St. Benedict Center and No Salvation Outside the Church, 1940-1953

This essay argues that historians of American Catholicism have paid little attention to the issue of the relationship between the Church and salvation. The issue has been important in American Catholic thought since the time of John Carroll, but came to the fore most publicly in the late 1940's and early 1950's at the Cambridge, Massachusetts, St. Benedict Center where Father Leonard Feeney and his young associates taught that no salvation existed outside of the Catholic Church. And yet, few general histories of American Catholicism have examined the episode, which is important for what it reveals about the Catholic understanding of the substantive issue of salvation.