Disobedience at St. Benedict's

Father Leonard Feeney, S.J., is a short, 52-year-old man with a mobile, dimpled face and expressive hands. A literary priest who studied at Oxford and once worked on the Jesuit weekly America, Leonard Feeney is an enthusiastic conversationalist who sometimes begins his sentences with a naive, unliterary "Gee!" The author of several volumes of poetry and essays, he confessed in his Fish on Friday: "I am given to superlatives. I overstate things . . . I say 'most' when I mean 'much.' Without the words 'tremendous,' 'wonderful,' 'amazing,' and 'astounding,' my vocabulary would collapse. I couldn't talk. I couldn't think."

Last week, newspaper readers learned that Father Feeney's passion for overdoing things had landed him in ecclesiastical hot water. First, he burst into print with an impassioned defense of the three Boston College laymen teachers who had been fired for teaching doctrine "contrary to the traditional teachings of the Catholic Church" and for accusing their Jesuit superiors of heresy (TIME, April 25). Their uncompromising stand that there was no possibility of salvation outside the Roman Catholic Church, wrote Feeney, was the true doctrine -- whatever the Baltimore Catechism or his fellow Jesuits might say.

Unhappy Fact. Boston's prow-chinned Archbishop Richard J. Gushing then made a pronouncement. Boston College authorities, said he, had been right in firing the teachers ("I do not see what else [they] . . . could have done"). Furthermore, the newspaper appearance of Father Feeney's name, Archbishop Gushing said, "obliges me to reveal the unhappy fact that Father Feeney has been defying the orders of his legitimate superiors for more than seven months and since Jan. 1 of this year has not possessed the faculties of this archdiocese." In plainer words, Father Feeney had been denied the right to preach or hear confessions. Last week Archbishop Gushing further decreed that Father Feeney could perform no priestly functions, e.g., saying Mass, teaching religion. He also forbade any Roman Catholic to visit or assist in the activities of Feeney's G.H.Q. --St. Benedict Center on Cambridge's Arrow Street.

St. Benedict Center was established in 1940 by a group of Harvard Catholics as a somewhat more independent version of the Newman Clubs (for Catholic students) in other universities. But when Father Feeney became the center's spiritual director seven years ago, it soon began to grow into a full-dress academic institution, teaching Greek, church history, philosophy, literature and hagiography. More than 200 students were converted to Catholicism there, and 103 members and guests of the club felt called to become priests or nuns. This year, 50 members, about 20 of them converts, paid $200 a semester. Four nights a week about 200 other students attended evening lectures.

Profession of Faith. Jesuit Feeney alternately dazzled them with his erudition and convulsed them with his histrionics. He enjoyed doing impersonations of celebrities uttering incongruities (Franklin Roosevelt talking about the state of the church, Katharine Hepburn broadcasting a prizefight). All of Boston College's dismissed teachers taught at the center. Months before last fortnight's uproar, one of them, Dr. Fakhri Maluf, wrote an article for the center's quarterly publication, From the Housetops, which has been belaboring Jesuit "liberalism."

Father Feeney was confident last week that the Pope would eventually back up his stand. To some of his students he announced: "I don't care what happens to me after this. I have made my profession of faith to my country." But though he said he would bow to any disciplinary measures his superiors might take, Father Feeney was still in Boston, still apparently making no move to amend his first disobedience in failing to take a new job at Worcester's College of the Holy Cross. And in spite of Archbishop Cushing's decree, the Feeney school of doctrine was still going full blast. "The Archbishop said nothing about closing St. Benedict Center School" explained stubborn Jesuit Feeney.

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