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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 10 June 2011
On the afternoon of 6 September 1952, the readers of the Boston Pilot—the voice of the Roman Catholic archdiocese—found on the front page of their usually staid weekly the text of a trenchant letter from the Holy Office in Rome. The text, dated August 8, addressed a group of Boston Catholics who had kicked up a fuss over the ancient theological dictum, extra ecclesiam nulla salus (“outside the church there is no salvation”)—a phrase going back to St. Cyprian in the third century and one of the pillars of orthodoxy for Christian believers.
1 The quotation is taken from the Associated Press wire service, reporting on a Feeneyite who ran onto the field during a 1953 Notre Dame football game. Deedy, John, “Whatever Happened to Father Feeney?” The Critic 31 (1973) 22Google Scholar.
2 The Pilot, 6 September 1952. The letter was published on the front page, first in Latin and then in English translation.
3 Ibid. The quotation is from the ninth paragraph of the letter (“Quare nemo salvabitur”). While allowing for “implicit desire,” however, the letter ended by announcing that such cases were exceptions to the more general rule that “submission to the Catholic Church and to the Supreme Pontiff is required as necessary to salvation.”
4 Clarke, Catherine, The Loyolas and the Cabots (Boston: Ravengate, 1950) 300.Google ScholarDeedy, , “Whatever Happened?” 19–20Google Scholar.
5 The only other rival for this heretical crown—the set of beliefs denounced by Testem Benevolentiae in 1899 and usually labelled “Americanism”—has been considered by many Catholic historians a “phantom heresy.” The papal letter in 1899 declared that it accused no one of the doctrines condemned, but merely pointed out “certain excesses to be avoided,” while all the parties involved in the debate thanked the pope for the clarification that the letter offered. Thomas McAvoy, offering what became the standard interpretative line, argued that the theological (as opposed to cultural) tendencies condemned by the letter were really to be found in the French Church at the end of the nineteenth century, especially those surrounding a group of French Catholics who had proclaimed themselves “Americainistes” for ecclesiastical political resons. See McAvoy's, ThomasThe Americanist Heresy in Roman Catholicism, 1895-1900 (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1963) 300–322Google Scholar. For a lively revisionist reading, arguing that there was indeed an American “theological imperialism” afoot, see Wangler, Thomas, “The Birth of Americanism: ‘Westward the Apocalyptic Candlestick’” HTR 65 (1972) 415–36CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
6 Both Deedy (“Whatever Happened”) and Silk, Mark (Spiritual Politics: Religion and America since World War Il [New York: Simon & Schuster, 1988])Google Scholar offer fine examples of the sociological explanation of the Feeney affair. For a classic discussion of the sectarian model, see Troeltsch, Ernst, The Social Teaching of the Christian Churches (2 vols.; New York: Macmillan, 1949) 2. 461Google Scholar.
7 By “modernist” here I use William Hutchison's definition that posits epistemological presuppositions that modern culture itself is revelatory of divine purpose, or at least of the “direction” of history. Modern culture, therefore, represents the norm to which traditions, religious and other, must adapt in order to lead people to God, understand the direction of history, uncover the true sources of culture, etc. See Hutchison's, The Modernist Impulse in American Protestantism (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1976) 2Google Scholar. Perhaps the most famous and critical study of the post-World War II religious revival that took precisely this interpretation to task is Herberg's, WillProtestant, Catholic, Jew (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1955)Google Scholar.
8 Durkheim, Emile, The Division of Labor in Society (trans. Simpson, George; Glencoe, IL: Free Press, 1947) 102.Google ScholarErikson, Kai T. (The Wayward Puritans: A Study in the Sociology of Deviance [New York: Wiley, 1966] 4–12)Google Scholar offers a particularly lucid exposition of this theory.
9 Erikson, , Wayward Puritans, 67–159.Google ScholarBoyer, Paul and Nissenbaum, Stephen, Salem Possessed: The Social Origins of Witchcraft (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1974) 179–216Google Scholar.
10 Douglas, Mary, Natural Symbols (London: Barrie & Rockliff, 1970) ixGoogle Scholar. See also idem, Purity and Danger: An Analysis of Concepts of Pollution and Taboo (New York: Praeger, 1966) chaps. 1 and 2Google Scholar.
11 Douglas, , Natural Symbols, viii, ixGoogle Scholar.
12 Douglas, , Natural Symbols. See especially chap. 7Google Scholar, “The Problem of Evil.”
13 Clarke, , Loyolas and Cabots, 3–4Google Scholar.
14 Deedy, , “Whatever Happened?” 17Google Scholar.
15 Dulles, Avery, “Leonard Feeney: In Memoriam,” America, 25 02 1978, 135Google Scholar.
16 Catholic periodicals throughout the 1940s debated whether Catholic students should attend non-Catholic, and especially Ivy League, colleges; the famous article addressing this issue in America magazine was entitled “Should Catholic Lambs Eat Ivy?” See Clarke, , Loyolas and Cabots, 3-4, 6Google Scholar.
17 Deedy, , “Whatever Happened?” 17Google Scholar.
18 Silk, , Spiritual Politics, 71–72Google Scholar.
19 Dulles, , “Leonard Feeney: In Memoriam,” 135Google Scholar.
20 Clarke, , Loyolas and Cabots, 45:Google Scholar “We waited and we listened, but no strong voice arose above the noise of the world. There was only the jubilant announcement of a new age, the atomic age, born out of the abandonment of a Christian principle!”
