Father Feeney and Commonweal
I was taking notes on John Murray Cuddihy’s fascinating and provocative No Offense: Civil Religion and Protestant Taste, and came across, well, us–Commonweal.
In a chapter entitled, “A Tale of Two Jesuits: Leonard Feeney, SJ, and John Courtney Murray, SJ”, Cuddihy suggests that the real animus of Feeney wasn’t non-Catholics –it was Commonweal Catholics.
Father Feeney’s From the Housetops was was founded not primarily to win Protestant converts but to attack Catholic liberals. It was to be a weapon in an intra-Catholic quaqrrel. Like its lineal post-Vatican II descendant of twenty years later, L. Brent Bozell’s Triumph magazine, it was created to proclaim an unembarrassed and militant Catholicism and to stem the “leakage” from the Church that was becoming increasingly evident. (p.50).
. . .
It was the growth of these well-bred, tolerant manners, the phenomenon of Irish Catholic “liberal Catholicism,” that Father Feeeney and his Center conceived of themselves as trying to stem. Commonweal magazine was the weekly voice of this liberal Catholicism. A “Commonweal Catholic,” in Feeney’s circle, was a Catholic who was fastidiously discrete about his Catholicism. He was “passing.” A liberal Catholic, Mrs. Clarke writes, is one who always knows “how god should behave. God’s behavior is invariably made to conform with the Liberal’s own fine feelings . . . [he knows] how an incarnate God should talk ad behave . . . [he] does not like the statement “No Salvation Outside the Church” [not because the statement is false but] because “it isn’t nice.” (p. 55).
Cuddihy is quoting Catherine Goddard Clarke, The Loyolas and the Cabots: The Story of the Boston Heresy Case (1950). She was the President of the Harvard Center run by Feeney. I’m trying to get the book.
Three things struck me:
1. It would be fun to see some of the Commonweal editorials of the time.
2. The more things change, the more they stay the same.
3. Some things that aren’t nice are also not true.
More perspective: Avery Dulles on Father Feeney’s death.
When I teach sacramental theology, I have the students read a bit of Feeney’s writings against the notion of Baptism of desire. Interestingly, his chief target is that well-known artifact of Modernist theology: the Baltimore Catechism.
One of the Commonweal editorials of the mid-1940′s has stood the test of time. It was one of the only two journals (together with David Lawrence’s U.S. News) that criticized the dropping of the atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. If that is what being a “Commonweal Catholic” means, then we are indeed in a lonely place.
I would add: we’re also in a place to be proud of.
World War 1 and World War 11, were extreme wars of aggression destroying the Lives of millions of innocent Human Beings. The fact that atomic weapons have not been used since World War II, indicates that most people understand the horror involved in these weapons of mass destruction which could potentially destroy the entire World.
Then-Fr. Dulles’ article is really interesting – I wasn’t aware of Fr. Feeney’s background. It has the makings of a tragedy – with a reconciliation at the end.
Catherine Goddard Clarke was Avery Dulles’s godmother. I learned this from Avery when I gave him a copy of her book that I had found in a second-hand bookstore. “She was good enough not to mention me in it,” he said.
A brief footnote to the Atomic Bomb issue.
Last Saturday Pax Christi New Mexico gathered in Los Alamos for its annual vigil to end nukes.
Two Nobel Peace Prize speakers were on hand (last year it was Sr. Prejean.)Over the past few years, the this gathering caused much anger (and still does silently among lots of lab old timers here)
A few years back, our pastor asked for (and for a while got) the Bishop to kep Fr. John Dear out of Los Alamos.
This year the pastor went away on vacation and on the fron tpage of the local paer was a picture of Fr. Dear.
Of course when our pastor came six or seven years ago, Commonweal was removed from the parish library alon gwith NCR.
So I guess there’s a connection to Commonweal Catholicism, but slowly the times may be a changing.
That’s fascinating, Joe. Together with his review of Feeney’s life, it may suggest that the dichotomy some draw between the concerns of the late Dulles and the earlier Dulles is ovredrawn.
Up until about 1960, I don’t think there would have been much difference between the editorial positions of The Wanderer and Commonweal.
While The Wanderer has remained true to its founding mission in 1867, Commonweal has not. The lure of “liberal Catholicism” proved to be too strong for its editors to resist by 1960, or perhaps 1961. Of course, The Wanderer was founded to resist the “liberal Catholicism” of Isaac Hecker and Cardinal Gibbons that has supported every US war since we invaded the Philippines, our first Vietnam. Too bad Commonweal did not.
