Frank Sheed and Fr. Feeney

Frank Sheed has become a Catholic hero among many conservative Catholics with good reason. He taught the Faith clearly and succinctly

Frank Sheed, Fr. Feeney's former publisher, opined in his autobiography, The Church and I, that Fr. Feeney "was condemned but not answered."

Boston was in the headlines again when the scandals of sexual predator priests surfaced majorly there.

This called another popular Catholic writer to revisit the city of Boston.Catholic World News editor Philip F. Lawler described the case of Father Leonard Feeney 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 in his 2008 book "The Faithful Departed: The Collapse of Boston's Catholic Culture",.he wrote :


"When Church-state conflicts did arise, many Catholic leaders were quite willing to sacrifice the claims of their faith in order to minimize the conflict and preserve their privileged status as community leaders. Yet again, the most conspicuous examples of this attitude have been shown in Massachusetts. In the 1950s, an Archbishop of Boston discouraged a priest from his energetic public preaching of a defined Catholic dogma because some people found that dogma offensive.

A decade later the same archbishop--now a cardinal--announced that Catholic legislators should feel free to vote in favor of legislation that violated the precepts of the Church. In 1974 his successor encouraged Catholic parents not to send their children to parochial schools.

And in 1993 yet another Boston archbishop instructed the faithful that they should not pray outside abortion clinics. In each of these remarkable cases, the Archbishop of Boston obviously thought that he was serving the cause of community peace. But just as obviously, he was yielding ground, and encouraging the Catholic faithful to yield as well"
https://catholicism.org/faithful-departed-review.html

Another less well known  Catholic writer, and convert,  who was quite prolific a few years  back, Garry Potter. Investigated the controversy of the "Boston Heresy." Gary Potter is a Catholic journalist, who was  black listed in conservative Catholic circles, for believing the Dogma, who was a founding editor of "Triumph" magazine; his writings have appeared in many periodicals, such as National Review, Human Events, the National Catholic Register, The Wanderer, The Remnant, Angelus, etc.

He wrote in the Introduction to this 1995 book, "After the Boston Heresy Case":

"This book is not a complete history of its subject... the book is more about discovery. That is, it is the result of a ... search for the truth concerning one of this century's most notable religious controversies... There is widespread misunderstanding and even misrepresentation of the facts of the case... it is not simply discovery of the facts concerning the case. Before even seeking them, something else was learned. It had to do with my own religious beliefs... it deeply intrigued me to learn that the 'heresy' was a teaching of the Church not presented to me when I came into her as a convert after Vatican II...
"This particular teaching ... is usually translated: Outside the Church there is no salvation. Once the teaching became known to me, not simply was I dumbfounded that it had fallen into such obscurity that it could take more than two decades for even a 'professional Catholic' like myself to learn about it. I also grasped that it was truly the reason for becoming a member of the Church even if i was uninstructed in it when I received conditional baptism... Under the circumstances, I felt very fortunate to have joined the Church, even though it was not consciously for the right reason." (Pg. 1-3)

Those traditionalists (and some conservatives) who are supportive of, or sympathetic to Fr. Feeney will find this book of great interest.
 https://www.amazon.com/After-Boston-Heresy-Case-Potter/dp/1930278748#customerReviews

Also another Catholic writer, Charles. Coulombe, also a few years ago investigated the controversy with similar results, as Mr. Potter, being "blackballed" from mainstream Catholic media.

His book :

Desire & Deception: How Catholics Stopped Believing

byCharles A Coulombe

In addition to being black listed, Mr. Coulombe was stalked by Mr. Karl Keating, founder of Catholic Answers. For some unknown reason Mr. Keating seems to consider this subject of  "No Salvation Outside the Church" as undesirable. He seems to think no one can discuss it, I have never heard him take up a debate on it, by any worthy opponent.

With all due respect, to Mr. Keating, we appreciate everything he's done in his Catholic Answers ministry, but he doesn't even attempt to say anything useful on the topic. "Desire & Deception" is a volume about a topic, so controversial in the United States, it's no wonder that Mr. Coulombe originally decided to publish it under a pen name. because of  the hysterical reactions, like Mr. Keating's, towards  apologies of Feeneyism (so-called) are far too common.

The doctrine of "Extra Ecclesiam nulla salus" ("Outside of the Church there is no salvation") is a contentious topic in the Church today, as it has been for a few centuries.

The documents of the Second Vatican Council have only served to confuse the issue even more, so much so that a Catholic might be forgiven for believing that formal membership in the Catholic Church is of no particular concern to those currently outside her walls. Mr. Coulombe does his fellow Catholics a great service by examining patristic sources on the necessity of formal Church membership and of water baptism at some length.

