{"id":1873,"date":"2007-05-01T08:46:06","date_gmt":"2007-05-01T08:46:06","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.beliefnet.com\/viamedia\/2007\/05\/on-fr-drinan.html"},"modified":"2007-05-01T08:46:06","modified_gmt":"2007-05-01T08:46:06","slug":"on-fr-drinan","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/2007\/05\/on-fr-drinan.html","title":{"rendered":"On Fr. Drinan"},"content":{"rendered":"

Over at First Things, Peter Sprigg, who worked in Drinan’s office briefly and is now with the Family Research Council, remembers and tries to understand:<\/a><\/p>\n

\n
\n

One thing that Congressman Drinan said during that period has always stayed with me. In the immediate aftermath of the pope\u2019s order [for Drinan to step down] <\/em>, there were several meetings of Drinan supporters to discuss what to do next. I should note that many of his closest political supporters were not Catholic, despite Massachusetts\u2019 large Catholic population. Instead, they were Jewish, Protestant like me, or essentially secular. One of those supporters asked the congressman the question that may have been on the minds of many of them\u2014\u201cWhy not just ignore the pope?\u201d<\/p>\n

I have never forgotten Drinan\u2019s simple, four-word answer: \u201cThat would be unthinkable.<\/p>\n

snip<\/em><\/p>\n

A quarter of a century after my relationship with Robert Drinan ended, those two single words I heard him speak are what I remember most. One was his acknowledgment that abortion is \u201cinfanticide.\u201d The second was his declaration that with regard to the end of his congressional career, defying the pope would be \u201cunthinkable.\u201d How tragic it is that defying the pope\u2019s teaching on such \u201cinfanticide\u201d was not equally \u201cunthinkable.\u201d <\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Over at First Things, Peter Sprigg, who worked in Drinan’s office briefly and is now with the Family Research Council, remembers and tries to understand: One thing that Congressman Drinan said during that period has always stayed with me. In the immediate aftermath of the pope\u2019s order [for Drinan to step down] , there were…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":180,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1873","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news"],"yoast_head":"\nOn Fr. 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The Catholicism comes from her side. Amy grew up in a number of places - Indiana - Washington, DC - Lubbock Texas - Arlington, Virginia - DeKalb, Illinois - Lawrence, Kansas - and Knoxville, Tennessee, where the family settled in 1973. She attended Knoxville Catholic High School, then the University of Tennessee where she majored in history. She received an MA in Church History from Vanderbilt University, where she wrote a thesis on the changing role of women in 19th century American Protestantism, and the ways Scripture was used to justify those changes. She worked as as a teacher in Catholic high schools and a Parish Director of Religious Education and started writing for the diocesan press - the Florida Catholic - in 1988. Amy has written columns for Our Sunday Visitor and Catholic News Service at times over the past twenty years. Her articles have been published in venues ranging from Our Sunday Visitor to the New York Times to Commonweal. She has written 17 books. 18, if you included the as yet tragically unpublished novel. Amy has five children, ranging in age from 26 to 4 and was married to Michael Dubruiel, who died unexpectedly in February 2009. She lives in Birmingham, Alabama.","url":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/author\/awelborn"}]}},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1873","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/180"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1873"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1873\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1873"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1873"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1873"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}