School for Scandal

"It is seldom appropriate for one group within society to seek to insert their moral beliefs, however profoundly held, into a document designed for people of fundamentally differing views." -- Robert Drinan, American Herald, March 25, 1974


The above quotation from Robert Drinan, S.J., who passed away last Sunday, is truly fantastic coming, as it does, from (1) a lawyer and legislator who supported, among other "moral beliefs," (2) impeaching Richard Nixon (3) banning guns (4) the holding of Roe v. Wade and (5) ending the war in Vietnam.

That a lawyer and/or legislator does not recognize that, first, ALL laws reflect moral beliefs, and second, that all the issues he cared the most about while in office imposed or else found in the Constitution a "moral belief" is stunning. His is a profoundly hypocritical, or else stupid, statement. To make sense of this quote requires re-defining words such as "law," "moral beliefs," "imposing," among others, plus a facility for moral compartmentalization that, I think we can show, Fr. Drinan possessed in superhuman quantities.

I am reprinting below Fr. Drinan's New York Times obit. The Times, typically, glosses over certain leftist hypocrisies that are obvious from the record. I have provided my comments, in italics, on those parts of the obituary that require dilation.


Robert Drinan Dies at 86; Pioneer as Lawmaker Priest

By Douglas Martin

The Rev. Robert F. Drinan, the first Roman Catholic priest to become a voting member of Congress, and the first congressman to call for the impeachment of President Richard M. Nixon, died on Sunday in Washington. He was 86.

The cause was pneumonia and congestive heart failure, said a spokesman for Georgetown University, where Father Drinan had taught at the law school for the last 26 years.

"Father Drinan's commitment to human rights and justice will have a lasting legacy here at Georgetown University and across the globe," said Georgetown President John J. Degioia. This is a true statement, only not how Degioia means it. His commitment to human rights did not extend to the unborn, nor to those enslaved under communist regimes from the old USSR to Vietnam to Cambodia to, his favorite communist society, Cuba. His "commitment" to "justice" will, unfortunately, have a lasting legacy. It will take decades for Georgetown and the Church to get over the harm he caused.

A footnote here: I went to hear Fr. Drinan speak when he came to my lawschool in the early 80s. I asked him in Q and A how he could speak on behalf of human rights while ignoring/remaining silent of the fact that Castro in Cuba was one worst suppressors of human liberty in the world. To paraphrase, Fr. Drinan said, “well, we need to be patient with Cuba because Fidel Castro faces many obstacles, many of which brought on by the U.S. embargo.” (!) This says it all: the embargo came about because of Castro’s suppression of human rights and his outright support for a sworn enemy of the U.S. and his willingness to assist that enemy. His human rights violations gave birth to the embargo, not the other way around.

The career of Father Drinan, a Jesuit, included work as a human rights advocate, as dean of Boston College Law School and as an author of 12 books. But it was in electoral politics, and particularly his fiery opposition to the Vietnam War, that he gained his greatest visibility.

He maintained that a priest should be involved in secular pursuits as a way of promoting a more just and compassionate society. He was inspired, he once said, by Dorothy Day and the Catholic Worker Movement, which she co-founded. And though he never pledged to ignore church dictates while in office, he did ignore Catholic teaching in his support for federal financing of birth control and abortion.

The CNN website notes: “But he wore his liberal views more prominently. He opposed the draft, worked to abolish mandatory retirement and raised eyebrows with his more moderate views on abortion and birth control.” Well, I suppose you could say his views were “more moderate.” He spoke in defense of Bill Clinton’s veto of the partial birth abortion bill. Even pro-abortion Democrats like Joe Biden (“SMILE!”) and Pat Leahy supported the bill. If his views on abortion are “moderate,” what views of abortion are extreme? Mandatory abortion? Catholic Church-funded abortions performed inside the sanctuary of St. Patrick’s Cathedral?

In 1980, when he was in his fifth two-year term representing his Massachusetts district and planning to run for a sixth, Pope John Paul II ordered him to quit Congress. The Vatican said that it was belatedly enforcing a provision of canon law forbidding priests to hold elective office and that the order applied to all. Father Drinan said he would not even consider resigning from the priesthood to continue a re-election race he was almost certain to win.

Thank God, once more, for JP II.

“As a person of faith,” he said, “I must believe there is work for me to do which somehow will be more important than the work I am required to leave.”

Yes, there was more important to work to do. It was being a priest, taking his vocation seriously and not using it as a shield for those who supported positions that the Church specifically taught against and understanding that saying the Catholic Mass had a greater importance, metaphysically, than all his votes supporting Communist governments put together.

