After the Boston Heresy Case

by Gary Potter

Book Overview

To go after something is to inquire into it, to be in search of it, to seek the truth about it. In this book, veteran Catholic journalist Gary Potter goes after the truth concerning one of last... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0962099465
• ISBN13: 9780962099465
• Release Date: January 1995
• Publisher: Catholic Treasures
• Length: 215 Pages
• Weight: 0.60 lbs.

Customer Reviews

You may hold that non-Catholics may go to heaven -- and not be called a heretic

Leonard Edward Feeney was born in 1897 in Lynn, Massachusetts. After high school, where he was a classmate of the future Cardinal of Boston, Richard Cushing, Feeney became a Jesuit novice. By the time he was thirty he was a published poet. From the late 1930s until 1948 when he and around 80 followers launched "the Boston Heresy Case," Feeney's reputation among American Roman Catholics soared to a level approaching that of his friend, the popular radio personality, Monsignor Fulton Sheen. Feeney's FISH ON FRIDAY became a best seller. He wrote a charming biography of the early American Saint Elizabeth Ann Seton. He was for four years literary editor of AMERICA magazine, the national Jesuit weekly. His admirers included Presidential candidate Al Smith, Clare Booth Luce and the future theologian and cardinal Avery Dulles. Always in terrible health, half his stomach having been surgically removed in his early Jesuit years, diminutive Father Feeney had a mean talent for mimicry and was a master of English prose and poetry. In 1944 his Jesuit superiors, acceding to a request by the charming co-founder and director of Saint Benedict Center in Cambridge, Mrs Catherine Goddard Clarke, appointed Leonard Feeney to be chaplain and spiritual director of the recently founded Center just outside Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts. At the end of World War II, many returning war veterans sought out the Center for its exciting rediscovery of old "integral Catholicism," including the philosophy and theology of Saint Thomas Aquinas. They complained bitterly that Harvard was teaching the Axis ideologies they had just been fighting. August 1945 devastated the Center's main-stream Catholic complacency. Two atomic bombs were dropped: on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the latter the center of Catholicism in Japan. How could this happen? An atrocity slaughtering thousands of innocent women, children and non-combatants. Why were most Americans cheering? Why did the bishops not lead the nation in mourning? Center leaders sensed that America had lost its moral and theological moorings. And they thought they had discovered the reason why: the American Catholic Church was no longer militant, crusading to bring all men to Christ through baptism and personal submission to the authority of the pope. It was going "Americanist," assimilating to the Protestant establishment, grateful to be increasingly accepted socially. It was that simple. Center men and women anchored their crusade to save America by bringing all men to Christ and the pope in an old dictum dating to the third century, "extra ecclesiam nulla salus," i.e. "outside the (Roman Catholic) Church there is no Salvation." Center members informed Rome that Catholic theologians in Greater Boston, tolerated by Archbishop Cushing, were tolerating a horrible heresy: that non-Catholics, or indeed anyone not baptized, might through the mercy of God conceivably be saved and attain to heaven. The archbishop denounced them