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In a letter to his would-be constituents on Boston College Law School stationery, Dean Drinan invited voters to the forthcoming caucus in Concord and reminded them that his new book, Vietnam and Armageddon, would appear very soon an “outline of a new challenging foreign policy for the United States in the 1970s.” And, he asserted, his visit to Israel in 1964 had made him highly qualified on Middle Eastern affairs. In a subsequent letter he pointed to his article in the current edition Theological Studies on abortion for those who had questions on that subject, which was not a big campaign issue but was roiling offstage. But as the campaign progressed, on a talk show, during a debate, and in interviews, both publications would give him some close calls. One would imperil his progress, and both would challenge and raise questions about his skill as a campaigner and spokesperson.

After Drinan completed his fifth term and left Congress in January 1981, Georgetown Law quickly offered him a professorship, and he returned to a modest room in the ancient Mulledy Hall and a very challenging and satisfying new life. For the most part, this gave him every opportunity, comparable to his congressional influence, to work for the goals of what he had come to consider essential during his “best” ten years. But much of what he did during the congressional years he kept doing. He wrote seven books, many journal articles and reviews, and a regular column for the National Catholic Reporter, which gave him every opportunity to reach a large Catholic and ecumenical audience with his political views. And he wrote regularly for America, the magazine that had given him his start.

Congressman Drinan's four-page occasional newsletter to his constituents summed up the achievements of 1974 and outlined the challenges ahead in 1975, celebrating the end of the “dark night” of Watergate and offering hope, based on the arrival of “75 new and generally progressive Democrats” in the House and the “erosion of the seniority rule.” This, it was hoped, might lead to a decreased military budget, national health insurance, a coherent energy policy, and antitrust measures against multinational corporations. Drinan was appalled that in five months 50,000 to 100,000 had died of starvation in Bangladesh while 26.6 percent of the administration's Food for Peace budget was earmarked for Indochina. He saw the issues of world hunger, global inflation, and arms control as tied together. Money spent on arms took men and money out of the private sector, where it could increase the volume of consumer goods and decrease prices.

This chapter focuses on Father Drinan's childhood years as well as his experiences at Boston College. Topics covered include his years in grammar school and Hyde Park High, his arrival at Boston College in 1938, his encounter with English teacher Father Richard Gregory Shea, and his decision to join the Jesuit novitiate at Shadowbrook.

This chapter focuses on Drinan's last two years in Congress. In 1979–80 he alone or with congressional or ecumenical colleagues flew to South Africa in February; to Hong Kong, Thailand, Indonesia, Malaysia, and Hanoi in August; and finally to Guatemala, Nicaragua, and a return to El Salvador in December and January. He reported his findings for America; or, in twenty-nine-page co-written reports, he fingered guilty foreign leaders and recommended changes in national policy. His last legislative challenge, which spread over almost two years, was an ordeal, a grind, a noble effort, and only a partial success: the reform of the federal criminal code. John Paul II's order that Drinan withdraw his candidacy for a sixth term is also described.

Drinan's interests and areas of expertise were broadening, to the point where, although he had zero political experience and had never even registered as a member of a political party, he could at least appear to be as well informed as any candidate for office. On January 12, 1970, Drinan met with Peter O'Malley, a Catholic; Kenneth Wilson, a Protestant; and Obermayer, a Jew, and asked to run for office.

Drinan's grades were consistent from his freshman year at Boston College up to his last year at Weston. He entered and left Boston College as an honors student, graduating cum laude, and left Weston with the same cum laude mark. Like many excellent students, he decided early that he was in the long run going to profit more from following his interests in extracurricular activities, most of which were intellectual, than from cramming for Latin oral exams. Unlike his peers, he ended his course having published articles in America and other national Catholic magazines. The record suggests that three things happened to young Drinan in the five years between his approaching ordination and his arrival at Boston College as a law professor. First, he finally broke out of the isolation of rural Weston into an international setting, one that he had requested several times and finally achieved. Second, he got the ego boost an ambitious young man needs by writing for The Boston Pilot, America, Commonweal, and the Catholic World. Third, these scholarly articles in the “popular” press planted the seeds for the ethical, moral, and legal positions he would take up more than a decade later.

As 1971 played out, Drinan, still in his first year as a congressman, doggedly and single-mindedly pursued the issue that had brought him to Congress—ending the Vietnam War—all the while paying due diligence to the needs of his constituents. He averaged about a dozen major speeches a year—preaching at Masses, addressing high school and university graduations, and talking in synagogues and in church halls. Letters poured in on the strife and famine in Pakistan, and above all on Vietnam. The writers reminded Drinan that they had voted for him and now urged him to make even more effort to deliver on his promises. Some asked, What more can we do? He told some to join the Common Cause, the private nonpartisan association he considered the most effective. On July 1 1971, Drinan sat down with his tape recorder and composed some “reflections” on his first six months in Congress. The resulting essay was basically a promotion of the Common Cause, but along the way he revealed something about his expectations for churches in public life.

