Leonard Feeney

Leonard Edward Feeney (February 18, 1897 – January 30, 1978) was an American Jesuit Catholic priest, poet, lyricist, and essayist.

He articulated an interpretation of the Catholic doctrine extra Ecclesiam nulla salus ("outside the Church there is no salvation"). He took the position that baptism of blood and baptism of desire are unavailing and that therefore no non-Catholics will be saved. Those positions are called, after him, Feeneyism.

Fighting against what he perceived to be the liberalization of Catholic doctrine, he was excommunicated by the Holy See. He was described as Boston's homegrown version of Father Charles Coughlin for his antisemitism.

America
In the 1930s, as a Jesuit, Feeney was a literary editor at the Jesuit magazine America.

Professor and polemics
He was a professor in Boston College's graduate school, and then professor of spiritual eloquence at the Jesuit seminary in Weston, Massachusetts. Thereafter, he became the priest chaplain at the Catholic Saint Benedict Center, a religious center at Harvard Square founded by Catherine Goddard Clarke, in 1945; Feeney had first visited in 1941. He gave incendiary speeches on the Boston Common on Sundays, leading Robert F. Kennedy, then a Harvard undergraduate, to write Archbishop Richard Cushing of Boston requesting his removal.

After April 1949 the affair became a public scandal when Feeney undertook in the press the defence of dismissed laymen who were teaching in the Jesuit College (founded in Boston by the Society of Jesus in 1863) that those who were not members of the Catholic Church were damned.

Feeney criticized Cushing for, among other things, accepting the church's definition of "baptism of desire". Finally, in 1949, Cushing declared Feeney's St. Benedict's Center off-limits to Catholics. That same year Boston College and Boston College High School dismissed four of the center's members from the theology faculty for spreading Feeney's views in the classroom. In light of his controversial behavior, his Jesuit superiors ordered him to leave the center for a post at College of the Holy Cross, but he repeatedly refused, which led to his expulsion from the order. Cushing suspended Feeney's priestly faculties in April 1949; Feeney continued to celebrate the sacraments although he was no longer authorized to do so.

Around this time, Fr. Feeney began speaking on Boston Common, gathering large crowds of up to 2,000 people to his public meetings, both supporters and hecklers. According to The Harvard Crimson, Feeney declared that in Catholic majority Boston, he wanted to "rid our city of every coward liberal Catholic, Jew dog, Protestant brute, and 33rd degree Mason who is trying to suck the soul from good Catholics and sell the true faith for greenbacks". Feeney would frequently throw visceral barbs back at his hecklers, describing them as "sexually degenerate, fairy, lewd, obscene, dirty, filthy, rotten, pawns, pimps, and frauds".

Excommunication
On 8 August 1949, Cardinal Francesco Marchetti Selvaggiani of the Holy Office sent a protocol letter to Archbishop Richard Cushing on the meaning of the dogma extra Ecclesiam nulla salus ("outside the Church there is no salvation"). This protocol had been approved by Pope Pius XII on 28 July 1949. The document states: "[T]his dogma [extra Ecclesiam nulla salus] must be understood in that sense in which the Church herself understands it. For, it was not to private judgments that Our Saviour gave for explanation those things that are contained in the deposit of faith, but to the teaching authority of the Church".

After Feeney refused twice to oblige to the Holy See's summons to Rome to explain himself, he was excommunicated on 13 February 1953 by the Holy See for persistent disobedience to legitimate church authority due to his refusal to comply. According to Cardinal John Wright, Pope Pius XII personally translated the edict into English.

The decree of excommunication was later published in the Acta Apostolicae Sedis. His followers claimed that his excommunication was invalid.

Following his excommunication, Feeney co-founded a community called the Slaves of the Immaculate Heart of Mary with Catherine Goddard Clarke. This group later split in two, one of which became the Still River Branch, in good standing with the Catholic Church; the other is a schismatic group that holds to Feeney's views on Salvation.