His later examination of the case of Fr. Leonard Feeney and the contemporary heresy of Americanism is especially useful for those who believe that "Feeneyism" is actually a condemned heresy and that Fr. Feeney was excommunicated on doctrinal grounds. On the contrary, the Slaves of the Immaculate Heart of Mary--an order co-founded by Fr. Feeney, and in full communion with Rome--continues to this day to preach what the late priest taught, without formal condemnation.

Likewise, his excommunication was on the grounds of disobedience for not traveling to Rome, Fr. Feeney asked on what grounds was he being summoned (which was his right under Canon Law) and was arguably promulgated incorrectly and therefore invalidly. Fr. Feeney's literal interpretation of "Extra Ecclesiam nulla salus" has never been condemned, and it is still apparently a fully acceptable interpretation for any Catholic trying to harmonize earlier Church teaching with the spirits of Vatican II.

Mr. Coulombe admits, to his credit, that there are important Church documents (including the Council of Trent --link to discussion of Trent)) that seem to crack open the door for a less strict teaching on the necessity of water baptism, but "baptism of desire" as it is widely understood today certainly has no support in any Magisterial teaching. His dismissal of St. Thomas Aquinas and Thomism is in part because of Thomas' softening on these doctrines. Clear heads and rigorous theology need to be brought to bear on these problems, with all sentimentalism pushed aside.

Father Brian Harrison, O.S., S.T.D,  a learned pontifical university theologian, and contributor to a number of Catholic periodicals, also investigated "Feeneyism." While he wouldn't agree on every point with Father Feeney, he agrees that the main point Fr. Feeney was preaching; was valid and correct. Fr. Harrison has since retired and seems to have laid low.

But he felt compelled to respond to the Wanderer newspaper, which has over the years has attack Fr, Feeney. But to their credit the Wanderer in "Catholic Replies” column,.(Vol 143, No.7- Feb 17, 2011) printed his response to  their usual  latitudinarian interpretation, of the "Dogma of the Faith":

"Specifically, I don’t think your “take” on the Council of Florence’s uncomfortably severe profession of faith (infallible ordinary Magisterium) will hold up, either historically or doctrinally.

Historically, it really isn’t credible to suggest that Catholic bishops and the Pope in 1442 thought that everyone on earth by that time “had heard and had understood the Gospel message.” Remote parts of northeast Europe were then still being evangelized; educated Catholics knew that down in Africa there were unreached tribes; the previous two centuries had seen both peaceful and warlike contact between Europeans and the Mongols, Chinese, and other large Asian populations whom educated Europeans knew had never been thoroughly — or, in some cases even partly — reached by Catholic missionaries. In other words, the discovery of the New World 50 years after the Council didn’t change the European Catholic perspective nearly as much as you (following Sullivan?) claim it did.

Doctrinally, there is no hint at all in the Florentine text that only those “pagans and Jews” who are culpably ignorant of the Gospel will go to hell if they are not “aggregated” or “joined” to the true Church before the moment of death. This is a solemn profession of a doctrine that had been universally taught as perennially true ever since the New Testament times — in other words for century after century, including periods when all Christians knew there were vast quantities of people out there who had not yet heard the Gospel, and so were not culpable in their unbelief.

From St. Paul onward (“How will they believe and be saved if they do not hear? How will they hear without a preacher” — Romans 10:3-4), the constant teaching of the Church, repeated and solemnly confirmed by Florence, had been that everyone needs to hear and believe the Gospel in order to be saved. Whether ignorance of the Gospel on the part of pagans, Jews, or Muslims was vincible or invincible, culpable or inculpable, was understood to be basically irrelevant! For those folks would all be damned anyway, if they didn’t get to believe explicitly in Christ before death!

So it seems that your interpretation of the Florentine dogma, by making it condemn to Hell only those who die culpably outside the Church, basically changes its original meaning — something we are forbidden to do under anathema by Vatican I."

Doubtless, in the last reference to Vatican I, Father Harrison has in mind the Dogmatic Constitution on the Catholic Faith, Chapter 4: On Faith and Reason, and, more specifically, an appended Canon on Faith and Reason:

"[From the Constitution:] Hence, too, that meaning of the sacred dogmas is ever to be maintained which has once been declared by holy mother church, and there must never be any abandonment of this sense under the pretext or in the name of a more profound understanding.

[From the Canon:] If anyone says that it is possible that at some time, given the advancement of knowledge, a sense may be assigned to the dogmas propounded by the church which is different from that which the church has understood and understands: let him be anathema." [Source]

We commend The Wanderer for printing so much of Father Harrison’s excellent response.

It may be good for Catholics today to revisit this controversy, as these honest men have done.

While Fr. Feeney may have had his personal idiosyncrasies, the core issue is worthy of investigation.

These four distinguished authors seem to all agree with Frank Sheed:
Fr. Feeney "was condemned but not answered."