In the fall of 1941, [Jesuit] Father Feeney, then an instructor at the Weston seminary, became involved with Saint Benedict Center, a Catholic library apostolate serving the Catholic students at Harvard, Radcliffe, and other institutions of higher learning in the Cambridge area. . . . During his years at the Center Feeney is known to have received more than 200 young people. . . into the Catholic Church,Prompted by influential figures at Boston College and Harvard, sanctions were gradually placed against Fr Feeney and the Saint Benedict Center, and in October 1949, Fr Feeney was expelled from the Jesuits for "serious and permanent disobedience". He was excommunicated by the Holy Office (predecessor of the CDF) for "heresy" in 1953. However, the excommunication was lifted in 1972 with no recantation required from Feeney. The Feeney case has since been characterized as "the first of several times the archbishops of Boston would compromise the Catholic faith for the sake of good politics and cordial relations with the secular powers that be".. . . . Tension between Saint Benedict Center, the elite universities in the Cambridge area, and the hierarchy began mounting in the early postwar years. The Center increasingly became repulsed by the complacency Jesuits studying at Harvard when the Catholic faith was ridiculed. Per [Center foundress Catherine] Clarke:
Our students often saw the priests sit, apparently unmoved, in the classes of atheists and Marxist sympathizers. The priests listened while these professors frequently denied Christ, questioned His claims, belittled Him, or cast reflections on devotions to the Blessed Virgin Mary, the Mother of God. Through it all, the priests remained, if not smiling and serene, at least without the open protest and complaint, the kind that any true priest is required to give under circumstances like these.Father Feeney forbade these hypocritical Jesuits from attending Saint Benedict Center in 1947. In addition to converts, many Harvard and Radcliffe students attending Saint Benedict Center began to see a conflict between their studies and their faith. Some even resigned, penning letters to administrators explaining their reasons for doing so. While Feeney never pushed students to take so drastic a sacrifice, he celebrated those who took the brave step.
I don't think there was actually much difference between an elite-school education in the 1940s and the one I had 20 years later. Standard reading required of freshmen and sophomores would have included Margaret Mead's Coming of Age in Samoa, which has since been accused of academic fraud, and B F Skinner's Walden Two. Darwinian theory was routinely taught, and it was generally implied in all empirical science courses that scientific materialism was the only intellectually respectable world view. Harvard PhD, and later professor, B F Skinner's views dominated psychology. Philosophy courses focused on Sartre, Wittgenstein, and William James, with Aquinas as a discredited footnote.
I simply don't know how Law, whose roommate, as we've already seen, suggested he was something of a squish over Catholicism, would have responded to Fr Feeney. However, Cardinal Cushing, not a Feeney supporter, had already begun to address the issue of hard-line Catholicism at Harvard. According to this account,
With the beginning of the 1950-51 school year, Archbishop Cushing adopted a provisional solution [to the Feeney problem]: as chaplain of the Catholic Club he named his own secretary, Fr. Lawrence J. Riley, who was also on the faculty of St. John’s Seminary.The article later cites Fr Joseph Muzquiz, an early Opus Dei priest assigned to create a US presence for the movement in the early 1950s, who met in 1951 with Fr Riley about the situation atFr. Riley continued as chaplain through the 1951 school year. In a report on his first year in that position, he informed the Archbishop about the status of the programs at the Club, which involved between 30 and 40 people. Fr Riley added, in an unenthusiastic tone, "For neither activity was there much support from the members of the Club."
Harvard, the most prestigious university in America, where the only Catholic group was unfortunately the St Benedict Center, which continued to oppose the hierarchy of the Church, and the Archbishop had excommunicated those who continued to attend their activites.Actually, the Harvard Catholic Club had been a prestigious institution since the late 19th century, but it appears that interest had faded with the establishment of the Saint Benedict Center, which seems to have had much greater appeal for serious Catholic students in the area. Fr Riley's own efforts to rekindle Catholic participation in the Catholic Club seem to have met with only a lukewarm response, and according to the article linked here, Fr Riley was chaplain of the Catholic Club only in the 1951-52 school year, while elsewhere, Law says he made his final decision about a vocation in the spring of 1953.
Nevertheless, my informant tells me that Law cited Fr Riley as a key influence in discerning his vocation, and this article that appeared in the Boston College campus paper at the time of Law's arrival in Boston as archbishop says Law
stated publicly that he owed his vocation to the priesthood to the Most Reverend Lawrence J. Riley, who is an auxilary bishop in the Boston Archdiocese. Bishop Riley is a graduate of the Boston College Class of 1936 and was the chaplain of the Harvard Catholic Club when Bernard Law was a Harvard undergraduate.The odd thing is that Riley appears to have been a much less inspiring figure than poor Fr Feeney, but there must have been something about him that inspired the young Bernard Law. In light of later characterizations of Law as a conservative or hard-liner, this seems incongruous -- as does the account we've already seen of Law's Baptist Adams House roommate, who said Law never attempted to proselytize.
Another question is how, or even whether, he was catechized and confirmed, either in his early teens or at the Harvard Catholic Club. The picture that's emerged is that the family wasn't observant, and he doesn't seem to have had religious instruction in childhood. Why the Catholic Club all of a sudden? Did he even know what Catholic is?
