Introduction

This book is going to press one year after the people of the United States, and eventually the people of the world were shocked by, a stubborn profession of faith made on the part of some Boston Catholics, who were at once silenced and interdicted by the ecclesiastical and sacerdotal authorities in what has come to be known far and wide as the “Boston Heresy Case.”

The strangest feature of this case is not, as might be commonly supposed, that some Boston Catholics were holding heresy and were being rebuked by their legitimate superiors. It is, rather, that these same Catholics were accusing their ecclesiastical superiors and academic mentors of teaching heresy, and as thanks for having been so solicitous were immediately suppressed by these same authorities on the score of being intolerant and bigoted. If history takes any note of this large incident (in what is often called the most Catholic city in the United States) it may interest historians to note that those who were punished were never accused of holding heresy, but only of being intolerant, unbroadminded and disobedient. It is also to be noted that the same authorities have never gone to the slightest trouble to point out wherein the accusation made against them by the “Boston group” is unfounded. In a heresy case usually a subject is being punished by his superior for denying a doctrine of his church. In this heresy case a subject of the Church is being punished by his superior for professing a defined doctrine.

I have written this book both in extreme delay and in extreme haste. The fact that I gave it almost a solid year of my thought in the midst of many other duties does not, to my own mind, exonerate it from being a belatedly written book. The long hours I have spent in assembling the documents and presenting the story, without any effort at being vindictive, have made me realize for what a great length of time the Catholic Church in the United States has needed an incident that would bring to light the laxity with which we are protecting our doctrines, preserving our membership and producing saints.

If this story, to my mind an unanswerable one, shall have in any small measure helped to bring back to Catholic teaching the essential requirements of the Persons we must know and obey so as to be saved- the Three Persons of the Blessed Trinity, the Persons of Our Lord and Our Blessed Lady in the Mystery of the Incarnation, and the person of our Holy Father, the Pope, the rock on which the Church was built, outside of whose paternal care there is no salvation- I feel that I can safely let my readers wait until eternity to know the full story that only God can tell in regard to what is popularly known as the “Boston Heresy Case”.

I shall be excused, I hope, for giving the book a somewhat studied, alliterative title. No one who reads these pages will fail to see the strange connection contained in this title, nor, with a slight amount of insight, fail to reason as to who was responsible for the alliance I am bold enough to call that of the “Loyolas and the Cabots”.

My gratitude should be expressed particularly, to my most special advisers and helpers, Philip Gammans and David Supple. It was the genius of Philip Gammans which prompted him from the beginning of our difficulties in St. Benedict Center to keep the “Center Log”, which made much of the material immediately available, and it was David Supple’s and Philip Gammans’ careful reading and comment on my manuscript that gave me confidence to know that the story was unfolding accurately and in the order we had known it. My gratitude must also be expressed to Lawrence Supple, Muriel Mary Vincent and Juan Ribera; to Elizabeth Sullivan, Raymond Karam and Philip Swain.

C. G. C.
Cambridge, Massachusetts,
Saturday of the First Week of Lent, 1950.

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