Philip F. Lawler , Editor of Catholic World News, has authored a new a book called The Faithful Departed, The Collapse of Boston’s Catholic Culture. Not yet released, the book can be ordered from Amazon.com at a pre-publication special price. Mr. Lawler has posted a sneak preview online, from which we excerpt the paragraphs below.
Note the passage I have italicized. Guess who the 1950’s-Boston priest is (and don’t cheat by looking at the tag I stuck on this posting!).
“For more than a generation, the American hierarchy has done its best to convey the impression that the Church is a noble civic institution— that the demands of Catholicism will never clash with the claims of a democratic government. (You might say that this argument is the ecclesiastical equivalent of the Charles Wilson’s belief that “what was good for General Motors was good for the country, and vice versa.”) When Church-state conflicts did arise, many Catholic leaders were quite willing to sacrifice the claims of their faith in order to minimize the conflict and preserve their privileged status as community leaders.
“Yet again, the most conspicuous examples of this attitude have been shown in Massachusetts. In the 1950s, an Archbishop of Boston discouraged a priest from his energetic public preaching of a defined Catholic dogma, because some people found that dogma offensive. A decade later the same archbishop— now a cardinal— announced that Catholic legislators should feel free to vote in favor of legislation that violated the precepts of the Church. In 1974 his successor encouraged Catholic parents not to send their children to parochial schools. And in 1993 yet another Boston archbishop instructed the faithful that they should not pray outside abortion clinics. In each of these remarkable cases, the Archbishop of Boston obviously thought that he was serving the cause of community peace. But just as obviously, he was yielding ground, and encouraging the Catholic faithful to yield as well.”
4 responses so far ↓
1 DEE // Apr 2, 2008 at 9:40 am
How well I remember Father Feeney. He used to preach from a tree in Boston Common and lots of kids would liste to him, not me.
May be rest in Peace. He was lucky.
2 Bill // May 12, 2008 at 3:44 am
Correct doctrine is not a licence to imprudently inflame the erroneous conscience of one’s neighbor. I salute Father Feeney and his stand, but shrink from his methods, not out of cowardice but by reason of tactical intelligence in such matters.
3 Brother André Marie, M.I.C.M. // May 12, 2008 at 8:42 am
Bill: My assumption is that you are making reference to Father’s preaching on the Common, as per Dee’s reference. I understand the thinking behind what you say. But to be fair, a few things ought to be recalled, including that the kind of preaching Father engaged in on the Common was not the limit of his apostolic approach. He tended to make converts one-on-one, even after he was unjustly smeared as a “hate priest.” Too, much of what was most talked about in his preaching on the Common constituted direct response to blasphemies shouted against Our Lord and Our Lady. In similar circumstances, St. Louis Marie de Montfort punched a man out and St. Camillus de Lellis threw a man out of a window.
4 Bill // Jun 10, 2008 at 3:00 am
Thank you for this engrossing and erudite blog, as well as for the opportunity to respond.
Imagine you are a missionary among savages (which, let us ruefully admit, most modern Americans are). As Cardinal Newman once suggested, it is not fitting to begin with the intellectually demanding doctrine of the Trinity, much less teachings wholly apt to incite the benighted, attached as they are to their perversities.
Yet that is what Father seems to have done. In Cambridge, he converted a whole constellation of the children of the Eastern establishment elite. Naturally they were bewildered. Then, when the sapientially dull but diplomatically astute hierarchs asked him to tone down his socially tone-deaf rhetoric, his response was to effectively punch the village chief in the nose.
A just man may prudently challenge the insolent to a joust of honor only in a land where a modicum of justice reigns. But as Father well knew, if anyone knew, the United States was and is a vast land of the recalcitrantly unconconverted led by oligarchs limited in point of nicety of conscience.
That, I take it, is the innermost kernel of Avery Cardinal Dulles’ last comprehensive appraisal of Father. Yet irrespective of what Cardinal Dulles remembers, is there not enough on record outside of the recollections of his intimates to suggest that Father indulged his heroic spleen in ways that were counterproductive?
Nothing I have to say about Father is intended to berate. But like a man playing a chess match with hindsight, I am sad and disappointed when I think of what such an august figure could have accomplished had he modulated his game to fit the confines of the times. Does any of the foregoing not resonate with you?
Leave a Comment