primacy of the pope. A kaleidescope simply shifted. [14]

A thousand year old interpretation of dogma changed after millions of American Catholics rubbed shoulders long enough with saintly Methodist, Jewish and Mormon neighbors.  Hold that thought about a paradigm shift as we turn to our third Bostonian.
* * *

Father Leonard Edward Feeney, S. J.
(1897 - 1978) [15]

Dick Cushing and Len Feeney both studied at Boston College High School. Unlike Dick, Len was smart enough for the Jesuits and made a distinguished career with them as teacher, poet, writer and an editor of AMERICA magazine. He was at the height of his fame during his World War II chaplaincy guiding Harvard and Radcliffe students studying religion at St Benedict Center just outside Harvard Yard.

One of "BenCen's" founders was the recently converted Harvard graduate Avery Dulles. When Feeney died, Dulles wrote a powerful eulogy. [16] Decades after they had met, Avery Dulles still imagined Saint Paul looking and sounding just like the diminutive Feeney as the latter walked up and down, translating aloud from the Greek New Testament.

But Dulles had found God and the Catholic Faith at Harvard [17] while Feeney increasingly saw Harvard as the cozy abode of Satan. Boston College's liberal Jesuits were not much better -- teaching evolution and watering down that indispensable dogma, "outside the church there is no salvation."

At the end of the war in the Pacific, something soured in Leonard Feeney. His health had always been terrible. He and his 80 or more adult Catholic followers at St Benedict Center were shaken in August 1945 by the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and especially of Nagasaki, Japan's Catholic center, dating to the missionary visit of Saint Francis Xavier. Curiously, the Vatican had later sent a Maine Bishop named William O'Connell on a mission to Japan which included a visit to Catholic Nagasaki.

After months of meditation the Feeneyites, as later styled, decided that something was horribly amiss when American Catholics were deliriously gleeful about indiscriminate atomic bombing of thousands of innocent Japanese civilians.

Feeney & Co. searched the Scriptures, scrutinized the Church Fathers and plumbed the decrees of the Great Ecumenical Councils. They found their answer to the moral rot of America and American Catholics.

An ancient dogma had been quietly shelved by the Baltimore Catechism: Extra ecclesiam nulla salus. "No Salvation outside the Catholic Church." For Feeney, only baptized Christians could possibly be saved. Only Catholics in union with the Pope would go to heaven. No Jews, no Mormons, not even catechumens and unbaptized martyrs for the faith. Baptism of blood and baptism of desire were mere metaphors. Only water worked. American Catholics, led by heretical Jesuits and accommodating Archbishop Cushing, had corrupted the ancient Roman, ever fighting, ever victorious faith through their tolerant "liberalism." Americans must fall back into fortress Catholicism or the Faith is lost.

Len Feeney's priestly faculties were suspended by his boyhood friend Dick Cushing. The Jesuits expelled him. For refusing to travel Rome for examination, Feeney was excommunicated by his hero Pope Pius XII. Late in life Feeney and then his ultra-conservative followers were quietly received back into communion. Pius VI lifted Feeney's excommunication. The old priest was required to retract none of his ultra-conservative views.

One of Feeney’s followers now leads a Benedictine abbey in Massachusetts. Abbot Gabriel Gibbs recently recalled how he had been expelled from seminary as a young man for asserting Feeney's, Francis Xavier's and the Church’s ancient doctrine that outside the church there is no salvation [18].

Cardinal Dulles summed up the battle for men's minds that Cushing won and Feeney lost:

"As late as a few decades ago, Catholics frequently spoke as though faith did not exist beyond the confines of their own Church, but today they generally recognize that divine and salvific faith exists among members of other Christian communities, among adherents of non-Christian religions, and even among people who are not formally religious." [19]
* * *

Is there anything new under the sun?
And what of today, August 2009?

Is some new radically awful Pelosian schism prowling among us?  Pause and reflect: our yesteryear was not always neat, tidy and docile, either.

-- Archbishop Carroll of Baltimore survived the suppression of  his Jesuit Order. He became the only American bishop elected by American priests. He advocated the liturgy in English. He created a church warden system giving enormous authority to lay Catholics. The bishop strongly advocated separation of church and state in America and elsewhere.

-- His distant Catholic cousin Charles Carroll of Carrollton, signed the Declaration of Independence.

-- American churchmen expressed enough new thoughts in favor of separation of church and state to coin the name of a heresy -- Americanism.

