In 1949, the president of Boston College, William Keleher, had a problem with some of his faculty. That problem was heresy. Four of his instructors, and one at BC High, were promoting the teachings of Leonard Feeney. He was a Jesuit priest at the St. Benedict Center in Cambridge who extolled the belief that anyone who was not Catholic could not be saved.

This disagreement was part of the larger incident known as the ‘Boston Heresy Case,’ which would lead to Feeney being one of the rare priests who received a formal writ of excommunication from the Vatican in 1953.

In the 1950s, Feeney was known for his angry preaching on Boston Common, decrying in particular the Jews, but also the Protestants, the Greek Orthodox, the Freemasons, and the fairies as enemies of the Catholic church. He and his band of devoted followers decamped from Cambridge to Still River, a rural town in Central Massachusetts, in 1958, where he was at the center of a cultish, communitarian world until his death in 1978. But before they were in Still River, some of them were in Newton.

Feeney had been a Boston College professor in the 1930s, teaching English to graduate students. He didn’t think highly of the undergraduates, saying that BC students only cared about intellectual pursuits in class, compared to Oxford students, who were always discussing their learning. This prompted an undergraduate professor to write into The Heights to disagree, saying that this was not true and, in fact, it was known that young women frequently criticized the all-male student body for their inability to stop talking about classics and theology at parties.

Feeney, who was known for his whimsical poetry, then became literary editor at America magazine. But, in part due to his drinking problem being amplified by New York City, he was sent back to Massachusetts to teach homiletics at the Jesuit seminary in Weston. This brought him into contact with attendees at the St. Benedict Center. It had been founded in 1940 as a student and young adult Catholic discussion center across the street from St. Paul’s Parish in Cambridge, right down the street from Harvard College. In 1943, he became its chaplain. His humorous but intellectual sermons drew huge crowds.

This was, undoubtedly, a huge boon to his ego. “He had a very high opinion of himself, but he was a sort of second tier poet,” said Mark Massa, a Boston College theology professor and Jesuit priest who devotes a chapter to Feeney in his new book, Catholic Fundamentalism in America.

“He had a real resentment. He was from that generation of Irish Catholics that was very much not welcome at Harvard,” Massa added. (Feeney, who was from Lynn, was friends with the nieces of the postmistress Newtonians boycotted). But Feeney was resentful not only of Protestants but also of the Society of Jesus, who did not consider him one of their intellectual heavyweights. He wanted to be something other than a whimsical poet. And he was finally in charge of something, free of department chairs, editors-in-chief, and cathedral rectors.

Initially, both the Jesuits and the Archdiocese of Boston approved of Feeney. But in 1946, things changed. The Center’s new magazine, From the Housetops, promoted an aggressive, angry form of Catholicism. One of its articles, ‘Sentimental Theology,’ by Boston College philosophy professor Fakhri Maluf, drew significant attention.

Maluf was from Lebanon, and he was an adult convert to Catholicism, having been raised by an Orthodox father and a Protestant mother. And he was angry. “I happened to mention casually the Catholic dogma, ‘There is no salvation outside the Church.’ Some acted as if I were uttering an innovation they had never heard of before, and others had the doctrine so completely covered with reservations and vicious distinctions as to ruin its meaning and destroy the effect of its challenge. In a few minutes, the room was swarming with the slogans of liberalism and sentimentalism, utterances which are beginning to have the force of defined dogma,” he wrote.

He complained about the lack of belief in this dogma opening the door to all kinds of heresies. If Catholic parents believed that non-Catholics might be saved, they would allow their children to read books by heretics, like Anglican C.S. Lewis, and then their children would lose their faith and consequently their own salvation. A hatred for liberalism and liberal Catholics characterized the St. Benedict Center.

This was spawned in large part by their location near Harvard College. Harvard had a huge influx of returning WWII veteran students, thanks to the GI Bill. They were horrified by what they heard their professors teach, believing that the faculty were promoting the same types of secular German ideologies that had led to the war. In response, the St. Benedict Center started its own school, which they managed to convince the federal government should deserve GI bill money because there were Boston College faculty teaching classes. After they started the school in 1947, normal Catholic college students began to find the Center unappealing.

It became a place for only the most extremely devoted. Feeney had become antagonistic toward anyone who did not agree with him, including the other Jesuits he lived with. He banned them from visiting the Center. Some priests compared him to the Jansenists, the exclusivist 18th century Catholic theological movement that was denounced as heretical.

The Center also told Harvard students to transfer to Boston College, and Radcliffe students to transfer to Emmanuel. (Harvard and Boston College were all male, and Radcliffe and Emmanuel were all female). As they were soon to learn, however, Boston College was also full of ‘liberals.’

They were particularly concerned that Boston College was teaching that those outside the church could be saved.