What was also extremely interesting about Cuddihy’s chapter is his care to show that John Courtney Murray, despite attacks from the right, was also very concerned to insure that the American experiment was interpreted in a way that does not threaten Catholic dogma–the First Amendment as “articles of peace” rather than ‘articles of faith.”
s
F.Y.I.-
http://www.saintbenedict.com/publications/fr_feeney_history_2.php
Since it is true that there is no Salvation outside His Church, let us Pray that those outside The Body of Christ, at the Hour of Their Death, become part of the One Body of Christ through His Divine Love and Mercy.
Since it is true that there is no Salvation outside His Church, let us Pray that those outside The Body of Christ, at the Hour of Their Death, become part of the One Body of Christ through His Divine Love and Mercy.
Nancy,
I hope you know that Father Feeney’s very literal interpretation of “Outside the Church there is no salvation” is one of the things that he was excommunicated for. Here’s a paragraph from a source I have never cited before — EWTN:
<blockquote What the disobedient Feeney said amounted to this: he insisted that all who did not formally enter the Church would go to hell. Hence he had to say, and he did say, that unbaptized babies go to hell. Further, all adults who did not formally enter the Church – get their names on a parish register – would also go to hell, even if they never had a chance to hear there was a Church, e.g., those in the western hemisphere during the long centuries before Columbus. Therefore Feeney consigned literally millions upon millions to hell, even though He gave them no chance.
There was no baptism of blood. If you were martyred for your faith in Jesus before you were baptized, you went to hell. There was no baptism of desire. Remember that in the early Church, catechumens were instructed in the faith before being baptized. Father Feeney believed that if they died before baptism, or if they were martyred, they went to hell.
The Church today teaches that we trust in God’s mercy when it comes to unbaptized babies. Father Feeney taught that they went to hell.
You are always talking about the Deposit of Faith. Baptism of blood and baptism of desire are part of the Deposit of Faith.
David, it is part of The Deposit of Faith that Christ, at The Hour of Our Death, will decide our Final Destination based on our desire and Thank God, His Love and Mercy.
David, it is part of The Deposit of Faith that Christ, at The Hour of Our Death, will decide our Final Destination based on our desire and Thank God, His Love and Mercy.
Nancy,
And that it is not necessary, in order to avoid hell, to have been baptized with water or even — if you had no chance whatsoever of knowing about Jesus — to have accepted him by name as your Savior. Otherwise, like Father Feeney (before he reconciled with the Church) you are saying it is a fact that all unbaptized babies, all Native Americans before Columbus, etc., etc., were created only to go to hell. This is not what the Catholic Church teaches.
David, I certainly did not say that since this is what the Catholic Church teaches on Baptism:
http://www.vatican.va/archive/catechism/p2s2c1a1.htm
Paul Likoudis, frequent contributor to the Wanderer (and, I believe, an editor or former editor), is mistaken about Commonweal’s history. For those who are interested, Rodger Van Allen’s two-volume history of the magazine has it right: The Commonweal and American Catholicism & Being Catholic: Commonweal from the Seventies to the Nineties.
Many thanks for this, Cathy. I have been interested in Obama’s seeming resuscitation of civil religion and will check out the Cuddihy book.
In noticed that Cardinal Dulles’ early fling with the Fenneyites was largely passed over in silence in his obituaries, which is probably just as well, as it is a somewhat complex story–though I think his obit on Feeney elides a bit of his early attachment to the priest’s more extreme views.
That said, Dulles’ appreciation of Feeney is bang on in many respects, and I think points up the pastoral commonalities I have tended to find in priests of all “stripes,” shall we say. When I was researching my book “The Coming Catholic Church” and interviewed Frank McNulty–no Feeneyite, to be sure–he brought up Feeney and his writings, and cited his advice to priests:
“He said, “If you want your people to love you, no matter what your faults, be kind to their children, their brides and their dead.”
David, welcome back!
I think Cuddihy is fascinating–and I believe he is still living. I’d really like to hear his take on the Catholic Church in the current era in the U.S.
I think, from Dulles’s account, there must have been significant good in what Feeney got going at Harvard. How and why it turned bad, and whether the seed of the bad was there from the beginning, is something that only an expert in the case and the people could say. .
This sounds already like a cult in the making to me.
