Georgetown Ignatian Society...

By ANN SHERIDAN

(Reprinted, with permission, from the April 23, 1996, issue of The Wanderer,
which is published weekly by Wanderer Printing Company, 201 Ohio Street, St. Paul, MN 55107. Subscription: $40 per annum.)

 WASHINGTON, D.C.-- The day after President Clinton vetoed the ban on partial-birth abortions, the Georgetown Ignatian Society informed Fr. Leo J. O'Donovan, S.J., that, if he did not publicly and specifically denounce President Clinton in the next issue of the campus newspaper (The Hoya), the society would call for his removal as president of Georgetown University. No statement was forthcoming from his office for the specified edition.

The following week, however, The Hoya quoted O'Donovan in an article about the society's demand for his removal: ''As a Catholic Jesuit university, Georgetown remains faithful to the Catholic Church's position concerning the sanctity of human life. I am certain that President Clinton knows that I remain unalterably opposed to abortion. I have made my views known on this subject previously and I will continue to do so in the future.''

Ignatian Society President Ann Sheridan said that didn't even come close to a denouncement, but his statement about having made his "views known on the subject" was more accurate than he probably intended.

''In what amounts to essential cooperation with evil, Leo O'Donovan funded a pro-abortion student group (GU Choice) until he was forced by the Ignatian Society's canon court proceedings to de-fund it,'' Sheridan said. She added: ''He did not protest students chanting on campus: 'Keep your rosaries off our ovaries' and 'Spit out the wafer. Condoms are safer.' Additionally, he has allowed the Georgetown Health Plan to cover 80% of abortion costs for its subscribers. Jesuits who protested the abortion coverage were enrolled in the plan, against their wishes and without their prior knowledge."

The Ignatian Society bases its current efforts to have O'Donovan removed as president of Georgetown on his public relationship with Clinton -- the most consistently pro-abortion President in American history. O'Donovan erected a plaque in Clinton's honor in the Dahlgren Chapel quadrangle; is publicly identified as a priest at White House dinners; frequently accompanies the President on Air Force One; and, as reported in The Wanderer, thinks that Patrick J. Buchanan is un-Christian and that Bob Dole is a "pineapple," and he is going to vote for Clinton.

Sheridan further stated: "As a private citizen, he may obviously vote for anyone he wishes, but on this matter. either O'Donovan is theologically out to lunch or he's so smugly swept away with the glory of being in the presence of a President of the United States that he has lost his ability to see the scandal he is causing by allowing himself to be used to gain respectability for the Clintons' pro-abortion agenda."

Fellow Ignatian Charles Molineaux, Esq. (SFS, 1950), agreed and cited an additional -- financial -- connection between O'Donovan and Clinton: "It is a tragedy, at the very moment when the Pope is pleading for Catholics to be counter-cultural and courageous, that the incumbent president of Georgetown, situated in what could be a 'bully pulpit,' has elected to go with the secular flow In refusing to denounce Clinton's consistent pro-abortion stance (a rare consistency). Either Fr. O'Donovan is too obtuse to realize that Georgetown is being used by the Clintons to attract support or he actually thinks that he can sustain the flow of federal funds to Georgetown by public toadying.''

William Peter Blatty (CAS, 1950), author of The Exorcist and also a member of the Ignatian Society, issued a statement in the Hoya article: ''It is dumbfounding that a Georgetown Jesuit could publicly berate John Thompson [Georgetown basketball coach] for wanting to own a few slot machines and then keep silent on the horrors of the late-term, partial-birth abortion."

After observing that O'Donovan is compromising the university's Catholic identity, he went on to say: "I'm considering a film remake of The Exorcist, but in all likelihood this statement that I'm making will ensure that I never again get the permission to move one camera, even one foot, onto the campus.

"But I speak my heart nonetheless, trusting, hoping, that this foolishly impractical gesture may somehow move this good and decent man. Fr. Leo O'Donovan, to an act of courage I am convinced is more than easily within his reach."

Blatty, Sheridan. and Molineaux all raised questions in their final statements:

Blatty: "Nobody hates you, Leo; but couldn't we render just a little bit more to God and quite a bit less to Bill?''

Sheridan: "How many times does the cock have to crow before Fr. O'Donovan comprehends that denial of Christ and His teachings has far more damaging implications than denial of Clinton and his actions?''

Molineaux: "It is also shocking that the Jesuit order, once known for idealism and obedience to the Pope, allows this to go on at the flagship 'Jesuit' university. An old proverb said, 'Only dead fish go with the flow.' In 16th-century England, almost all of the bishops and Churchmen went with the flow except Fisher; today we call him a saint and the rest cowards. Will no one speak up?"

