I’m not Catholic, and I tend to avoid most "organized" religion like the plague. For those people for whom organized religion works, more power to ‘em. But growing up fundy made it necessary for me, as an adult, to find my own spiritual path.
Nonetheless, I still recognize those members of mainstream religious communities who truly make a difference in this world - and I mourn each time we lose one, because they are such rare blessings.
We’ve lost another one tonight: Fr. Robert Drinan, the only Catholic priest ever to serve simultaneously as a member of Congress. As The NYT’s obit notes:
An internationally known human-rights advocate, Drinan was elected on an anti-war platform and represented Massachusetts in the U.S. House for 10 years during the turbulent 1970s.
He stepped down only after a worldwide directive from Pope John Paul II barring priests from holding public office.
During his Congressional tenure, Drinan continued to dress in the robes of his clerical order and lived in a simple room in the Jesuit community at Georgetown.
But he wore his liberal views more prominently. He opposed the draft, worked to abolish mandatory retirement and raised eyebrows with his more moderate views on abortion and birth control.
One suspects that those qualities described in the last graf had more to do with John Paul’s order to step down than any doctrinal or canonical conflict. And Drinan refused to stay quiet:
Although a poll at the time showed that 30 percent of the voters in his district thought it was improper for a priest to run for office, Drinan considered politics a natural extension of his work in public affairs and human rights.
His run for office came a year after he returned from a trip to Vietnam, where he said he discovered that the number of political prisoners being held in South Vietnam was rapidly increasing, contrary to State Department reports. In a book the next year, he urged the Catholic Church to condemn the war as ‘’morally objectionable.'’
He became the first member of Congress to call for the impeachment of Richard Nixon — although the call wasn’t related to the Watergate scandal, but rather what Drinan viewed as the administration’s undeclared war against Cambodia.
‘’Can we be silent about this flagrant violation of the Constitution?'’ Drinan demanded angrily back then. ‘’Can we impeach a president for concealing a burglary but not for concealing a massive bombing?'’
Decades later, at the invitation of Congress, he testified against the impeachment of another president: Bill Clinton. Drinan said Clinton’s misdeeds were not in the same league as Nixon’s, and that impeachment should be for an official act, not a private one.
After leaving office in 1980 — ‘’with regret and pain'’ — Drinan continued to be active in political causes. He served as president of the Americans for Democratic Action, crisscrossing the country giving speeches on hunger, civil liberties, and the perils of the arms race.
That’s my idea of a true man of God. Rest well, Fr. Drinan. You’ve earned it.