Feeney’s idea (via Dulles) that the act of faith involves the sacrifice of reason strikes my as nonsensical and, among other things, unsound doctrine. Grace perfects nature! Feeney’s idea only has plausibility if you start from the (false) premise that human reason is the measure of all things. That Feeney had a certain charism in Weber’s sense, seems likely, but so did Maciel.
I was struck by Dulles’s great admiration for Feeney’s style of lecturing, in which he would focus on those who might have reservations about what he was saying until he appeared to have their assent, whereupon he would sweep everyone in the room into a sort of irresistible unity on whatever point he was making. And then there is Dulles’s absurd conviction noted by Joe above, that Feeney’s view of faith as requiring a sacrifice of reason was “sound doctrine.” Even after the fact. Dulles did not seem to see as evidenced in this piece that the cultish direction in which the St. Benedict center group began to move was all too likely.
The idea that a Leonard Feeney (and others like Charles Coughlin) could and should be emulated in this day and age for ANY reason is ludicrous. Their prominent flaws significantly overshadowed any alleged secondary positive aspects of their lives.
It reminds me of the old saw that Hitler build the autobahns and Mussolini made the trains run on time.
Right.
When I was a child in “sister school” in the early 1950s, a friend whose mother was not Catholic asked the priest if she would go to heaven. This was during a catechism class on Catholic exceptionalism in that area. The priest told my friend that he must pray for his mother to become a Catholic so that she could join him in heaven (predestined at such a young and tender age). Needless to say, when the child went home and told his parents, he was yanked out of St. Rose School and the whole family became Lutherans (the mother’s faith.) Thanks, Leonard Feeney, for your influence.
I too date myself. In the 1950s, Father Feeney’s followers, the Slaves of the Immaculate Heart of Mary(!), would go from door-to-door selling various tracts and pamphlets by Leonard Feeney. I think this was a Northeast phenomenon. The brothers?, seminarians? dressed in black suits, white shirts, black ties as was customary for seminarians not yet in major orders (except the Jesuits, of course, who wore Roman collars from the time they were novices). Whenever the Slaves would show up in the Washington area, The Catholic Standard would, in an ominously-bounded black box, warn all Catholics against buying the Feeneyites” heretical wares.
Leonard Feeney, a poet!!! I remember only two lines from what I think was entitled “The Altar Boy” — “his cheeks grow red from the candle heat/ as the carpet under his noiseless feet ….” The rest was about snow, and cold,and pre-dawn dark, and the like. Perhaps he wrote also– St. Anthony of Padua:”He was the son of Lisbon’s ruler/ wealth and station his by birth/ but he scorned all earthly pleasures/ seeking those of priceless worth.” And St. Agnes: “Who bears the name of Agnes/ may bear it with all pride/ remembering one small Roman maid/recalling how she died.”
Leonard Feeney was a demagogue. God grant him a merciful judgment.
I have very little use for little movements in the church or any other group–I’m too suspicious, wondering always what the angle is.
Nonetheless, I suspect that there was something in Feeney’s proposal that appealed to people–the commitment to the tradition, the call for commitment. Much like the Legionnaires of Christ.
But something went badly, badly wrong–including the turn away from appreciation for the Catholic tradition to disdain (hatred?) for one’s fellow Catholics.
Maybe a fresh look at the Feenities, from the perspective of distance, can give us some perspective on what’s going on in some quarters in the Church today.
What would have happened to the Feenites, for example, if he hadn’t crossed the line into heresy–but stayed just on the other side of it?
“What would have happened to the Feenites, for example, if he hadn’t crossed the line into heresy–but stayed just on the other side of it?”
They would have been declared a Personal Prelature by JPII, showered with favor, and given control of the Notre Dame Centre in Jerusalem. Oops, the LC already got that. Oh, well …. maybe control of Medjugorje, or the right to “visit” non-cloistered orders of Sisters to make sure that their T’s are crossed and I’s are dotted.
“What would have happened to the Feenites, for example, if he hadn’t crossed the line into heresy-but stayed just on the other side of it?”
As long as one stays within the “Circle of Love”, the Alpha and Omega, all will be well. It is when one goes off in a tangent, that one ends up either to the left or right of the reference point.
Like this, for example: http://www.mathopenref.com/tangent.html :-)
The reference point is The Blessed Trinity, The Relationship of Love that gives us Life from the beginning.
“Let Us Make Man In Our Image.”- The Blessed Trinity