Drinan's expedition to Argentina was in the tradition of his 1969 flight with an investigating committee to Vietnam—a team of concerned human rights activists, this time representing Amnesty International, who wanted to talk to presidents and prisoners, visit scenes of alleged crimes, and question the victims as well as those responsible. They wished to alert the larger world to a local crime that demanded global attention. It was also a foreshadowing of a major direction his life and career were about to take. What he learned in Argentina he would reinforce the next year in El Salvador, and the following year in South Africa and Southeast Asia again, and finally a return to El Salvador and other countries in Central America during what would become his last year in office. But the combined impact of all these experiences would transform him into one of America's leading apostles for human rights, both in and out of office.

In the fall of 1973 Drinan sat down for a long interview with editor Alan Westin for the Civil Liberties Review. It was a friendly interview that focused on the work of the Judiciary Committee, and particularly on Subcommittee Three, which concerned itself with prison reform, capital punishment, the newsman's privilege, and repeal of the Emergency Detention Act of 1950, also known as preventive detention, whereby the executive branch had the power to round up and detain people without due process of law. Echoing his retreat notebook of 1968, in which he exclaimed that he had gone “13 years Without a Voice!” Drinan complained that he had come to Congress in 1970 not only for a “voice”—which he had had as a dean, speaker, and writer—but for a “vote.” He discovered, though, that the seniority system, controlled by conservative committee chairmen, prevented him from voting on issues that really mattered to him.

This chapter begins with a description of Father Drinan's life in Shadowbrook as a novice. In the 20th century up through to the time of the Vatican Council II in the early 1960s, the formation strategy, very strictly during the novitiate and slightly modified through philosophy and theology, was to isolate the young Jesuits from worldly distractions. Only in this way could they focus rigidly on developing spiritual discipline and the ability to meditate fruitfully and to live simply, free of the material paraphernalia of books, magazines, records, radios, favorite sweaters, hobbies, sports heroes, family, and friends that clutter the mind. The chapter then details his further studies and his experiences after his ordination on June 20, 1953.

During the first week of January 1971 Father Robert F. Drinan moved into another new world, one that called for him to assume a new role and a new identity. And the decade of American history into which he was carried had begun to accumulate its own unforeseen peculiarities. Dubbed in 1976 by author Tom Wolfe “The Me Decade,” the 1970s had a new ethos that grew in some ways out of an idealistic, positive, revolutionary movement—the morally based protest against the Vietnam War— that had propelled Drinan into office. But now it was beginning to shatter.

This introductory chapter begins by exploring the impact of Father Drinan on his time. It describes several instances, from the 1960s onward, of how Drinan touched the lives of the people around him. It then sets out the purpose of the book, which is to introduce the boy from the Boston town of Hyde Park who moved into the larger world of Boston College in 1938, then into many larger worlds—the Society of Jesus, the Church in Europe, religious journalism, law study in the nation's capital, teaching, academic administration, civil rights, Vietnam, Massachusetts politics, Congress, Central America, Soviet Russia, Southeast Asia, Latin America, and book writing. And then he turned to twenty-six years of teaching law, all the while advocating for disarmament and human rights.

In 1970, the year Drinan left Boston College to run for office, his abortion stand gained major attention in two scholarly studies: Daniel Callaha's Abortion: Law, Choice and Morality (1970) and Germain Grisez's Abortion: The Myths, the Realities, and the Arguments (1970). Both were struck by the manner in which Drinan's ethical stance had evolved from “The Inviolability of the Right to Be Born,” published in Abortion and the Law (1967) and which appeared in other sources, where he declared that “any change of a substantial kind in America's abortion laws would be a notable departure from that body of Anglo-American law which regulates conduct deemed to constitute a crime against society” to articles, like those in America, in which he foresaw the public swing against abortion restrictions and urged Catholics to seek compromise legislation with abortion reformers. Then he moved to the stance where he proposed that, for various reasons, the law should say nothing about abortion. His central point, considered unusual at the time, was that while he maintained that abortion was immoral, the law should say nothing about it, because to legislate the conditions under which a pregnancy would be terminated would be to sanction the termination itself.

Events ranging from the bombing of Vietnam to the renewed ban on contraception prompted Drinan to chart his course to establish greater public influence. But the underlying question of the mid-1960s was: Just what is the proper role for the priest in this post-Vatican II world? In his writings and lectures he was already supporting conscientious objection and the right to demonstrate and break an unjust law in order to protest what one views as a social evil. He did not shrink from being called a liberal, but, perhaps by personal disposition, he could not personally identify himself as a member of the Catholic Left. As a law professor and a priest, he was not ready to go to jail, but he sensed that he had to do more than teach and talk.