By the standards of Americans in 2025, the Society of Jesus in the 1940s was an extremely strict and conservative order of clerks regular. But relative to what they had been like at the turn of the 20th century, the Jesuits of the 1940s were in fact more liberal, especially when it came to higher ed. In 1936, a Jesuit had written in America magazine that “The secular school is not merely defective. It is essentially wrong. It is not only an unfit place for God’s Catholic children, but an unfit place for all God’s children.” (Not Feeney: his lightweight, joking essays were always sandwiched between more serious fare). But in the 1940s numerous Jesuits were studying for PhDs at Harvard, another thing that horrified St. Benedict Center attendees, who worried that this meant secular ideology would be carried into Catholic colleges.

Jesuit colleges had also significantly expanded from being small undergraduate institutions focused on classics and theology with exclusively clerical faculty to offering numerous majors and having graduate programs. This expansion also meant they needed to hire faculty who were not clergy. As Keleher would learn, this was not necessarily a good idea. Maluf was the first lay philosophy professor at Boston College, having been hired for the 1945-1946 academic year due to a shortage of priests available to teach. He was equally cranky in class.

“I think that the basic criticism is that he does not allow his zeal to be guided by tact. Consequently, he is inclined to pass judgement on any Catholic who does not at all times and in all places make a positive attack upon non-Catholics,” said Edward Slattery, a Jesuit priest who had had Maluf as a philosophy professor. When Slattery had contrasted Einstein’s theory of space time and relativity with St. Augustine’s concept of time, Maluf had attacked him.

There was another lay emergency hire at the time, James Walsh. He had studied mathematics at Boston College’s graduate school, and they were so desperate to have someone teach introductory undergraduate philosophy courses they were willing to let him teach. But he, too, was a Center member.

In January 1948, Feeney was told by the Archdiocese of Boston that he was not allowed to publish From the Housetops without another priest looking it over, and he was also told he could not convince students to transfer or drop out of college. The Jesuits were growing frustrated with Feeney, and in August 1948 they told him he was being reassigned to Holy Cross College in Worcester. He did not go. “He was zealous, but he was also sloppy. In Jesuit world, disobedience is the worst sin,” said Massa.

Feeney actually had packed his bags, but his followers convinced him that leaving would be giving in to liberalism.

Boston College campus. Photo by Bryan McGonigle

That same year, both Maluf and Walsh had been warned against promoting Feeney’s ideas in their courses. In December, a Boston College graduate student in philosophy named Raymond Karam wrote a piece in From The Housetops explaining the Center’s position on salvation. He had transferred from Harvard to BC at Maluf’s direction.

Maluf and Walsh knew that Boston College needed them. In a letter to the Jesuit provincial in December 1948, Keleher begged to be allowed to keep a priest who had been teaching philosophy. He said that while he had threatened to fire Maluf and Walsh, they were aware they were critical to keeping the department going. Early in January 1949, Maluf was told to change his syllabus for that semester to stay on the topic of philosophy and not venture into theology.

Later in January, Maluf and Walsh, along with physics professor Charles Ewaskio, sent a letter to Keleher with their concerns that Boston College was teaching that people outside the church could be saved, and that people would be saved without submitting to the Pope.

Ewaskio had converted to Catholicism while being a research assistant in the Harvard physics department. Feeney had convinced him to take a position at Boston College, which was a significant downgrade in pay. Keleher disagreed with their stance that Boston College was doing anything wrong.

Feeney was fully aware of what his followers were doing. Three weeks before the major uproar began, he had visited the Carmelite convent in Roxbury and told the sisters that “what the Church in this country needs is a good scandal, and I can provide it.”

In addition to disobeying his Jesuit superiors, he was also now disobeying Archbishop Richard Cushing. Cushing had suspended his priestly faculties, meaning he was not supposed to say mass or hear confessions, but Feeney continued to do so.

In February 1949, Maluf told the head of the philosophy department, who was a priest, that he was a heretic and in mortal sin, because he would not allow Maluf to teach his philosophy course the way Maluf wanted to. Maluf felt like his academic freedom was being infringed upon, but this was not a right he had in the way one might have today.

“BC was a very different place. There was no such thing as tenure. You served at the pleasure of the president, who was a Jesuit. You had to agree you weren’t going to do anything to embarrass the teachings of the Church,” said Massa.

Raymond Karam left Boston College because of this attack on Maluf. He said he had attended Boston College to study Catholicism and to get away from the liberalism of Harvard, but in actuality BC was no different.

“The study of such Sophists and enemies of Christ as Spinoza, Kant, Hegel, Einstein and many others is encouraged and made popular,” he wrote in his withdrawal letter.

In late February, Walsh, Ewaskio, Maluf, English professor Robert Walker, and BC High German teacher David Supple wrote a letter to the Superior General of the Jesuits in Rome, asking for him to resolve the matter.

He would not respond, although he would direct Vincent McCormick, a Jesuit in Lenox, MA, to figure out an appropriate response with the provincial John McEleney.

