Feeney was a Roman Catholic priest and a member of the Jesuit order. The order dismissed Feeney in 1949 for disobedience, and on February 4, 1953, the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith declared him excommunicated "on account of grave disobedience to Church Authority, being unmoved by repeated warnings." He was reconciled to the Church in 1972. Feeney co-founded the group known as the Slaves of the Immaculate Heart of Mary.
Catholics traditionally believe that sacramental baptism is the only way to be properly baptized. In addition, "the Church has always held the firm conviction that those who suffer death for the sake of the faith without having received Baptism are baptized by their death for and with Christ. This Baptism of blood, like the desire for Baptism, brings about the fruits of Baptism without being a sacrament." The belief in water baptism and the doctrinal position that those who are outside the Catholic Church are not saved can be found in the writings of the early fathers and the rulings of ecumenical councils. For instance, Pope Eugene IV, in the Council of Florence declared:
And since death entered the universe through the first man, ‘unless we are born again of water and the Spirit, we cannot,’ as the Truth says, ‘enter into the kingdom of heaven’ . The matter of this sacrament is real and natural water.
St. John Chrysostom:
And well should the pagan lament, who not knowing God, dying goes straight to punishment. Well should the Jew mourn, who not believing in Christ, has assigned his soul to perdition.
Pope Gregory XVI:
Finally some of these misguided people attempt to persuade themselves and others that men are not saved only in the Catholic religion, but that even heretics may attain eternal life.
Feeney felt that, in the previous two centuries, some tended to broaden the notion of "baptism of desire" to include all who try to live good lives, even those who desired no relationship with the Catholic Church. Feeney argued that those who are truly sincere will be led by God to the Catholic Church. He also accepted no form of baptism as opening the way to salvation other than by water and only within the Catholic Church, but he did say that this was an opinion. He denied the salvational efficacy of the mere wish alone, even the explicit wish to be baptized, and held that God must have provided those martyrs who apparently died for the faith without being baptized with a minister and water to baptize them before their death. Feeney and his followers maintain that there is a contradiction between the Second Vatican Council's document Lumen gentium and earlier authoritative statements, which they interpret as saying that non-Catholics are indiscriminately damned. His followers interpret the Catholic Church's declarations that outside of the Church there is no salvation as excluding from salvation people such as the American Indians who lived between the times of Christ and Columbus, because they could not have been baptized.
Splits
After Feeney's death, his spiritual descendants soon split into several groups because of various power struggles. The two most prominent both use the name Saint Benedict Center. All use the pre-Vatican II form of the Roman Rite liturgy. Three of these groups are located on or near the land to where Feeney moved in Still River, Massachusetts:
St. Benedict Abbey is a house of Benedictine monks.
The other branch, located in Richmond, New Hampshire, has no official recognition by the Catholic Church. The Southern Poverty Law Centerclassifies the center in Richmond, as well as the group's publishing arm Immaculate Heart Media, as an anti-Semitic hate group. The SPLC wrote that the Slaves of the Immaculate Heart of Mary "continue to endorse Feeney and to defend him from charges of anti-Semitism, despite his well-documented hatred of the Jews" and noted that in 2004, Bishop McCormack had rebuked the group as "blatantly anti-Semitic", and that in 2005, a brother of the Slaves had given a speech calling out the "Jewish nation" as "the perpetual enemy of Christ." The center denies being anti-Semitic. In January 2019, the vicar for canonical affairs for the Roman Catholic Diocese of Manchester stated that the group had been directed to stop representing themselves as Catholic. The diocese published a clarification of the status of the Slaves of the Immaculate Heart of Mary and the St. Benedict Center, declaring that they were neither approved by the diocese nor considered to be Catholic. The diocese and Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith in Rome found unacceptable that the St. Benedict Center teaches that non-Catholics cannot be saved. That same document further states that priests are forbidden to say Mass at any church or chapel owned by the St. Benedict Center or the Slaves of the Immaculate Heart of Mary. In 1978, three sisters from Feeney's original group sought to become Benedictine nuns. Nuns from Stanbrook Abbey helped establish their priory, which was formally erected in 1984 as Saint Scholastica Priory. The nuns were later joined by a group of Benedictine monks who were established as Saint Mary Monastery, a dependent house of Pluscarden Abbey.
