The Catholic Action League of Massachusetts today criticized Jesuit administered Boston College Law School for holding an event honoring the late Reverend Robert F. Drinan, S.J. The Law School hosted a panel discussion yesterday featuring Jesuit Father Raymond Schroth, who has written a book on Father Drinan, and included, among its participants, Congressman Barney Frank.
Father Drinan, the former Dean of BC Law School, was elected to Congress as a Democrat in 1970 and served in the U.S. House of Representatives, from the Third, and later the Fourth, Massachusetts Congressional District, from 1971 to 1981. During his time in Congress, Drinan was a supporter of legal abortion, the public funding of abortion, and contraception. In 1980, he declined to seek re-election after Pope John Paul II forbade priests from holding political office. Jesuit General Pedro Arupe characterized the order resulting in Father Drinan’s departure from Congress as the “express wish” of the Holy Father.
Drinan’s successor in Congress was then Massachusetts State Representative Barney Frank, whose brother, David Frank, was a top aide to Drinan. Father Drinan, who served as President of the Americans for Democratic Action, and was a board member of People for the American Way, infamously supported President Bill Clinton’s 1996 veto of a bill to ban partial birth abortion.
The Catholic Action League called the Law School event “one more example of BC’s thumb in the eye approach to Catholic orthodoxy.”
Catholic Action League Executive Director C.J. Doyle stated: “Robert Drinan was a traitor to the faith of his baptism, a disgrace to the sons of Saint Ignatius, an obstinate and mendacious heretic, and an enemy of the unborn. Drinan, along with the late Senator Edward Kennedy, provided the cover, the example, and the rhetoric which empowered two generations of American Catholic political figures to defect from Catholic teaching on the sanctity and dignity of innocent human life.”
“That BC should honor Father Drinan is appalling, but not surprising. Dissent from Catholic moral teaching at Boston College is longstanding, pervasive and institutional. Now, BC is actually celebrating dissent. Boston College seems to be consciously positioning itself as the principal counter-witness to what remains of orthodox Catholicism in New England.”
“Faithful Catholics saddened and afflicted by the on-going scandal which Boston College has become should consider voicing their objections to the institutions which have become the enablers of BC’s heterodoxy, such as the Archdiocese of Boston, the New England Province of the Society of Jesus, and the office of the Jesuit General in Rome. It is now clear that only the direct intervention of the Holy See can save American Catholics from being dispossessed of their own educational institutions, which were built with the toil and sweat of their immigrant ancestors, and are now in the hands of a professional class of secularized academics and culturally conforming bureaucrats.”
Catholic Action League Executive Director C.J. Doyle is an alumnus of Boston College.
