Leonard Feeney
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Father Leonard Edward Feeney |
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|---|---|
| Born |
February 18, 1897 Lynn, Massachusetts |
| Died | January 30, 1978 (aged 80) Ayer, Massachusetts |
| Occupation | Priest, poet, lyricist, editor, theologian, chaplain |
| Known for | Feeneyism |
Father Leonard Edward Feeney (February 18, 1897 – January 30, 1978) was a U.S. Jesuit priest, poet, lyricist, and essayist.
He articulated and defended a strict interpretation of the Roman 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. Fighting against what he perceived to be the liberalization of Catholic doctrine, he came under ecclesiastical censure. He was described as Boston's homegrown version of Father Charles Coughlin for his antisemitism.
Feeney was born in Lynn, Massachusetts, on February 18, 1897.
He entered the novitiate in 1914 and was ordained a priest in 1928.
In the 1930s, he was literary editor at the Jesuit magazine, America.
He was a professor in Boston College's graduate school, and then professor of spiritual eloquence at the Jesuit seminary in Weston, Massachusetts, before he became the priest chaplain at the Catholic Saint Benedict Center at Harvard Square in 1945. (He had first visited in 1941.) He gave incendiary speeches on the Boston Common on Sundays, leading Robert Kennedy, then a Harvard undergraduate, to write Archbishop Cushing requesting his removal. He induced some of the faithful to drop out of Harvard or Radcliffe to become students at his Center, now accredited as a Catholic school. From 1946, the Center published From the Housetops, a periodical focused on Catholic theology that enjoyed contributions from the archbishop himself. By 1949, it had begun a controversy over extra ecclesiam nulla salus that led to four of the Center's members' dismissal from their posts in the Boston College theology faculty and Boston College High School.
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