Raymond A. Schroth. Bob Drinan: The Controversial Life of the First Catholic Priest Elected to Congress. New York: Fordham University Press, 2011. xv + 393 pp. $32.95 (cloth), ISBN 978-0-8232-3304-5.

Reviewed by Dianne Kirby
Published on H-1960s (August, 2011)
Commissioned by Ian Rocksborough-Smith (University of the Fraser Valley)

Jesuit on Jesuit

Raymond A. Schroth has produced a very fine biographical account of his fellow Jesuit and sometime colleague, Robert Drinan. Schroth, an experienced political commentator and author of eight books, emphasizes at the outset that Drinan's story was sufficiently important that he was but one of a community of persons convinced it must be told. With his Jesuit sensibilities and journalistic skills, Schroth brings Drinan to life and captures an era. His research is meticulous and draws on a variety of published and archival sources, plus dozens of interviews. The determination to be objective is discernible at every point as Schroth rises to the very best tradition of biography. The reader journeys through a life and witnesses the evolution of a character that had strengths and weaknesses and many contradictions, not least his positions on abortion and Israel that were to confound many who otherwise supported his activities as a political priest.

Schroth takes the reader into Drinan's childhood and youth in the midst of family and friends, to the challenges, the pain and joy, of a vocation that denied the man a family of his own, but provided unique opportunities to pursue the significant causes that shaped the period. In learning about the man and his responses to those causes, the reader revisits and reassesses them as part of the process of understanding Drinan. Schroth skillfully engages the reader with a character that was complex and difficult, whose decisions generated controversy within the church, wrath and hatred on the far Right, and loyalty and devotion from admirers.

Schroth talks with authority and insight about the evolution of the Jesuit order in twentieth-century America. Certainly his is an empathetic but also a very frank and honest account of its mission and of the adherents who sought to fulfill it and who influenced the young Drinan as he went through training and eventually arrived at the decision to run for Congress. Jesuits are known today for their activities in education, especially their universities, and for their intellectual and cultural pursuits. However, Schroth recalls the embarrassment caused at the turn of the century when Harvard Law School declined to accept graduates from Jesuit colleges. The "antiquated" Jesuit curriculum was not producing the broadly educated person required by Harvard. The deficiencies of the system, particularly in science and mathematics, was confirmed by The Report of the Commission on Higher Studies of the American Assistancy of the Society of Jesus, 1931-1932 (1933). The committee's recommendations, that all Jesuits get PhDs and that admission standards be tightened, took three decades to take hold as the Society's bureaucracy moved slowly during Drinan's period of training at Boston College, which he entered in September 1938. Schroth evocatively describes the pleasant campus environment in a neighborhood of hills amid a network of tree-lined streets, in addition to relating its background history. He also skillfully dissects the then prevailing Roman Catholic attitudes to Franklin Roosevelt and interventionism, reflected on the campus, in the run-up to the Second World War. As was the case throughout Catholic America, all changed following Pearl Harbor: "They did not discuss it. They simply saw themselves in a war in which God was on America's side and that must be won" (p. 34).

All religions, modern and ancient, have been confronted with questions about relations with political power and attitudes toward the poor and vulnerable. In the mid-1950s, addressing "Italy's Hopes and Needs" in five articles for America that addressed the state's and church's attempts to recover from the devastation of the Second World War, Drinan claimed that there could be no religious revival without economic progress: "'Poverty can be so crushing that it almost snuffs out the flame of divine love in the soul'" (p. 66). The most compelling issues at home in the late 1950s and 1960s were, of course, civil rights and the peace movement: "Drinan threw his personal and institutional resources into both" (p. 75). Although these might seem natural activities for a man of God, both were intricately bound up with the Cold War, the religious dimension of which actually made clerical involvement contentious. In the war of words conducted by the two rival powers, the Soviet Union identified American treatment of its African American population as its Achilles' heel, especially in the eyes of the developing world. For the United States, Marxist atheism was the Soviet area of most vulnerability in an age where faith still mattered, especially in the global South.

In the emerging Cold War competition with the Soviet Union, the Truman administration, followed by its successors, made religion the cornerstone of American democracy and accorded Soviet atheism, contrasted with U.S. religiosity, a central role in defining the nature of the conflict. The United States rendered religion the measure not simply for a nation's morality and justice, but, above all, for democracy and freedom. Western Cold War rhetoric that claimed the conflict with the Soviets was about the defense of Western civilization and Christianity was notably supported by many churchmen, including Pope Pius XII and Roman Catholic prelates throughout the United States. The Vietnam War, however, significantly compromised the post-World War II anti-communist consensus, rendering the depiction of the East-West confrontation as between good and evil less and less tenable. In the United States, the political culture of the early Cold War, based on apocalypticism and anti-communism, eroded under the impact of first the civil rights movement and then the Vietnam War. Drinan was not alone among churchmen in supporting civil rights and opposing Vietnam and in challenging the anti-communist myth that the Soviet Union sought world domination. Reinhold Niebuhr, one of Cold War America's most influential theologians, was but the most well known of the many clerics who felt compelled to reconsider the West's Cold War behavior. Vietnam moved him to express shame for his nation and he became a founding member of Clergy and Laymen Concerned About Vietnam (CALCAV).

