Keeping the Faith at Harvard

One day in the late spring of 1945, a bright, vivacious Harvard senior named Muriel Vincent walked into St. Benedict's Center, a gathering place for young Catholic students at the convergence of Bow and Arrow Streets in Cambridge, Massachusetts. About to graduate, Muriel was, as she described herself, "a disenchanted nineteen-year old, drifting in a dead sea of indirection and indecisiveness." What happened that day changed her life forever. In her own words, "Fr. Feeney, the chaplain at St. Benedict Center, was walking out the door and I was walking in. He stopped, smiled, and said quite simply, 'I want to see you, dear; I want to talk with you about many things, but I have to leave now. Please come back.'" Within a few months, Muriel Vincent had become a Catholic, an active member at the Center in Cambridge, Massachusetts in its early days. She was an eye-witness to one of the greatest controversies in the history of the American Catholic Church, swirling around the traditional Church teaching of "extra Ecclesiam nulla salus" (outside the Church there is no salvation.) Fr. Leonard Feeney's strict interpretation of this teaching made national headlines, as he defied the Vatican and his Jesuit superiors, led mass rallies on Boston Common, and eventually quit Harvard with a coterie of his deovted followers, was stripped of his priestly faculties and excommunicated for nineteen years. In her memoir, she gives us a lively, fascinating look at the St. Benedict Center and its colorful participants. Her memoir encompasses both the Center's promising early years, when it provided a religious haven for many of our nation's best and brightest, including the future theologian and cardinal Avery Dulles, son of President Eisenhower's secretary of state, and the heart-breaking years, when the Center was censured by Boston Archbishop Richard Cushing, went into exile, and finally splintered into seven groups, some of which propound to this day the doctrine of no salvation outside the Church--an ironic situation indeed, as these groups are not recognized by the Vatican. A remarkable cast of characters take center stage, including the charismatic Fr. Feeney, a spellbinding orator and bestselling author; the Center's elegrant and magnetic founder, Catherine Goddard Clarke; the children raised by the Feeney community and the parents who vow themselves to celibate, quasi-monastic lives; and many other followers whose spiritual struggles are recorded with clarity and compassion. Most impressive is the account of the inspiring, holy priest Fr. Cyril Karam, with whom the author (receiving the religious name Sr. Mary Clare) co-founded twin Benedictine monastic communities in full communion with the Catholic Church. As the story unfolds, deeply held religious beliefs are nurtured and challenged, passions flare, and an American Catholic tragedy--not without its comic elements--unfolds with energy, color, and warmth from the skilled pen of a master chronicler. Contemplative nun, writer, foundress and former prioress of St. Scholastica Priory, and much sought-after spiritual adviser, Sr. Mary Clare offers, in this first eyewitness history of the Feeney movement, a chronicle that is unique, unflinching in its analysis, and unfailingly charitable.