A Kerry-Drinan Connection?

By Diogenes ( articles ) | Nov 02, 2004

Though he lacks a smoking gun, Thomas Lipscomb speculates in the New York Sun that John Kerry's public explanation for getting dinged by Harvard Law School -- viz., Harvard didn't accept tardy applicants but BC did -- may not be the whole story:

It is hard to see why Mr. Kerry had to file an "extremely late" application since he lost the congressional race in Lowell, MA, the first week of November 1972 and was basically doing nothing until he entered law school the following September of 1973. A member of the Harvard Law School admissions committee recalled that the real reason Mr. Kerry was not admitted was because the committee was concerned that because Mr. Kerry had received a less than honorable discharge they were not sure he could be admitted to any state bar.

The fact that Mr. Kerry had cancelled his candidacy for a Congressional seat in 1970 in favor of Father Robert Drinan cannot have hurt Mr. Kerry's admission to Boston College. The Reverend Robert Drinan's previous position was dean of the Boston College Law School.

In briefest terms: Kerry was a rival of Drinan's for the 1970 Democratic nomination as Massachusetts 3rd Congressional District candidate. Lipscomb is suggesting that Kerry took a dive by withdrawing before the primary, leaving Drinan alone against incumbent Phil Philben (whom he handily defeated) and as part of his reward was winked into BC Law School three years later. There's no evidence for this thesis beyond the memory of the unnamed member of the HLS admissions board, but there is an intriguing connection between Lipscomb's story and one which ran in Catholic World Report eight years ago, detailing how Drinan's New England Jesuit superior, Fr. William Guindon, S.J., duped the Jesuit General Pedro Arrupe into reversing his prohibition of the Drinan candidacy in 1970, and then foxed him again in 1972 by claiming that no qualified Catholic layman could be found in Massachusetts to take Drinan's place.

[Fr. Guindon] denied Arrupe's claim, based on the reports of American bishops, that qualified laymen were available to run for Drinan's office, and stated flatly that no layman had demonstrated the moral vision necessary for such an office. The American bishops had a surreptitious political agenda of their own, he asserted, and their judgment in the Drinan case was based on outdated theology.

Beautiful.

Speaking of outdated theology, we're still waiting for the results of the McCarrick Commission's investigation into the propriety of denying communion to pro-abortion politicians ...