The Politics Of A Pro Abortion Jesuit

At a community supper in Newton following the Oct. 15, 1969 antiwar rally on Boston Common, Jerome Grossman, one of the rally’s organizers, noticed a priest talking with a young Vietnamese man whose father was in jail in Vietnam. “He seemed unusually kind and considerate to the young man,’’ Grossman recalled. “There was no question as to where his sympathies lay on the war.’’ Grossman, a businessman-turned-antiwar activist, was looking for a credible candidate to run for Congress against the hawkish incumbent.

The priest, Father Robert F. Drinan, the Jesuit dean of Boston College’s law school, would become his candidate. Eleven years later, in May 1980, Grossman had dinner in Washington with Drinan, who was expected to run for a sixth term in Congress. 

Grossman recalled that something seemed to be bothering Drinan, but he did not let on what it was. But Drinan had learned that after years of receiving passive approval from his Jesuit superiors to serve in Congress, Pope John Paul II was preparing to order him not to run for reelection. Those two events serve as bookends for a searching biography by Raymond A. Schroth, whose title, “Bob Drinan,’’ seems jarring to those, especially in the Massachusetts press corps, who invariably addressed him as “Father Drinan.’’

Link (here) to the full article at the Boston Globe