Msgr. Richard C. Antall: The Canceled Jesuit

When I worked in the Cleveland Diocese’s Latin American Mission, Catholic Relief Services and the University of Central America (the Jesuit “inspired” UCA) often invited me and other colleagues for the visit of celebrities and activists from the United States who were doing a star turn in El Salvador. That is how I met Cardinal McCarrick, various presidents of Jesuit universities in the States, and Robert Drinan, S.J., the former five-term congressman who had been told by St. John Paul II not to run for a sixth term.

Drinan had been elected congressman in the ’70s, when I was in the seminary. Before I learned of his betrayal of the pro-life cause, I had admired him. In public high school, the crowd I hung with were impressed with priest-radicals, like Daniel Berrigan, whose poetry I even attempted to like at the time. I had found something contagious about clericalized chic. It was silly, of course, but I thought it was a way for the Church to influence society. …

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