It was CALCAV, as a newly formed ecumenical organization, along with the Fellowship of Reconciliation, that sponsored a study team of eight distinguished clergy and civic leaders that included Drinan to go to Vietnam to investigate the treatment of political prisoners by South Vietnam. Their findings revealed how deeply rooted the culture of abuse had become. The resulting forty-page report resonates with terms made familiar in more recent history by the controversies surrounding Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo Bay: "harsh interrogation techniques," "waterboarding," and "torture." Handed into the White House and the State Department in June 1969, the report elicited no response from either.

Drinan's antiwar stance, and the national attention he had received as head of the federal Civil Rights Commission Advisory Committee of Massachusetts, made him a choice congressional candidate for the peace group Newton Coalition for New Politics. Drinan "was willing and anxious to run because he was convinced that this was the way he could do the most good in his life" (p. 109). A priest assuming political office inevitably raised questions in a country often uneasy about the admixture of religion and politics. The much-respected superior general of the Society of Jesus, Father Pedro Arrupe, had urged the Society's members not to avoid political involvement when it was deemed essential to combat social injustice. He did not, however, say that Jesuits should run for political office and Drinan's doing so initiated a behind-the-scenes struggle, which was only resolved when John Paul II ascended the papal throne determined to silence what he saw as dissident voices, be they liberation theologians in Latin America or a "turbulent priest" who had served five terms in the U.S. Congress. Schroth provides a superb telling of the fascinating struggle that took place between the Vatican and Drinan's superiors about his congressional activities, showing a masterful command of the subject and the Byzantine intrigues of ecclesiastical politics.   

Schroth's lively accounts of Drinan's electoral campaigns and activities in office provide telling insights into the inner workings of American government. Drinan entered office determined to do something about Vietnam from within the system: "But, he rudely learned, the system didn't seem to work" (p. 187). The narrow Democratic majority and the seniority system, controlled by conservative committee chairmen, prevented him from voting on issues that mattered to him. Unsurprisingly, Drinan was highlighted on Richard Nixon's "enemies list," and was the first member of Congress to file for impeachment. Most congressmen hoped the issues raised by Watergate would just go away so Drinan's motion was deemed "premature" and he was criticized for risking subsequent proceedings that forced the president to resign. Nonetheless, Drinan remained a very pro-active legislator with a near-perfect attendance record who saw himself as a "moral architect" and personally sponsored significant bills.

Although Schroth notes that Drinan looked for opportunities to show that his political proposals coincided with the goals of the American Catholic hierarchy, his position on abortion appeared antithetical to that of his church and fellow Roman Catholics. Personally opposed to abortion, Drinan drew a distinction between legality and morality when he addressed the issue in Congress and he supported its federal funding. Schroth treats Drinan's stance on abortion judiciously and with sensitivity, as he does his critics and defenders. The deep divisions between pro-life and pro-choice adherents over this most subjective and emotive of issues will mean that for the former Drinan's justifications, carefully set out by Schroth, will remain baffling and unconvincing, for the latter persuasive and rational. The majority of Roman Catholics were, of course, in the former category and most certainly his superiors in the Society and the Vatican. The previous reluctance of Drinan's Jesuit superiors to assume responsibility for the removal of the people's elected representative or of the Vatican to risk the perception of interference with American politics proved irrelevant to John Paul II who ordered that Drinan withdraw his candidacy for a sixth term in April 1980.

Schroth emphasizes that the order was a terrible blow to Drinan who felt deprived "of what he most loved--that job in Congress where he was doing so much good" (p. 309). But he bowed to his conscience and ironically vowed obedience to the most political pope of the twentieth century. Notably, the papal directive was tailored for Drinan alone and did not apply to other priests or nuns holding political office across the country. Although Drinan's conscience made him cease campaigning for Congress, it also ensured that he continued to campaign for those causes he held dear. Hence Drinan's political activism did not cease with his departure from Congress and he was most certainly not silenced. In 1991, he condemned the first Gulf War as unjust in a meticulous analysis of Just War theory and warned that the aftereffects of the war would be "'devastating and tragic'" (pp. 327-328). He taught at Georgetown Law School and continued to speak and write about important issues--abolition of the death penalty, gun control, immigration, civil and human rights, poverty, and the rights of women--until his death at the age of eighty-six.

Schroth's endeavors to do justice to the man and his life, and to address the questions about religion and politics and the relationship between church and state that Drinan's career in Congress and afterwards raised, is timely. After decades of neglect, the religious dimension of the Cold War and its significance is receiving increasing scholarly attention. The role of religion in U.S. policymaking at home and abroad is now addressed by specialist academic journals and scholarly books. Schroth's biography of Drinan is a valuable contribution to this burgeoning scholarship. It is also a reminder of the power of religious authority with its potential to have an impact on social, political, and economic power. Schroth notes how Drinan always wore his clerical garb. As American politicians, presidents above all (and one particular former British prime minister), appropriated the sacred, it is worth remembering and contrasting the legislative record and policies pursued by Drinan, an ordained servant of God, compared to those statesmen claiming guidance from God for policies Drinan would indisputably have opposed.

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Citation: Dianne Kirby. Review of Schroth, Raymond A., Bob Drinan: The Controversial Life of the First Catholic Priest Elected to Congress. H-1960s, H-Net Reviews. August, 2011.
URL: http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=32621

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