From the website of St.Benedict Abbey : Our History
Saint Benedict Center began in 1941 as a student center in an old furniture store in Harvard Square on the corner of Bow and Arrow Streets, just a half a block from the Harvard Yard. It was directly across the street from the Romanesque front porch of St. Paul’s Church, Cambridge’s renowned “university church.”
The three original founders were Catherine Goddard Clarke, Avery Dulles (then a Harvard Law student) and Christopher Huntington, a Harvard dean. Catherine Clarke went on to help found the Slaves of the Immaculate Heart of Mary, Avery Dulles is now a Jesuit and a Cardinal, living at Fordham, and Christopher Huntington became a priest out on Long Island, New York.
Recalling his early days at the Center, Avery Dulles wrote, “At the Center, the Catholic Faith was never just abstract doctrine to be memorized for an examination but it was always a truth to be lived and prayed.”
In 1942, Fr. Leonard Feeney, S.J. began to visit. By late-1944, however, both Catholic and non-Catholic students were so charmed by Father Leonard that Catherine Clarke, felt compelled to ask Archbishop Cushing if it were possible for him to arrange for Father Feeney, then still on the faculty of the Jesuits’ major seminary, to be assigned as the Center’s chaplain. The recently-installed archbishop said he was so impressed by what he had heard of Father Feeney’s work in stimulating Catholic students in the practice of their faith and in attracting many non-Catholic young people to study about the Church, that when he was presented with Mrs. Clarke’s request he happily relayed it to the also-newly-appointed Jesuit provincial for New England, Very Rev. John J. McEleney, S.J. The provincial, too, endorsed the request, and on December 17, 1944, Father Feeney became the full-time chaplain and spiritual director of St. Benedict Center.
Many years earlier, on November 12, 1916, after he had set the cornerstone for St. Paul’s Church, Cardinal O’Connell warned that “there is very grave danger, not far distant from this sacred edifice.” He warned Catholics that at Harvard “prominent educators are striving to undermine the foundation of all truth, the source of all knowledge, of all life – Christian faith.”
Such sentiment was, quite literally, cast in bronze awhile later when Rev. John J. Ryan – who spent all thirty-six years of his priesthood at St. Paul’s and who personally designed the brick-and-sandstone church, chose the motto for the bell that would hang in its belfry. Recognizing that its peal would resound through Harvard Yard, Father Ryan directed the artisans who cast the instrument to have the mold carry the inscription: vox clamantis in deserto (“a voice crying in the wilderness”)
The old guard among the Boston Yankees, which the classic “Harvard man” typified, was growing increasingly alarmed at the sheer number of Roman Catholic personalities moving into major public roles. They sought to blunt this Catholic ascendancy by promoting a sort of pietistic nationalism in which no religion could dominate the culture.
Father Leonard believed with all his heart that the work of priesthood – his priesthood – was to assist in bringing souls to Christ. “Why,” he would ask with Pope St. Leo the Great, “should you take the honor of the priesthood if you will not labor for the salvation of souls?”
There is no question that his lectures on those Thursday nights in Cambridge stressed the imperative for young people to be Catholic – not only to be saved, but in order to live normal, fruitful lives – at Harvard or elsewhere. Abbot Gabriel (pictured on the right with Fr. Feeney in 1946) recalled, “I can remember his singling out Adams House, the residence hall where I lived, directly across the square from the Center, after a suicide was reported, and saying, “If you want to save your sanity and save your soul, you have to become a Catholic.” As events confirmed, such audacity, coupled with Father Leonard’s advice to certain students to withdraw from Harvard and Radcliffe and other institutes – Catholic as well as not-Catholic – because their Catholic Faith was being compromised, were the seeds of confrontation.
Saint Benedict Abbey,
Those years immediately following the end of World War II, after all, ushered in a period of great opportunity and phenomenal growth – in membership and resources – for the immigrant Catholic Church in the United States and there were those – perhaps including Archbishop Richard J. Cushing and his auxiliary, Bishop John J. Wright – who did not want anything to distract the forces in play.
That the Catholic Church, in the persons of both leaders and followers, reacted as it did to the preaching of Father Feeney and the other members of the St. Benedict Center family was evidence, Holy Cross Professor O’Brien observed, “of a new concern for respectability which caused Catholics to moderate their quite orthodox message of exclusive salvation.”
That’s where the problem started. To hold what generations before had held about the necessity of the Catholic Church for salvation did not jibe with the advent of “no-offense religion.” It didn’t go with the American scene.
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