21 Ibid.
22 Ibid.
23 Deedy, John, “Whatever Happened,” 17Google Scholar.
24 Dulles, Avery, “On Keeping the Faith,” From the Housetops 1 (1946) 60–62.Google ScholarSilk, Mark (Spiritual Politics, 74)Google Scholar refers to this quotation.
25 The phrase is from the encyclical of Boniface VIII's Unam Sanctam, who “declared, defined, and pronounced” it in 1302. Feeney also loved to quote the famous oath sworn by all participants at the First Vatican Council, who professed allegiance to the “true Catholic faith, outside of which no one can be saved.”) See also Deedy, , “Whatever Happened,” 19Google Scholar.
26 Deedy, , “Whatever Happened,” 19Google Scholar.
27 Clarke, , Loyolas and Cabots, 50–51Google Scholar.
28 O'Connell, William, “The Catholic Priest and the Catholic School,” Sermons and Addresses (Boston: Pilot, 1931) 10. 51–53Google Scholar.
29 Boston Globe, 16 February 1948. Cushing went to dinner at Harvard's Lowell House at the invitation of house master Perkins to discuss the conversion of Temple Morgan, a Harvard undergraduate living there. Morgan—the scion of a prominent family and member of the elite Porcellian Club—had been converted by Feeney's preaching, baptized by Feeney, and promptly withdrew from Harvard to enroll at St. Benedict's own school. Rumor had it that the consternation over Morgan's withdrawal had reached Harvard's Board of Overseers, which had discussed the case at some length. Silk, , Spiritual Politics, 78Google Scholar.
30 Clarke, , Loyolas and Cabots, 100, 112Google Scholar.
31 Ibid., 139-41. British Catholic novelist Evelyn Waugh visited the Center that fall on the advice of Mrs. Clare Booth Luce (“a saint and apostle on no account to be missed”). Waugh's account is itself classic: “I found him one morning surrounded by a court of bemused youth of both sexes & he stark ravin g mad… He fell into a rambling denunciation of all secular learning which gradually became more and more violent… It seemed to me that he needed an exorcist more than an alienist. A case of demonic possession & jolly frightening.” Amory, Mark, ed. The Letters of Evelyn Waugh (New Haven: Tickner & Fields, 1980) 292–93Google Scholar.
32 Clarke, , Loyolas and Cabots, 144–62Google Scholar.
33 Silk, , Spiritual Politics, 81Google Scholar. See chaps. 20 and 21 in Clarke's Loyolas and Cabots for an insider's view of these events.
34 Quoted in Silk, , Spiritual Politics, 81Google Scholar.
35 “A letter from the Holy Office,” AER 127 (1952) 307–15Google Scholar.
36 Roma locuta, causa finita (“Rome has spoken, the case is finished”) had guided Feeney's calls to Rome until the fatal pronouncement on August 8: thereafter, Feeney believed that liberalism infected even the Vatican itself. Clarke, , Loyolas and Cabots, 247-66, 300–301Google Scholar.
37 Deedy, , “Whatever Happened,” 20–23Google Scholar. There is further irony in Feeney's move to Harvard, Massachusetts. His new “monastery” there abutted the site of “Fruitlands,” the nineteenth-century commune of transcendentalist Bronson Alcott, which itself represented precisely the kind of “fuzzy Christianity” that Feeney targeted with disdain.
38 Liebman's, Rabbi JoshuaPeace of Mind (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1946)Google Scholar was among the first of an interdenominational genre of religious/therapeutic bestsellers, including Sheen's, Fulton J.Peace of Soul (New York: Whittlesey, 1949)Google Scholar and Peale's, Norman VincentPower of Positive Thinking (Englewood Cliffs: Prentice-Hall, 1956)Google Scholar. Donald Meyer has convincingly argued that this new form of popular theology really eschewed questions of theology that might accentuate differences in order to offer a therapeutic “fix” to the American religious psyche. See his The Positive Thinkers (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1965)Google Scholar.
39 Silk, , Spiritual Politics, 84Google Scholar.
40 Lumen Gentium, the Second Vatican Council's dogmatic statement on the church, offered the new definition. See “The Dogmatic Constitution on the Church,” in Flannery, Austin, ed., Vatican I1, The Conciliar and Post-Conciliar Documents (Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press, 1983) 359Google Scholar.
41 On the American “distinctive tradition” that maintained Roman loyalty and cultural identification, see Hennessey, James, “The Distinctive Tradition of American Catholicism” in Gleason, Philip, ed., Catholicism in America (New York: Harper & Row, 1970)Google Scholar; and McAvoy, Thomas, The Formation of the American Catholic Minority, 1820-1860 (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1967)Google Scholar. On Americanism, see Wangler's “The Birth of Americanism.”
42 On the Catholic claim to insider status, see Halsey's, WilliamThe Survival of American Innocence (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1979)Google Scholar. Perhaps the classic text in elucidating this claim is Murray's, John CourtneyWe Hold These Truths: Catholic Reflections on the American Proposition (New York: Sheed & Ward, 1960)Google Scholar.
43 See Muldoon, J. M., “Innocent III,” The New Catholic Encyclopedia 7. 521–24Google Scholar.
44 See Lawlor, F. X., “The Church (Theology of),” The New Catholic Encyclopedia 3. 683–93Google Scholar.
45 The Pilot, 6 September 1952, 1: “It is beyond understanding how a member of a religious institute, namely Father Feeney, presents himself as a 'Defender of the Faith” and at the same time does not hesitate to attack the catechetical instruction proposed by lawful authorities, and has not even feared to incur grave sanctions threatened by the sacred canons because of his serious violations of his duties as a religious, a priest, and an ordinary member of the Church.”