Three years ago, Boston's Archbishop Richard J. Gushing suspended Father Leonard Feeney from all his functions as a Roman Catholic priest (TIME, May 2, 1949). His offense: taking literally the Catholic doctrine that "outside the church there is no salvation," i.e., insisting that everyone who is not a good Catholic will go to hell.*
Father Feeney, a Jesuit teacher who was once associate editor of the magazine America, did not recant. Though he was also dismissed from the Jesuit order, he stayed at St. Benedict Center in Cambridge, a house of studies originally founded for the use of Catholic Harvard-men. A...