[Congressional Record Volume 153, Number 17 (Monday, January 29, 2007)]
[House]
[Pages H961-H963]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




                          FATHER ROBERT DRINAN

  (Mr. McGOVERN asked and was given permission to address the House for 
1 minute and to revise and extend his remarks.
  Mr. McGOVERN. Mr. Speaker, Father Robert Drinan, a former Member of 
this House and a champion for the cause of peace and justice, died 
yesterday.
  Father Drinan was a hero and a friend. He recognized early the folly 
of the Vietnam War, and he fought to end it. He was a critic of the 
current and senseless war in Iraq. He was outspoken and not faint on 
issues of human rights here at home and around the world. He was a 
friend to the poor, a courageous advocate for civil rights and civil 
liberties, and a well-respected legal scholar. He was also a Jesuit 
priest who was proud of his vocation and dedicated to the teachings of 
the Church.
  We developed a strong friendship over the years. I certainly sought 
his advice and counsel on many, many issues; and he never hesitated to 
provide it. He called regularly, sent me articles and speeches, and 
always urged me to stand strong for what is right.
  Mr. Speaker, our country, and indeed the world, is better off because 
of Bob Drinan. My condolences go out to his family and friends. He was 
a remarkable man and a true inspiration and he will be missed.

[[Page H962]]

  Mr. Speaker, I ask to insert in the Record a copy of an article which 
appeared in today's Boston Globe honoring Father Drinan.

                    [From boston.com, Jan. 29, 2007]

                     Congressman-Priest Drinan Dies

                            (By Mark Feeney)

