Leonard Edward Feeney (February 18, 1897 – January 30, 1978) was an American Jesuit priest, poet, lyricist, and essayist. He articulated a strict interpretation of the Roman Catholic doctrine extra Ecclesiam nulla salus ("outside the Church there is no salvation"). He took the position that baptism of blood and baptism of desire are unavailing and that therefore no non-Catholics will be saved. Fighting against what he perceived to be the liberalization of Catholic doctrine, he came under ecclesiastical censure. He was described as Boston's homegrown version of Father Charles Coughlin for his antisemitism. Biography Feeney was born in Lynn, Massachusetts, on February 18, 1897. In 1914 he entered the Jesuit Novitiate of Saint Andrew in Poughkeepsie, New York. During his 14 year formation as a Jesuit, he studied in England, Wales, Belgium, France, and in his homeland. He took religious vows as a son of Saint Ignatius, and was ordained a priest on June 20, 1928. in the 1930s, he was literary editor at the Jesuit magazine, America. He was a professor in Boston College's graduate school, and then professor of spiritual eloquence at the Jesuit seminary in Weston, Massachusetts, before he became the priest chaplain at the Catholic Saint Benedict Center, a religious center at Harvard Square founded by Catherine Goddard Clarke, in 1945. (He had first visited in 1941.) He gave incendiary speeches on the Boston Common on Sundays, leading Robert F. Kennedy, then a Harvard undergraduate, to write Archbishop Cushing of Boston requesting his removal. He induced some of the faithful to drop out of Harvard or Radcliffe to become students at his Center, now accredited as a Catholic school. From 1946, the Center published From the Housetops, a periodical focused on Catholic theology that enjoyed contributions from the archbishop himself, but Feeney’s rigid interpretation of Extra Ecclesiam nulla salus put him on a collision course with the same archbishop, Richard Cushing (who became a Cardinal 10 years after these particular incidents; also Senator Edward Kennedy in a memoir claimed that his brother Robert actually met with Cushing about the subject but only after their father first called Cushing). After April 1949 the affair became a public scandal when Feeney undertook in the press the defence of dismissed laymen who were teaching in the Jesuit College (founded in Boston by the Society of Jesus in 1863) that those who were not members of the Catholic Church were