 

IGNATIAN SOCIETY PETITIONS CARDINAL HICKEY TO REMOVE FR. DRINAN'S FACULTIES

By ANN SHERIDAN

(Reprinted, with permission, from the July 18, 1996, issue of The Wanderer,
which is published weekly by Wanderer Printing Company, 201 Ohio Street, St. Paul, MN 55107. Subscription: $40 per annum.)

WASHINGTON, D.C. -- Ever-ready to prove that his opinions are better informed and more legally compelling than those of the Magisterium, Fr. Robert F. Drinan, S.J., has once again assumed his perch in the tree of apostasy and advised New York Times readers that Congress should sustain President Clinton's veto of the partial-birth abortion ban. ("Posturing on Abortion," June 4th edition.)

Considering that Fr. Drinan shares that tree with Georgetown University's president, Fr. Leo O'Donovan, S.J., one should not be surprised. Nor should anyone be surprised that the Georgetown Ignatian Society, armed with the ax of canon law, has started cutting the limb out from under him.

Not only were Fr. Drinan's statements directly and publicly counter to the unequivocal position taken by His Holiness, the American cardinals, and the National Conference of Catholic Bishops, the harm was deepened by his identifying himself in the article as a Jesuit priest and, by implication, claiming to represent the teachings of the Church.

While proclaiming his own adherence to Vatican II in finding abortion "virtually infanticide," he defends the veto on the same spurious grounds advanced by Clinton -- that the bill should contain a health exception. As a professor who has taught constitutional law for years, Fr. Drinan should know that the U.S. Supreme Court has defined "health" to include even emotional pain, so that there would be no case in which a "health" claim could not be made. Medical experts do not say that the technique banned by the bill is "the safest," as Fr. Drinan asserted. The author of the most widely used textbook on abortion, Dr. Warren Hern, has stated that he "would dispute any statement that this is the safest procedure to use."

Fr. Drinan also should know that the medical testimony before Congress was unambiguous in stating that there is no maternal condition or fetal deformity which requires that the unborn child be killed. This parroting of the specious arguments and statistics of abortion rights advocates is inconsistent with his stance of viewing abortion as "virtually infanticide," and is scandalously divergent from the Church's position.

Additionally, his legalistic gerrymandering of moral law is truly breathtaking -- this from someone who professes to be a lawyer, while much more circuitously professing to be a priest. In a lamentable example of Jesuitical casuistry which would make Fathers McCormick, O'Keefe, Case, et al., proud (but, thank God, compelled 12 Georgetown Jesuits to send him a private letter of protest), Drinan cautioned that the bill would sanction government intrusion into the professional acts of those performing late-term abortions, and that nursing and health aides would be put in the position of reporting their compatriots to the authorities if the procedure were made illegal. For whatever reason, lawyer Drinan dismisses the history of another government which did not interfere in the slaughter of 12 million souls and how the Nuremberg court dealt with those who kept their compatriots' acts secret.

As one who lives in the Jesuit residence at Georgetown and is a professor at the Georgetown University Law Center, Fr. Drinan has priestly faculties in the Archdiocese of Washington, D.C., and James Cardinal Hickey, the archbishop, has jurisdiction over those faculties and is empowered to demand strict compliance with Church teaching by those under him.

Therefore, based on the Code of Canon Law's canon 1369 ("A person is to be punished with a just penalty, who, at a public event or assembly, or in a published writing, or by otherwise using the means of social communication, utters blasphemy, or gravely harms public morals, or rails at or excites hatred of or contempt for religion or the Church"), the Georgetown Ignatian Society, on June 21st, formally petitioned Cardinal Hickey to remove Fr. Drinan's priestly faculties in the Washington Archdiocese. If Fr. Drinan were to publicly retract his support for President Clinton's veto, the petition would be withdrawn.

If he does not and Cardinal Hickey removes his faculties, the door would be open for Drinan to end his priestly charade, remove his collar, run again for Congress, and spend his declining years on the Hill in the illustrious company of other Catholic pro-aborts like Kennedy, Dodd, Mikulski, Kerry, and Leahy.

Ah, the public acclaim! The honor! The perks! White House dinners! More space in The New York Times! Perhaps he could make weekly visits to 1600 Pennsylvania Ave. to give "live'. advice about how to deal with impending indictments to end Hillary's need to channel Eleanor Roosevelt. Even better, maybe Michael Eisner could invite Drinan to join the board of Walt Disney Company whose subsidiary, Miramax, made Priest. Why not? Eisner, who just added Fr. O'Donovan to Disney's board, sat on Georgetown's board in 1991-1992 when the Georgetown Ignatian Society brought canon court proceedings against the university because Fr. O'Donovan had funded a pro-abortion group, GU Choice. The Vatican subsequently forced Fr.O'Donovan to de-fund the group.

Fr. Drinan may feel that as a lawyer and a self-appointed interpreter and champion of legal abortion, he is beyond criticism, but,while he is posing as a priest, the Georgetown Ignatian Society will continue to hold him accountable for his actions.