Priest’s Book Tells Sad Tale of Jesuits’ Abortion Complicity in the USPART III
COMMENTARY: The late Jesuit Father Paul Mankowski knew how badly some of his brother priests and his superiors had betrayed the Society of Jesus.
Father Raymond J. de Souza
January 7, 2022
Father Mankowski was doing research in the New England Jesuit archives in the early 1990s. He came across Father Drinan’s files. He asked for and was given permission to make copies of the material for an article on Father Drinan’s service in Congress.
Father Mankowski discovered that, far from permission to run for Congress, the Jesuit superior general, Father Pedro Arrupe, repeatedly forbade it. Father Drinan and Jesuit Father William Guindon, the New England provincial, conspired to favor Father Drinan’s candidacy and to frustrate Father Arrupe’s orders. The files provide in great detail the lies and evasions of both Fathers Drinan and Guindon over many years.
Father Mankowski knew that the material would correct the impression that the Jesuit order as a whole was pleased with Father Drinan promoting abortion in Congress. It would also reveal how perfidious senior New England Jesuits were in the 1970s.
Father Mankowski decided not to write an article on Father Drinan’s candidacy. It was a supremely unpleasant business, and Father Drinan seemed to be a “spent force.”
Until June 1996, that is. The New York Times published an op-ed by Father Drinan “as a Jesuit priest,” praising President Bill Clinton’s veto of the ban on partial-birth abortion. That a priest would desire to keep partial-birth abortion legal shocked even those who were sympathetic to him.
Cardinal John O’Connor was furious, writing in his Catholic New York column: “I am deeply sorry, Father Drinan, but you’re wrong, dead wrong. You could have raised your formidable voice for life; you have raised it for death. Hardly the role of a lawyer. Surely not the role of a priest.”
Father Mankowski judged that the return of Father Drinan to public controversy required the truth to be told. He gave his materials to professor James Hitchcock, the distinguished historian at the Jesuit St. Louis University. Hitchcock published the material in an article that summer in Catholic World Report, “The Strange Political Career of Father Drinan.”
The Jesuits erupted in poker-hot rage. Not at Father Drinan for his position, not at the Jesuits who enabled it, not at the superiors who covered up the lies. The American Jesuit leadership brought down the hammer on Father Mankowski, who did not conceal his role in providing the archival material to Professor Hitchcock.
“The results of all this for Paul Mankowski were draconian,” writes Weigel in his editor’s introduction. “He was forbidden for years to publish under his own name. He was constrained in his pastoral work. He was often treated as a pariah. And while he was eventually permitted to take final religious vows and become a ‘spiritual coadjutor’ within the Society of Jesus, Mankowski was refused ‘full incorporation’ into the Society (which involves the famous Jesuit ‘fourth vow’ of obedience to the pope with respect to mission).”
The publication of the Father Mankowski memorandum with its supporting documentation is, as Weigel, writes “essential for the posthumous vindication of Father Mankowski’s honor,” so long besmirched by some of his Jesuit brethren, even as they heaped lavish laudations upon Father Drinan.
https://www.ncregister.com/commentaries/priest-s-book-tells-sad-tale-of-jesuits-abortion-complicity-in-the-us
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