-- The Baltimore Catechism re-expressed hundreds of years of dogma through its conception of three baptisms: of water, blood and desire. Americans were busy noticing good people all around them who were not Catholics but who loved the Lord. Surely that Lord of all would not send saintly non-Catholic Americans to hell.

-- Polyglot Archbishop O'Connell hitched his star to Rome, classical languages, Italian and French. He was unloved. People do not flock to pray at his grave. But O'Connell made American bishops secular powers to be reckoned with.

-- To Latin-challenged Archbishop Cushing the Baltimore Catechism was all the theology he needed. God wasn't going to send his Jewish brother-in-law to hell. Hence, rigidly narrow interpretations of extra ecclesiam nulla salus had to go. Cushing is a main hero in James Carroll's PRACTICING CATHOLIC. According to Carroll, Cushing gave thinking morally a higher priority than thinking dogmatically. He then persuaded the Vatican Council Fathers to do the same thing.

-- To Father Sweeney, a defined dogma meant precisely what it said and would do so forever. Feeneyism was never declared heretical. Father's followers were simply enjoined from calling people who disagreed with them heretics. Remember Paul V who made the Jesuits and Dominicans stop their name calling?

Feeney and his ultra-conservative views live today. I heard one Feeneyite say of liberal Jesuit Boston College that its Acronym "BC" stands for "Barely Catholic."

"Semper idem." Rome never changes. Or does it?
Now, over to you. Does our Catholic past explain our Catholic present?

Thank you.  -OOO-

B I B L I O G R A P H Y



-- Giuseppe Alberigo. A BRIEF HISTORY OF VATICAN II. Orbis Books. Maryknoll, NY. 2006. 141 pp. ISBN-13: 978-1-57075-638-2 (pbk)

-- James Carroll. PRACTICING CATHOLIC. Boston. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. 2008. 2009. 360 pp. paper. ISBN 978 - 0 - 618 - 67018 - 5. [NOTE: I bought this book to read before writing my AOH talk, but read it only after the AOH text was complete. 7/26/9.]

-- Avery Dulles:

---- “Leonard Feeney: In Memoriam,” AMERICA 138 (February 25, 1978) 125-37.  On line at
www.americamagazine.org/content/article.cfm?article_id=10724

---- “Harvard as an Invitation to Catholicism,” pp. 118 - 124 in Jeffrey Wills, editor, THE CATHOLICS OF HARVARD SQUARE, Petersham, MA, Saint Bede's Publications, 1993.

---- THE SURVIVAL OF DOGMA: FROM SYMBOL TO SYSTEM. 1982, expanded 1995. The Crossroad Publishing Company. 280 pages. paperback. ISBN-10: 0824514564
ISBN-13: 978-0824514563.

See especially in THE SURVIVAL OF DOGMA:

 “ ... reconceptualization  ...  may be illustrated ... by the axiom ‘Outside the Church, no salvation” (Extra ecclesiam nulla salus.) This ancient maxim, with a venerable patristic pedigree, was affirmed in the strongest terms by popes and ecumenical councils in the Middle Ages. ...  (and) many who proclaimed the principle understood it in a harshly literal sense. In our time the ancient understanding of the formula is repugnant to practically all Catholics.  ... According to the repeated teaching of Vatican Council II there is plentiful salvation outside the Church. Many contemporary theologians would prefer to see the formula used as little as possible in preaching, since it will almost inevitably be misunderstood.” (Ch 10, Dogma as an ecumencal problem, p. 161)

 “ ... In all honesty it is not possible to say that Vatican II speaks about the other Churches, the other religions, or religious liberty in the same way as earlier popes and councils had spoken. The ancient doctrine ‘Outside the Church, no salvation’ has been so drastically reinterpreted by Vatican II that the meaning is almost the opposite of what the words seem to say. Modern Catholics take a very different view of this matter than their ancestors in the Middle Ages.” (Ch. 9 “Doubt in the Modern Church,” p. 145).      [7/31/9]

-- John H. Fenton. SALT OF THE EARTH: AN INFORMAL PORTRAIT OF RICHARD CARDINAL CUSHING. New York. Coward-McCann, Inc. 1965. 242 pp. LOC # 65-13275

-- Abbot Gabriel Gibbs, O. S. B. (Joseph William Gibbs).  HARVARD TO HARVARD: THE STORY OF SAINT BENEDICT CENTER’S BECOMING SAINT BENEDICT ABBEY, Ravengate, Still Water, MA, 2006.  {The Abbey separately recounts its history in twelve URL panels starting at http://www.abbey.org/history1.htm  This internet presentation also includes many photos in black and white.}

-- Patrick Killough. "Leonard Edward Feeney and John Henry Newman: Not So Parallel Lives." Remarks to the annual conference of The Venerable John Henry Newman Association, University of Dallas, Dallas, Texas, Friday August 8th, 2008

-- Hans Kueng. THE COUNCIL, REFORM AND REUNION. Translated by Cecily Hastings. 1961 English translation from German 3rd edition. New York. Sheed & Ward. 208 pp.