       The Rev. Robert F. Drinan, who left Boston College's 
     administration to become the first Roman Catholic priest 
     elected to Congress and who in 1973 filed the initial 
     impeachment resolution against President Richard M. Nixon, 
     died yesterday at Sibley Memorial Hospital in Washington, 
     D.C. He was 86.
       The cause of death was pneumonia and congestive heart 
     failure, said a spokeswoman for Georgetown University, where 
     Father Drinan taught legal ethics and other subjects to more 
     than 6,000 students during the past 26 years.
       ``Father Drinan was a forever gentle, resilient, tenacious 
     advocate for social justice and fundamental decency,'' said 
     Senator John F. Kerry, who was Father Drinan's campaign 
     manager in 1970. ``He lived out in public life the whole 
     cloth of Catholic teachings. In the most divisive days of 
     Vietnam when things were coming apart, this incredible man 
     and most unlikely of candidates showed America how a man of 
     faith could be a man of peace .''
       A five-term member of the House of Representatives, Father 
     Drinan was one of its most liberal members. His strong anti-
     administration stands earned him a place on the Nixon 
     ``enemies list.'' His upset victory over U.S. Representative 
     Philip J. Philbin, a 14-term incumbent who was vice chairman 
     of the House Armed Services Committee, in the 1970 Democratic 
     primary in Massachusetts Third Congressional District was a 
     high-water mark in the New Politics, which brought the 
     antiwar movement to the ballot box.
       Father Drinan's election was also a landmark in U.S. 
     church-state relations.
       A Catholic priest, the Rev. Gabriel Richard, had served in 
     Congress in 1822 as a nonvoting delegate from Michigan 
     Territory, but he had been appointed. And many Protestant 
     clerics had served as U.S. representatives. Yet the sight of 
     Father Drinan in the halls of Congress in his Roman collar 
     was startling. Some even questioned the propriety of his 
     wearing a cleric's collar and black suit on the floor of the 
     House. Father Drinan had a standard response. ``It's the only 
     suit I own,'' he'd quip.
       Before entering politics, the Jesuit priest had long served 
     as dean at Boston College Law School.
       Supporters saw his entering Congress as a logical union of 
     his legal and spiritual vocations. ``Our father, who art in 
     Congress'' became a popular, if unofficial, campaign slogan.
       Yet many of Father Drinan's most vehement detractors were 
     Catholics who opposed him politically because they saw his 
     electoral career as detracting from his priestly calling. He 
     further angered some Catholics with his show of independence 
     from the church, supporting federal funding of abortions and 
     opposing constitutional amendments that would have banned 
     abortion and allowed prayer in public schools.
       In 1980, Pope John Paul II ordered Father Drinan to either 
     forgo reelection or leave the priesthood. With ``regret and 
     pain,'' Father Drinan announced he would not seek reelection.
       ``It is just unthinkable,'' he said of the idea of 
     renouncing the priesthood to stay in office. ``I am proud and 
     honored to be a priest and a Jesuit. As a person of faith, I 
     must believe that there is work for me to do which somehow 
     will be more important than the work I am required to 
     leave.''
       Father Drinan's unexpected announcement set off a scramble 
     among prospective successors. The winner was U.S. 
     Representative Barney Frank, then a state representative from 
     Beacon Hill.
       In announcing that he would not run again, Father Drinan 
     described himself as ``a moral architect.'' It was an apt 
     description of his political career. His election in 1970 was 
     as much crusade as campaign, charged with a moral fervor that 
     would characterize his entire political career. Father 
     Drinan's critics called him `the mad monk.'' In the context 
     of those highly charged times, it could as easily be 
     considered praise.
       ``He envisions political power as a moral power,'' Ralph 
     Nader, the consumer advocate, once said. More advocate than 
     legislator, Father Drinan was an outsider on Capitol Hill. 
     (``You have collegiality much more in the church than you do 
     in Congress,'' he said in a 1974 Globe interview.) A wag 
     likened his membership on the House Internal Security 
     Committee, the successor to the House Committee on Un-
     American Activities, ``which Father Drinan wanted to 
     dissolve, to ``an atheist belonging to the World Council of 
     Churches.''
       As a member of the House Judiciary Committee, Father Drinan 
     gained a national profile in the summer of 1974 when the 
     committee's hearings considering Nixon's impeachment were 
     televised. The hearings would have taken place a year 
     earlier, had Father Drinan had his way. On July 31, 1973, he 
     introduced the first resolution to impeach the president--
     though not for any high crimes and misdemeanors relating to 
     the Watergate scandal, but rather over the administration's 
     secret bombing campaign in Cambodia.
       Father Drinan prided himself on having filed that 
     resolution. But its timing dismayed the House Democratic 
     leadership, which thought it premature and counterproductive.
       ``Morally, Drinan had a good case,'' then-House Speaker 
     Thomas P. O'Neill Jr. noted in his memoirs. ``But 
     politically, he damn near blew it. For if Drinan's resolution 
     had come up for a vote at the time he filed it, it would have 
     been overwhelmingly defeated--by something like 400 to 20. 
     After that, with most of the members already on record as 
     having voted once against impeachment, it would have been 
     extremely difficult to get them to change their minds later 
     on.''
       In 1975, Father Drinan filed an impeachment resolution 
     against U.S. ambassador to Iran Richard Helms for his 
     activities as director of the Central Intelligence Agency. 
     That same year, Father Drinan was chief plaintiff in a suit 
     filed by 21 Democratic congressmen to block U.S. military 
     involvement in Cambodia. It was later dismissed.
       Robert Frederick Drinan was born in Boston, the son of 
     James John Drinan and Ann Mary (Flanagan) Drinan. Father 
     Drinan grew up in Hyde Park. He played clarinet with the 
     Boston Civic Symphony and participated on the debating team 
     at Boston College. He entered the Society of Jesus in 1942, 
     after earning his bachelor's degree at Boston College.
       Father Drinan did his seminary work at Weston College in 
     Cambridge. (Daniel Berrigan, who would later become a noted 
     peace activist, was a classmate.) He received a master's from 
     Boston College in 1947 and two law degrees from Georgetown 
     University Law Center, the first in 1949 and a master's in 
     law in 1951. Ordained in 1953, he received a doctorate in 
     theology at Rome's Gregorian University.
       In 1955, he returned to Boston College as associate dean 
     and professor at its law school. He became dean a year later, 
     a position he held until 1969. Father Drinan served as Boston 
     College's vice president and provost from 1969 to 1970. 
     During his deanship, the law school went from being ``a 
     moribund institution,'' as a federal judge once described it, 
     to ranking among the nation's more highly regarded law 
     schools.
       Father Drinan found himself increasingly involved in public 
     issues. He served as chairman of the advisory committee for 
     Massachusetts of the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights. As part 
     of an ecumenical group, he went to South Vietnam in 1969 to 
     assess the state of religious and political freedom there.
       Asked in a 1970 Globe interview why he was running for 
     Congress, Father Drinan answered with a series of questions. 
     ``Why? Why not? Jesuit priests always have been avant-garde. 
     Right?''
       His candidacy drew nationwide attention. The conservative 
     columnist William F. Buckley Jr. called Father Drinan ``the 
     greatest threat to orderly thought since Eleanor Roosevelt 
     left this vale of tears.'' He won a three-way race in 
     November by 3,000 votes.
       Also elected to Congress in 1970 were such vehemently anti 
     war Democrats as Ron Dellums of California and Bella Abzug of 
     New York. Yet Father Drinan drew particular attention. In 
     January 1974, George H.W. Bush, who was then Republican Party 
     chairman, said there wasn't another congressman whose defeat 
     he more strongly hoped for than Father Drinan's. He promised 
     a major GOP drive to unseat him. None materialized.
       Last night, several of Father Drinan's colleagues said his 
     character and conscience made him a strong voice on Capitol 
     Hill. In a statement, Senator Edward Kennedy cited Father 
     Drinan's principled commitment to, among other causes, ending 
     the war in Vietnam. ``He was a profile in courage in every 
     sense of the word, and the nation has lost one of the finest 
     persons ever to serve in Congress,'' Kennedy said.
       ``When I arrived in Congress, Father Drinan was already 
     serving as the conscience of the House of Representatives 
     with every vote he cast,'' U.S. Representative Edward Markey 
     of Malden said. `` He was a man of faith who never stopped 
     searching for truth, and he was a committed educator who 
     stayed true to his faith.''
       After leaving Congress, Father Drinan returned to academe, 
     teaching international human rights, legal ethics, and 
     constitutional law at Georgetown University Law Center. He 
     published ``Can God and Caesar Coexist? Balancing Religious 
     Freedom and International Law'' (2005).
       In addition to keeping a heavy schedule of speeches and 
     writing, Father Drinan served on the board of Common Cause, 
     the citizens lobbying group, and spent two terms as president 
     of the liberal organization Americans for Democratic Action. 
     While in Congress, he had been a founder of the National 
     Interreligious Task Force for Soviet Jewry. (Father Drinan 
     was a strong supporter of Soviet Jews seeking emigration.) He 
     also served on the board of Bread for the World, an 
     organization dedicated to feeding the hungry. In a 1992 Globe 
     interview, Father Drinan called ending world hunger his 
     ``number one passion.''
       In that interview, Father Drinan was asked what he felt 
     about the Vatican's forcing him to choose between the clergy 
     and Congress. ``History will have to judge whether or not 
     that was a wise decision,'' he said.
       He leaves a sister-in-law, Helen, of Newton Highlands, and 
     three nieces.
       Funeral arrangements had not been made last night.

[[Page H963]]



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