Sects: The Slaves of Leonard Feeney

“Outside the church there is no salvation” is a venerable teaching that Roman Catholic theologians are trying to forget in the ecumenical age. Perhaps the only priest who takes the maxim literally is outside the church himself: the Rev. Leonard Feeney, 67, a defrocked Jesuit who in the ’30s and ’40s was one of the nation’s best-known Catholic theological popularizers and convert seekers. Feeney was excommunicated in 1953 for disobeying his religious superiors and refusing to accept a Holy Office decision that non-Catholics who worshiped God in good faith could be saved.

Convinced that his cause was right, the dynamic, white-haired priest argued his case on Boston Common every Sunday afternoon for nearly six years after his excommunication-interspersing a fiery defense of “true Catholicism” with attacks on Protestants and Jews. Then, in 1958, Feeney moved his cadre of followers, who called themselves the “Slaves of the Immaculate Heart of Mary,” from Cambridge to a rambling farm near Still River, a picture-book farming village in eastern Massachusetts. Feeney closed the doors of St. Benedict’s Center to outsiders, concentrated on the spiritual disciplining of his 86 devoted Slaves, 39 of them children.

Dogmatism & Rigor. St. Benedict’s was almost as hard to get out of as to get into, according to testimony recently presented before the State Supreme Court. The evidence, the first public account of life at the center since the Slaves moved to Still River, came from Boston College Law Student Robert Colopy, 38, filing suit for custody of his five children, who are still with their mother at St. Benedict’s.

Colopy and his wife Loretta joined the center in the late 1940s, overwhelmed by Feeney’s zeal and fervor. Married in 1949, they had five children by 1954. Then Feeney, gradually growing more dogmatic and rigorous as his suspicions of society deepened, decreed that the Slaves were to take vows of celibacy. All children born to his followers live apart from their parents, and Feeney is in sole charge of their education. Colopy testified that once one of his children asked him: “Mister, are you my father?”

At St. Benedict’s, said Colopy, men and women live in separate houses on the farm, are forbidden to read newspapers, listen to the radio, or have any contact with the Still River townsfolk. Supporting the community by sales of his devotional and historical books, Feeney runs St. Benedict’s like a monastery, indoctrinating the Slaves with long daily lectures and sermons. According to Colopy, Feeney frequently denounces the Jews as responsible for Communism, and Protestants for subverting Latin America from the church. Although Boston’s Richard Cardinal Gushing suspended him from his priestly functions, Feeney continues to celebrate Mass and hear confessions. He forbids the Slaves to attend Catholic services in Still River.

Slavery to Freedom. Two years ago, after failing to persuade his wife to leave, Colopy wrote the Bishop of Worcester for advice. When the bish op’s reply was discovered by one of the Slaves, Colopy was condemned before the community, stripped of the black-cassock worn by male Slaves, and locked in one of the farmhouse’s rooms.

Finally, two brothers drove him from the community to Boston, apparently intending to put him on a plane with a one-way ticket. In the city, Colopy jumped from the car and fled to freedom. He filed his lawsuit after returning to the center to reason with Loretta, who slapped him and denounced him as a “traitor.”

Whether the Supreme Court agrees with Colopy or not, he stands a good chance of eventually seeing his children outside the monastic confines of St. Benedict’s. Ailing and embittered, Father Feeney has broken off contact with nearly all of his old clerical friends, has yet to induce one canonically ordained priest to join the Slaves, who regard themselves as more Catholic than the Pope. And without a spiritual leader, say other churchmen who have followed the tragic history of Father Feeney and his believers, the center will surely collapse. “They really need a priest,” admits Colopy. “Those people really believe. They are not frauds.”