Reconciliation with the Catholic Church and death
Feeney reconciled with the Catholic Church in 1972 without any recantation from his part. This reconciliation without Feeney's recantation, reports the National Catholic News Service, "came about at least in part through the intervention of Cardinal Humberto Medeiros of Boston who had attended lectures at St. Benedict's during his days as a seminarian. Cardinal John Wright, head of the Vatican's Congregation for the Clergy, reportedly personally brought the matter to the attention of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith".

Feeney died in Ayer, Massachusetts, on January 30, 1978.

For Feeney's death, Cardinal Avery Dulles, who had previously been a pupil in Feeney's lectures, shared his reflection on and personal experience with Feeney.

The Point
Feeney was editor of The Point, which ran a mixture of theological and political articles, some of them branded anti-semitic by Feeney's critics. The newsletter frequently contained sentiments such as:

"the Church has never abandoned her absolute principle that it is possible for an individual Jew to scrap his hateful heritage, sincerely break with the synagogue, and cleanse his cursed blood with the Precious Blood of Jesus. (October 1957)"

"Those two powers, the chief two in the world today, are Communism and Zionism. That both movements are avowedly anti-Christian, and that both are in origin and direction Jewish, is a matter of record. (September 1958)"

"As surely and securely as the Jews have been behind Freemasonry, or Secularism, or Communism, they are behind the 'anti-hate' drive. The Jews are advocating tolerance only for its destructive value — destructive, that is, of the Catholic Church. On their part, they still keep alive their racial rancors and antipathies. (July 1955)"

The Anti-Defamation League of B'nai B'rith monitored The Point magazine for at least 14 editions. In 1955, the League exchanged correspondence with the Federal Bureau of Investigation regarding possible criminal investigation of Feeney and his followers, but no investigation was started.

Reactions
As a Harvard undergraduate, Robert Francis "Bobby" Kennedy attended a meeting of students at which he stood up and challenged Feeney, later storming out following the priest's assertion that there was no salvation outside the Catholic faith. A similarly negative reaction to Feeney's teaching was recorded by British novelist and Catholic convert Evelyn Waugh, who wrote of visiting the priest while in the United States:

"I went one morning by appointment & found him surrounded by a court of bemused youths of both sexes & he stark, raving mad. All his converts have chucked their Harvard careers & go to him only for all instruction. He fell into a rambling denunciation of all secular learning which gradually became more & more violent. He shouted that Newman had done irreparable damage to the Church then started on Ronnie Knox's Mass in Slow Motion saying 'To think that any innocent girl of 12 could have this blasphemous & obscene book put into her hands' as though it were Lady Chatterley's Lover. I asked if he had read it. 'I don't have to eat a rotten egg to know it stinks.' Then I got rather angry and rebuked him in strong words. His court sat absolutely aghast at hearing their holy man addressed like this. And in unbroken silence I walked out of the house. I talked to some Jesuits later & they said that he is disobeying the plain orders of his provincial by staying there. It seemed to me he needed an exorcist more than an alienist. A case of demoniac possession & jolly frightening."

A few years later Feeney wrote critically of Knox and Newman in his collection of essays London is a Place, with an unsympathetic passing reference to Waugh's biography of St. Helena:

"on the list of [Knox's] recurrent callers, was Mr. Evelyn (pronounced Evil-in) Waugh, whose father, a London publisher, supplied his sons with early printing privileges in pornography, before one of them (Evelyn) turned to hagiography, and whitened his sepulchre with the life of a saint."

In 2003, in an article for The Jewish Week newspaper, editor Gary Rosenblatt wrote: "In a lesser-known case, Richard Cardinal Cushing excommunicated a priest, Leonard Feeney, in 1953, for preaching that all non-Catholics would go to Hell. Even though Father Feeney's words were based on the Gospel, Cardinal Cushing found them offensive, in large part because his sister had married a Jew, said Carroll, and the Cardinal had grown close to the family, sensitizing him to the Jewish perspective toward proselytization."