In March, John Crowley, a Jesuit professor at Weston College, provided some ecclesiastical regulations that could be applied to the offending faculty. One was that only Jesuits who were trained in systematic theology could be theology professors, which Crowley said should apply to lay faculty as well. Another was that lay teachers who engaged in “stubborn non-conformity” should be treated the same as disobedient Jesuits. “If I run across any other pertinent regulations, I will pass them on. […] Of course you will be excommunicated by the High Priest of the Center,” he said in a letter to George O’Donnell, the Jesuit dean of the Graduate School.

(The quoted letters here can be found at the Burns Library at Boston College, which is open to the public with an appointment).

In April, Walker sent a letter to Keleher saying he recanted the teachings of Feeney. The others did not, and they were fired. The Center members were angry. They picketed against Keleher on Good Friday, April 15, 1949. On April 20, Cushing put them under an interdict, meaning Catholics were not supposed to attend the Center – although the most dedicated Center members, naturally, ignored this.

There was only one man left who could give them recourse: the Pope. Feeney and his followers were firmly dedicated to the Pope, and assumed that he, as final defender of Catholic orthodoxy, would rule in their favor. But as it turns out, he did not. Rome sent back a reply that summer with the pope’s approval.

“For to obtain eternal salvation, it is not always indispensable that a man actually be incorporated into the Church as a member thereof,” wrote the Supreme Sacred Congregation of the Holy Office in August 1949. “God accepts even an implicit wish so called because it is included in that good attitude of soul wherewith he seeks to make his own will conform to God’s.”

By September, he was back to having public lectures denouncing liberalism. In October, he was expelled from the Jesuits. In December, he told a Harvard Law School student that auxiliary bishop Joseph Wright was damned, along with Charles Dickens and Blaise Pascal. In 1950, they lost their GI Bill funding, over which they sued, unsuccessfully.

Feeney’s devotees, now organized as a quasi-monastic order known as the Slaves of the Immaculate Heart of Mary, began to take a more aggressive tone. They would accompany Feeney to his public sermons on the Common. They physically attacked the parents of one of Feeney’s devotees who were trying to rescue their daughter, who had dropped out of Radcliffe several years earlier. They purchased numerous houses nearby the St. Benedict Center to become their compound.

Married couples were expected to live separate, chaste lives, and their children were raised communally.

The Vatican was tired of his antics, and tried repeatedly to get him to come to Rome and explain himself, with no success. Feeney refused to go in part because he was worried what the archdiocese would do to his followers if he left the city. On February 13, 1953, the Catholic Church had had enough: Feeney was excommunicated.

Feeney said he would appeal this directly to the pope, but unfortunately for him, the pope was the one who had translated the writ of excommunication. But this did not slow him down.

His followers sent letters to every Congressman saying they were damned if they did not become Catholic, and he complained in his newsletter about Notre Dame letting Protestants play on their football team. But they also continued to exert their physical presence in the Boston area, not just on the Common but elsewhere, such as by protesting a new Catholic chapel on the grounds of Jewish-affiliated Brandeis College.

Ironically, for all his complaints about liberalism, it was only because of the American liberal values of free speech that he was allowed to continue doing this. At one point St. Paul’s Parish did ask the newsstands in Harvard Square to stop selling From the Housetops, but even in Boston, the Catholic church had nowhere near the power to suppress ideas as it once had.

The Supreme Sacred Congregation of the Holy Office that had explained official doctrine to Feeney in 1949 had previously been known as the Supreme Sacred Congregation of the Roman and Universal Inquisition. At one point they were torturing heretics; now all they could do was send strongly worded letters.

But there was one entity more powerful than any superior general, archbishop, or pope: a local zoning commission. Feeney’s followers were hauled before Cambridge Criminal Court because someone had complained about Feeney’s house not meeting appropriate safety and sanitation codes, and because it was being used for religious services that it was not supposed to be.

While this was not the only reason they left Cambridge in 1958, it didn’t help. In Still River, they became much more isolated from the rest of the world. But some members did manage to free themselves from Feeney’s clutches–although not always with their spouse and children.

Feeney was reconciled to the church before his death in 1978. After his death, his followers dispersed into several groups. Some who still disagreed with Rome moved to New Hampshire. The ones who remained in Massachusetts formed themselves into legitimate religious orders under the auspices of the Diocese of Worcester, and you may occasionally see students from their high school playing music or monks studying for the priesthood across the street from Boston College at St. John’s Seminary.

Feeney and his followers are now a mostly forgotten chapter in Boston’s history. If Feeney is remembered for anything, it’s for his aggressive anti-Semitism. But there was more than that, and much of it revolved around higher education. While questions on salvation may not be a live issue, concerns about Harvard being excessively liberal certainly are. So, too, are arguments over what the goals of Catholic college education ought to be. Let Feeney be a cautionary tale for us today.

And remember, if you ever try to start your own cult, do make sure to get all the appropriate permits.