John Murray Cuddihy on Leonard Feeney and Walter Kaufmann

The secularization of religious fundamentalism

update: made edits to clarify timeline

In the 1960s, the Jesuit Priest Leonard Feeney became infamous for aggressively preaching against the Catholic Church’s abandonment of its own chosenness doctrine: that there is no salvation outside of the Church. Feeney was incensed, according to sociologist John Murray Cuddihy, that the charity of “softly-phrased evasions” among more liberal Catholics in the west was intended to “kill off the chastity of truth…”

Cuddihy wrote that this was correct. “Charity in the form of civility”, he explains, “was softening and eroding the old intransigent truths…[a]ncient, uncouth truth was being polished up and manicured.”