-- James M. O'Toole. MILITANT AND TRIUMPHANT: WILLIAM HENRY O'CONNELL AND THE CATHOLIC CHURCH IN BOSTON, 1895-1944.  Notre Dame. U. of ND Press. 1992. 324 pp. ISBN-10: 0268014035, ISBN's -13: 978-0268014032.

-- George B. Pepper, THE BOSTON HERESY CASE IN VIEW OF THE SECULARIZATION OF RELIGION. The Edwin Mellen Press. Lewiston, N.Y. 1988.

-- Otto Preminger (director). THE CARDINAL. 1963 feature film.

-- Henry Morton Robinson. THE CARDINAL. (Novel) New York. Simon and Schuster. 1950. (draws on life of Cardinal O'Connell)

-- Ann Taves. THE HOUSEHOLD OF FAITH: ROMAN CATHOLIC DEVOTIONS IN MID-NINETEENTH CENTURY AMERICA. Notre Dame U. Press. Notre Dame. 1986. paper. 197 pp. ISBN 0-268-01082-X.

Black Mountain, NC 8/3/9



E N D    N O T E S

[1] For The Daughters of the Cross see my review at http://www.patrickkillough.com/religion/came_to_louisiana.html 
of the 1970 book, THEY CAME TO LOUISIANA by one of my early teachers, a Texan, Sister Dorothea Olga McCants.

[2] Mary Elizabeth Perkins. YOUR CATHOLIC LANGUAGE. Sheed & Ward. 1940. Reviewed online at
http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,763870,00.html

[3] The  Baltimore Councils (both Provincial and General) are a rich treasure trove. One place to start researching the many editions of the famous Baltimore catechism is
http://www.baltimore-catechism.com/ For three forms of baptism see Catechism questions  631 through 654.

[4] For a good overview of newly introduced Catholic devotional practices in English America see Ann Taves, THE HOUSEHOLD OF FAITH: ROMAN CATHOLIC DEVOTIONS IN MID-NINETEENTH CENTURY AMERICA. Notre Dame U. Press. Notre Dame. 1986.

[5] James M. O'Toole. MILITANT AND TRIUMPHANT: WILLIAM HENRY O'CONNELL AND THE CATHOLIC CHURCH IN BOSTON, 1895-1944. 1992.

[6] O'Toole, 1992, p. 81.

[7] ibid, p. 102.

[8] ibid, p. 227.

[9] Ann Taves. THE HOUSEHOLD OF FAITH: ROMAN CATHOLIC DEVOTIONS IN MID-NINETEENTH CENTURY AMERICA. 1986.

    "the miracles of the saints were simply the ordinary life of heaven made manifest in earthly affairs, chinks in the barriers between heaven and earth, a situation in which not to have miracles was a cause of surprise, terror, and dismay." p. 62. Ms Taves applies to 19th Century American Catholics a description of  medieval Catholicism by Benedicta Ward, MIRACLES AND THE MEDIEVAL MIND, 1983, p. 216.

James McMaster, editor of the FREEMAN'S JOURNAL, refused to get very excited about miracles. They are "only part of God's work in His Church" a "normal part of the church's life." p. 67


[10] O'Toole, 1992, p. 257.

[11] Almost all my material on Cardinal Cushing is derived from John H. Fenton. SALT OF THE EARTH: AN INFORMAL PORTRAIT OF RICHARD CARDINAL CUSHING. 1965.

[12] ibid., p. 189

[13] ibid., p. 66.

[14] See Avery Dulles, THE SURVIVAL OF DOGMA: FROM SYMBOL TO SYSTEM. 1982, expanded 1995. Taking "extra ecclesiam nulla salus" as an example of paradigm shift (reconceptualition) in dogma or interpretation of dogma, Dulles writes:

“ ... reconceptualization  ...  may be illustrated ... by the axiom ‘Outside the Church, no salvation” (Extra ecclesiam nulla salus.) This ancient maxim, with a venerable patristic pedigree, was affirmed in the strongest terms by popes and ecumenical councils in the Middle Ages. ...  (and) many who proclaimed the principle understood it in a harshly literal sense. In our time the ancient understanding of the formula is repugnant to practically all Catholics.  ... According to the repeated teaching of Vatican Council II there is plentiful salvation outside the Church. Many contemporary theologians would prefer to see the formula used as little as possible in preaching, since it will almost inevitably be misunderstood.” (Ch 10, Dogma as an ecumencal problem, p. 161)

