Religion: Disobedience at St. Benedict's

Father Leonard Feeney, S.J., is a short, 52-year-old man with a mobile, dimpled face and expressive hands. A literary priest who studied at Oxford and once worked on the Jesuit weekly America, Leonard Feeney is an enthusiastic conversationalist who sometimes begins his sentences with a naive, unliterary "Gee!" The author of several volumes of poetry and essays, he confessed in his Fish on Friday: "I am given to superlatives. I overstate things . . . I say 'most' when I mean 'much.' Without the words 'tremendous,' 'wonderful,' 'amazing,' and 'astounding,' my vocabulary would collapse. I couldn't talk. I couldn't think."

Last week,...

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