Author Topic: Conspiracy of a Cult (Read 2364 times)

Lover of Truth · « **Reply #6 on:** August 27, 2014, 05:15:25 AM »

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Though he would later comment that he had written these lines as an ignorant young priest, the fact is that whatever deficiencies there might have been to this area of his priestly training, they were here no worse than any of the many other areas of instruction he received. It is of and within this time that some who knew him came to think of him as a "great theologian," though of course not to usurp that Church's own ability to choose as to who is great or not among Her theologians, or even who is qualified to be among them in the first place. For of course it is one thing for one's friends (of which he had many in those early days) to speak of one as a great theologian, but quite another for the Church to endorse one's theological expertise by, for example, appointing him Dean or President of some Pontifical College in Rome, or commissioning him to write theological textbooks for same. What he was at that time was a great orator, and also writer, whose speeches and writings had gone far to help people understand the Faith, something sort of like a prototypical Fulton Sheen, so to speak. He had a great capacity for explaining advanced theological concepts to ordinary persons in a manner that they could understand them.

Lover of Truth · « **Reply #7 on:** September 04, 2014, 08:18:37 AM »

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In later years of his [Father Feeney] life he became concerned over what he saw as a dulling of the sword of the Spirit, of the teachings of the Church. He had by this point accepted a position as spiritual director over a layman's association known then as the St. Benedict Center, and had soon gathered quite a crowd of young college students around him, from Harvard, Boston College, and even Radcliffe College, and as described in the book The Loyolas and the Cabots he and his lay students "went into a more intensive study of the Scriptures. We studied the Church Fathers, and the Doctors of the Church. We studied the Scriptures in Greek and Latin because we wanted to know exactly what Jesus had said and how He had said it, for our own knowledge and sanctification and so that we might be better able to tell His truth to His people." (page 49 - Note: Citations from The Loyolas and the Cabots are taken, along with their page numbers, from the original 1950 hardback edition.)

In the Treatise, we are introduced to Fr. Feeney in Section 26, and treated to a defense of him and his actions. As written, Fr. could do no wrong while his opponents could do no right (though one has to grant that his opponents managed to fight a rather poorly organized fight against him). And of course it is written as if Fr. Feeney was right and everyone else wrong, which at the very least does tend to stretch the imagination a bit. Nevertheless, the "Grand Mythos" of Fr. Feeney, as presented by his supporters, possesses some holes in its account, which show a different side of him. But in a number of details, neither Fr. Feeney himself nor his defenders ever since have been straight with us.

JPaul · « **Reply #8 on:** September 04, 2014, 09:21:15 PM »

The misinformation and detraction go on and on.......

Lover of Truth · « **Reply #9 on:** September 16, 2014, 11:45:31 AM »

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Let us start with the story of Father's search for the "missing" or "lost" or "displaced" doctrine.

The way it is usually presented, for some years he had pondered on the question of what it was that seemed to be going wrong. Gary Potter, in his book After the Boston Heresy Case on page 84, paints a vivid picture of Fr. Feeney seated in a dark study for quite some time during the hot summer months of 1947, meditating on this mysterious and supposedly as yet unidentified "doctrine."

How, may I ask, is it that in supposed advance of knowing precisely what "the problem" was, did he (or they of the Center) know that it was some single doctrine that was supposedly "missing" or "displaced"? Even noted Feeney supported Gary Potter writes in his book, After the Boston Heresy Case on page 82: "In retrospect, and if you read their own many lucid defenses of the missing doctrine written after they identified it, you wonder why their search took two years." Why indeed? One just has to picture Fr. Feeney sitting there, musing to himself, "Well, could it be the Holy Trinity? No. How about the Indefectibility of the Church? No, not that either. How about the Merits of the Saints? The Seven Sacraments of the Church? The Papacy? The Ten Commandments? No, not any of those. Hmm. Which doctrine could it possibly be?" He might as well have been going "Eeney meeney miney moe."