“ ... In all honesty it is not possible to say that Vatican II speaks about the other Churches, the other religions, or religious liberty in the same way as earlier popes and councils had spoken. The ancient doctrine ‘Outside the Church, no salvation’ has been so drastically reinterpreted by Vatican II that the meaning is almost the opposite of what the words seem to say. Modern Catholics take a very different view of this matter than their ancestors in the Middle Ages.”
(Ch. 9 Doubt in the Modern Church, p. 145).

[15] Most of what I say about Father Feeney is drawn from research and bibliography used for an August 2008 talk I gave in Dallas to the John Henry Newman Society. See
Patrick Killough. "Leonard Edward Feeney and John Henry Newman: Not So Parallel Lives." Remarks to the annual conference of The Venerable John Henry Newman Association, University of Dallas, Dallas, Texas, Friday August 8th, 2008

[16] Avery Dulles, “Leonard Feeney: In Memoriam,” AMERICA 138 (February 25, 1978) 125-37.

[17] Avery Dulles, “Harvard as an Invitation to Catholicism,” pp. 118 - 124 in Jeffrey Wills, editor, THE CATHOLICS OF HARVARD SQUARE, 1993.

[18] Abbot Gabriel Gibbs, O. S. B. (Joseph William Gibbs).  HARVARD TO HARVARD: THE STORY OF SAINT BENEDICT CENTER’S BECOMING SAINT BENEDICT ABBEY, 2006, p. 272f.

[19] Avery Dulles. THE SURVIVAL OF DOGMA: FROM SYMBOL TO SYSTEM. 1982,1995 p. 179.

- OOO-

Black Mountain
August 3, 2009


T W O    A P P E N D I  C E S

Yesteryear And Today's Attitudes toward Church Teaching
Highlights for Discussion

  I. My American Catholicism in the 1930s, 40s and 50s:

    Racial segregation in Louisiana.
    Latin liturgy.
    Tridentine Mass. Priest's back to congregation.
    Devotions abound: rosaries,novenas, scapulars, miraculous medals.
    No food and drink before communion.
    Frequent confession. Infrequent communion.
    Surging vocations to be priests, nuns. No permanent deacons.

 II. Some trends within 19th Century American Catholicism:

    Americans (but not Rome) love separation of church and state.
    Modernism.
    Americanist heresy.
    No salvation outside church.
    Baltimore catechism.

III. 1940s - 1970s Boston and  three Irish American Catholic leaders:
 
    A. Cardinal-Archbishop William Henry O'Connell (1859 - 1944)

    Boston: 1907:   600 priests, 1800 nuns. 0 deacons.
                   2006: 1400 priests, 2300 nuns, 234 deacons.

    B. Cardinal-Archbishop Richard James Cushing (1895 - 1970):

    "Let's take up a collection."
    Vatican II: ecumenism, Jews, salvation re-conceptualized.

    C. Father Leonard Edward Feeney, S. J., M.I.C.M. (1897 - 1978)

    Why did Catholics applaud bombing of Nagasaki?
    Is ecumenism a mistake? Adventists think so. Catholics used to.
* * *
    Should Nancy Pelosi and other prominent dissenting Catholic politicians be       refused communion?

TPK 7/25/9



NO SALVATION OUTSIDE THE CATHOLIC CHURCH

(sung to the tune of "Barney Google")


No salvation outside the Catholic Church.
"No salvation": it will leave you in the lurch.
    You've got to take the whole of it,
    You can't belong to the soul of it.
No salvation outside the Catholic Church.


No salvation outside the Catholic Church.
No salvation outside the Catholic Church.
    Without that personal submission to the Pope
    You'll lose your charity, faith and hope.
No salvation outside the Catholic Church.


No salvation outside the Catholic Church.
No salvation outside the Catholic Church.
    That crazy thing called Baptism of Desire
    Will lead you into everlasting fire.
No salvation outside the Catholic,
The Roman Catholic,
Outside the Catholic Church.



Robert Connor (pseudonym for Robert  Colopy, Jr.) WALLED IN: THE TRUE STORY OF A CULT, New York, Signet Classics, 1979. p. 198.Reviewed by Patrick Killough at
http://www.patrickkillough.com/books/connor_walled.html.


TPK black mountain, nc 7/24/2009