Fr. Robert Drinan, S.J.

A priest friend passed on to me Raymond Schroth's biography, Bob Drinan, The Controversial Life of the First Catholic Priest Elected to Congress. I read it because the giver is my pastor and friend and because I wanted to explore what in American Catholicism would create a political activist priest who could vote in favor of public funding for abortion.

The book did not really answer my question, but it did tell me much about the generation of Catholics that preceded my conversion in 1996. I have no desire to recreate the Jesuit education that Fr. Drinan received at Boston College, Weston College, Georgetown, and other places during the middle part of the 20th century, but what has replaced it is no better. Our Catholic identity and focus on the Eucharist has been replaced with banal modern reading lists, political correctness, and activism as substitutes for piety.

I did see much of what made Fr. Drinan what he was. Though he was from the "greatest generation" whose members mostly wore uniforms, he graduated from Boston College in 1942 and spent the entire war in seminary. After the war, instead of teaching at a Jesuit high school as was common, he attended Georgetown University Law School. Though born the same year as Karol Wojtyla, their experiences of fascism, communism, deprivation, suffering, and war could not have been more different. For Fr. Drinan, the Vietnam War was the worst event of his lifetime and the worst cause in American history. Something tells me that if he had participated in the American effort in the Second World War in any way and/or taught high school, his political certainties and abstractions would have been at least sanded down.

Pope John Paul II was right to demand that Fr. Drinan not seek reelection in 1980. Yes, Fr. Drinan was a whirlwind for peace, human rights, and justice. He called himself "a moral architect" and was proud of virtually everything he voted for. But he, a Catholic priest, could not get himself to vote against public funding for abortions, and he seemed blind to the scandal that his vote caused and snarly when asked about it. He seemed to believe that in a pluralistic society, people should accept the conscience of a priest and move on. Abortion, however, is too important a public and moral issue, then and now, to become secondary to a priest in public office.

Catholic laymen sometimes argue expediency and vote with the pro-choicers, e.g., Bart Stupak, but they do not hold sacramental office. A man in a collar's options are limited, not unlike a soldier or police officer in uniform. A priest should not be seen as a political partisan forming coalitions to defeat the dreaded other side, but as a sacramental agent of God that rises above party and temporal powers. John Paul knew that a priest in public office is a Cardinal Richelieu waiting to happen, and we are fortunate that Fr. Drinan did not do more damage than he did.

Fr. Drinan's abortion votes killed his own political career and seriously undermine his place in the history of the Church and the Society. It is to his credit that he did not leave the Society but spent the rest of his life living out his vocation as priest. Nonetheless, his moral architecture most copied is his insistence that a Catholic in public life can vote for abortion. His legacy is a Democratic Party that essentially purges pro-life Catholics out of it.