The Canceled Jesuit

When I worked in the Cleveland Diocese’s Latin American Mission, Catholic Relief Services and the University of Central America (the Jesuit “inspired” UCA) often invited me and other colleagues for the visit of celebrities and activists from the United States who were doing a star turn in El Salvador. That is how I met Cardinal McCarrick, various presidents of Jesuit universities in the States, and Robert Drinan, S.J., the former five-term congressman who had been told by St. John Paul II not to run for a sixth term.

Drinan had been elected congressman in the ’70s, when I was in the seminary. Before I learned of his betrayal of the pro-life cause, I had admired him. In public high school, the crowd I hung with were impressed with priest-radicals, like Daniel Berrigan, whose poetry I even attempted to like at the time. I had found something contagious about clericalized chic. It was silly, of course, but I thought it was a way for the Church to influence society. 

By the time I met Drinan, I was not an admirer of his politics, which were strictly of the Boston bourgeois liberal bien-pensant kind; but I was curious about the man. We were in a car together for some part of the encounter, and I guess I asked him who had succeeded him in his congressional seat. “Barney Frank,” he said, and laughed, “I wonder if the pope is happy with him.” It was a very dry laugh from an impatient man. Mr. Frank’s association with a male prostitute who used the congressman’s apartment as a bordello had just come out in the news. I didn’t realize when I heard the priest’s joke that Drinan had been present at Frank’s first campaign kickoff.

I was a bit of a stealth conservative in those days, Mercutio-like in wishing a plague on both extremes in El Salvador but especially weary of the Left’s relentless agitprop. I did not challenge Drinan, who was not exactly a “hail fellow well met” kind of guy, and I was surprised to feel that he was still angry with the pope, who was my hero. 

The ex-congressman was in El Salvador because several Jesuits had been murdered by rogue military officers acting on the wishes of the High Command but not of the government. The trip was about getting more media attention to that scandal. I had been shocked by the murder of the Jesuit priests and remember watching then-President Cristiani’s press conference about it and thinking he looked like Macbeth seeing Banquo’s ghost. I had walked through the Jesuit residence with Bishop Matthiesen of Amarillo and had seen the bullet holes and the spattered blood on the walls.

Drinan is on my mind again because I just read Karen Hall’s book about Fr. Paul Mankowski, S.J., The Sound of Silence: The Life and Canceling of a Heroic Jesuit Priest, from Crisis Publications. The Jesuit priest was “canceled” for political incorrectness but especially because of his contribution to an article that detailed the equivocations and lies that attended Fr. Robert Drinan’s entrance into the political arena. I had read the brilliant essays of Fr. Mankowski that are collected in Jesuit at Large, edited by George Weigel for Ignatius Press, which includes the devastating “Memorandum on the Drinan Candidacy.”

I didn’t realize that Mankowski had suffered real persecution by his order because of his telling the truth about the dubious circumstances of Drinan’s political career (“Interrupted Career” as a eulogistic article in America had it). Fr. Mankowski’s trip to the Jesuit gulag for dissidents began when he heard a provincial tell how he had convinced Arrupe, the superior general of the Jesuits, to let Drinan run for office even though to do so was against Canon Law. His ruse was that he predicted Drinan would lose and Arrupe would not have to worry about the violation of Church law. The man was proud of his disingenuousness. He himself had encouraged Drinan to run. He also prohibited a conservative Jesuit, John McLaughlin, from running for Senate in Rhode Island.  Fr. Mankowski’s trip to the Jesuit gulag for dissidents began when he heard a provincial tell how he had convinced Arrupe, the superior general of the Jesuits, to let Drinan run for office even though to do so was against Canon Law.Tweet This

After dinner, Mankowski sent a verbatim account of the provincial’s boast to the Jesuit archives because he saw it as a revelation of history. He later offered to write an article for First Things about the anecdote because it seemed to exonerate Arrupe, who had been heavily criticized for the scandal of Drinan’s political career. 

Looking further, Mankowski dipped into archives of the history of Drinan’s candidacy, with permission, and eventually gave material to historian James Hitchcock, who wrote an article for The Catholic World Report provoked by Drinan’s defense of President Clinton’s veto of the partial-birth abortion law passed by the Congress. Unlike me, Mankowski never even met Drinan, but he probably felt that the revered ex-Congressman penning his article for the National Catholic Distorter and The New York Times to defend a veto of the partial birth abortion ban—“as a Jesuit priest who agrees with Vatican II”—was a new version of Faust signing away his soul to the devil.

If Mankowski’s conservatism had been a source of tension with his religious brothers before the article, his connection with it made him a pariah. He was punished for revealing the secret correspondence detailing a Jesuit defiance of Canon Law and papal directives and was not allowed to take final vows, which is a strange kind of discipline for a man who is an ordained priest and lived as a member of the order for over half his life. Ironically, part of the punishment included not being able to take the Jesuit Fourth Vow: to obey the pope. Here was a priest dedicated to the Holy Father and he was not allowed to take the vow in part because he had pulled back the veil from the men behind the curtain. 

He was officially silenced, told not to publish anything without the explicit permission of his superiors, and sent to assignments that did not fit his outstanding CV. His ostracism within the community is detailed by this book, including anecdotes about memos sent to provinces about him and eating breakfast alone in the refectory.

Author Karen Hall has been a writer of screenplays and even a religious thriller about priests (twice, because she revised the novel 20 years after its publication and her own progress in conversion). Her book is a testament of friendship and loyalty to a good priest who was consistently traduced by his superiors. Her admiration of Fr. Mankowski is contagious. 

I wish I could have known him and am startled to think that I had visited the house where he made his novitiate shortly before he entered there. I had not been impressed with the place because, and this might seem trivial, the novices went across the street on Sundays to the Eucharist, every man for himself at the hour he wished, to a non-Jesuit parish. If I had persisted in my interest in the order, I might have met the man whom I know now only from books.

The various conservative Catholic presses in this country are like the samizdat underground in the Soviet Union in the old Communist days. I don’t expect the samizdat manuscripts had much circulation, but it was worth the effort. Not a big market for serious religious books, unfortunately. 

In the old days, it was proverbial that Protestants bought and read such books and Catholics subscribed and read magazines for their continuing formation in the Faith. Now Catholic book readers are few and even the magazines seem less read. Some soi-disant loyal Catholics, the ostrich gang, prefer not to know what would upset them—like this story of a priest who suffered for telling the truth. Hall has an epigraph for one chapter from David Foster Wallace the avant-garde novelist: “The truth will set you free. But not until it is finished with you.” 

Books like Hall’s are messages in the bottle to future generations of Catholics. “When the lights come on again all over the world,” to quote a hopeful song from World War II, people should know of the sacrifices and the strange battles we are fighting today. I wish a benefactor would mail a copy of her book on Mankowski to all the seminarians in the country.