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(RNS) — Not that there wasn’t quite a lot of different information final week, however I’ve discovered myself desirous about Frank Pavone, the crusading anti-abortion priest who was defrocked by the Vatican for disobedience and blasphemy. His case harks again to that of one other crusading American priest, Leonard Feeney, a Jesuit disciplined by the Vatican disciplined for disobedience 70 years in the past.
Feeney, whose story I as soon as wrote up at some size, established himself as non secular chief of a storefront ministry in Cambridge, Massachusetts, within the late Forties. Situated throughout the road from one in every of Harvard’s undergraduate residences, St. Benedict Middle served not solely as a gathering place for Catholic college students but additionally as a missionary enterprise.
Feeney was a charismatic instructor and preacher, and he notched some spectacular converts — spectacular sufficient to fire up concern among the many powers-that-were at close by Harvard College. For his half, the Jesuit priest hated the varsity, blaming all of the ills of the brand new atomic age on its secularism.
His message, delivered with satirical wit, was that no matter was not Catholic was to a point anti-Catholic. What made him infamous was a hard-edged interpretation of the Latin dogma, further ecclesiam nulla salus — no salvation exterior the church.
Leonard Feeney. Picture courtesy of Wikipedia/Inventive Commons
Though pre-Vatican II American Catholicism was something however a bastion of liberalism, the declare that nobody apart from precise members of the Catholic church may very well be saved was not what Feeney’s fellow Jesuits at Boston Faculty taught. The genial archbishop of Boston, Richard Cushing, discovered Feeney’s take to be unacceptable group relations.
What to do?
Feeney was ordered to go away Cambridge and report for homiletics obligation on the Faculty of the Holy Cross in Worcester. When he steadfastly refused to go, he was, over a interval of a number of years, disadvantaged of his priestly schools, kicked out of the Jesuit order and, in 1953, excommunicated. The “Boston Heresy Case” turned frontpage information across the nation.
Calling themselves the Slaves of the Immaculate Coronary heart of Mary, Feeney and the followers who caught with him took to assembling each Sunday on Boston Frequent to denounce his enemies: Protestants, Masons, Boston’s Catholic hierarchy and particularly the Jews. In 1958, the group decamped to a farm in western Massachusetts. By the point of his demise 20 years later, Feeney was admitted again into the church — as had been, sooner or later, most (however not all) of the opposite Slaves.
For a few years, this episode has been dismissed a lot the identical manner the 1925 Scopes “Monkey Trial” was — as an eccentric reactionary second within the regular adaptation of Christianity to the fashionable world. However just like the resurgence of old-time evangelicalism, Feeney’s second now seems to be much less and fewer like what his biographer in 1965 known as a “comic-opera heresy.” Certainly, in a forthcoming examine, a Boston Faculty historian, the Rev. Mark Massa, sees Feeney because the progenitor of a Catholic fundamentalism that’s alive and kicking exhausting right this moment.
Which brings us to Frank Pavone. The longtime head of the anti-abortion group Monks for Life, Pavone, like Feeney, has not taken a place at odds with Catholic doctrine, which is clearly and undeniably against abortion. However, like Feeney, he has accused church leaders of being delicate on it.
Additionally (in keeping with his surname, Italian for peacock) Pavone is a preening zealot who has been at odds together with his hierarchical superior, Amarillo Bishop Patrick Zurek, for years, partially due to Monks for Life’s lack of monetary transparency.
In 2011, Zurek suspended Pavone from ministry exterior Amarillo and barred him from showing on the conservative Catholic TV community EWTN. In 2016, Zurek pronounced Monks for Life to be a civil establishment.
Leonard Feeney talking at St. Benedict Middle, Cambridge, Mass.
It’s price asking whether or not Pavone, who continues to be styling himself “Fr.” on the Monks for Life web site, will, like Feeney, lead his group into the type of sectarianism that, as Massa defines it, is a vital mark of fundamentalist Catholicism. The very best-known instance of that is the Society of St. Pius X, a corporation of traditionalist monks based within the wake of Vatican II.
In Pavone’s case, the reply might activate whether or not he finally ends up, like Feeney, excommunicated. In accordance with the Rev. James Bretzke, a Jesuit ethical theologian at John Carroll College in Cleveland, “If he persists in sustaining that he’s a priest, and if he had been to carry out the sacraments, particularly Mass, in a public manner, then these may represent crimes that might end in excommunication.”
Regardless of the future holds, Pavone’s removing from the priesthood and the Vatican’s personal declaration that Monks for Life “just isn’t a Catholic group” represent an authoritative sign to the Catholic world. With one exception, no American bishop has risen to his protection. Many conservative Catholic voices have hit the mute button.
And but, as was the case with Feeney, there’s a penumbra of assist for Pavone’s model of Catholicism that won’t go away — one with roots within the either-or theology of the Jansenists of the seventeenth and 18th centuries. “It’s an strategy to ethical points the place you are inclined to really feel that no matter is extra rigorous is one way or the other higher,” mentioned Bretzke.
Today, this strategy is embraced by the substantial variety of American Catholics who disdain Pope Francis, an anti-Jansenist determine if there ever was one. Amongst them, Pavone is more likely to stay a hero, even when they don’t say so out loud.
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