He began teaching constitutional law and other subjects at Georgetown University Law Center.

Ah, Georgetown. That used to be Catholic college. His hiring was one more nail in the coffin of Georgetown University’s identity as a Catholic university. He was hardly the first heretic to find refuge there and by no means the last, but it is shameful nonetheless.

There was only partial precedent to Father Drinan’s election to the House in 1970. Another Catholic priest, the Rev. Gabriel Richard, had served in Congress in 1823-25, but only as a nonvoting delegate from the Michigan Territory. (A third priest, the Rev. Robert John Cornell of Wisconsin, was elected to the House four years after Father Drinan, and served two terms, until an unsuccessful run for re-election in 1978.)

Father Drinan, a Democrat, won over the voters of his district in his very first race despite indications in the polls that a third were uneasy about his mix of religion and politics, and that Catholics were most concerned. But he hardly evaded the issue, even after election: he said Mass each day and wore his clerical garb at the Capitol, jovially claiming that he had no other suits.

Think of the compartmentalization that had to take place in this man’s soul to be able to raise the Body and Blood of Christ at 7 a.m. and go to the floor of Congress and vote in support of abortion at 9:30.

He won office on his passionate opposition to the war; worked successfully to help eliminate the House Internal Security Committee, previously long known as the Committee on Un-American Activities; fought against the arms race; and crossed himself before denouncing President Nixon on the House floor as “a fascist war criminal.” The president returned the favor by placing him on the administration’s enemies list.

All consistent with his pro-communist sympathies. All the good little Bolsheviks in the Democrat party supported him.

On July 31, 1973, Father Drinan introduced the first measure to impeach the president, not charging any crimes related to the Watergate scandal, but because of the secret bombing of Cambodia without Congressional approval.

The record is silent as to whether he said so much as a single Hail Mary for the millions killed by Pol Pot in Cambodia following the U.S. pull out from Southeast Asia. As far as I can see, I can find not a single reference to this man criticizing a communist government anywhere, no matter how repressive, how violent or how evil. So much for the human rights of those mired in gulag or re-education camps.

Some House Democrats had by then begun laying the groundwork for an impeachment case based on Watergate, and did not welcome Father Drinan’s initiative. They believed that if a vote to impeach was defeated, members might not back another one.

Representative Thomas P. O’Neill Jr., a Massachusetts Democrat who was then House majority leader, later wrote in his memoirs that while Father Drinan’s case had seemed good, “he damn near blew it.” In any event, Representative Peter W. Rodino Jr. of New Jersey, chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, did not act on the Drinan resolution.

Then, as now, it was really all about “getting” the president.

Robert Frederick Drinan was born on Nov. 15, 1920, in Boston, graduated from Boston College, entered the Society of Jesus and studied at Weston College in Massachusetts, where one of his classmates was Daniel Berrigan, who would gain fame as a radical Jesuit peace activist.

You would be hard put to find a single genuine difference between the radical Berrigan and Fr. Drinan.

Father Drinan earned a master’s degree from Boston College, two law degrees from Georgetown and a doctorate in theology from Gregorian University in Rome. He returned to Boston College, where he was dean of the law school for 13 years, then briefly served as vice president and provost before his election to Congress in 1970.

In that race, Father Drinan defeated Representative Philip J. Philbin, who had held his seat since 1942, in the Democratic primary and again in the general election, when Mr. Philbin ran as an independent. Father Drinan’s campaign manager was John Kerry, still 14 years away from winning election to the first of what have become four terms in the Senate.

Fr. Drinan ran for office with the explicit permission of Cardinal Cushing. This is only one small instance of the near-complete failure and collapse of moral authority within the U.S. Catholic Church in the 1960s and 1970s (and which continues to today, I hate to say). It was nearly impossible for the stalwart bishops in the U.S. (few as there may have been then or are now) to get much traction among Catholic politicians or the Catholics in the pews in the 70s or since on issues like abortion once you had an esteemed religious Order and a preeminent Cardinal granting tacit or vocal support to a Catholic priest who openly supported abortion rights and birth control. This is only part of the record of scandal for which a large segment of the American Catholic hierarchy will need to be accountable.

One of the Drinan campaign posters in that race proclaimed, “Father Knows Best.” (“Vote for Drinan, or Go to Hell” was reluctantly dropped.) After his election, supporters rather liked the slogan “Our father who art in Congress.”

The latter is a natural progression from raising the government to the status of God.



© Lost in Youngstown and Palinurus 2007.