Slaves of the Immaculate Heart of Mary may refer to a number of different religious communities which all trace their roots to the St. Benedict Center, founded in 1940 by Catherine Clarke in Harvard Square, Cambridge, Massachusetts. In 1945, Leonard Feeney became chaplain of the center. Clarke and Feeney formed the Slaves of the Immaculate Heart of Mary, an unofficial Catholic community. The group relocated to Still River, a village in the town of Harvard, Massachusetts. After Clarke's death, around 1968, the group separated into two Benedictine houses, St. Benedict Abbey and St. Scholastica's Priory, a diocesan women's religious community; and a Public Association of the Faithful in the Diocese of Worcester, Massachusetts. A fifth group split from the Stillwater Center and founded a separate self-identified Catholic community in New Hampshire. The latter has no canonical status.
In 1940, Catherine Clarke and several associates founded the St. Benedict Center in Harvard Square in Cambridge, Massachusetts, as a student center for students attending college in the Boston area. Leonard Feeney, S.J., became chaplain at the center in 1945. Feeney held rigid views regarding the doctrine Extra Ecclesiam nulla salus. Feeney criticized Boston Archbishop Richard Cardinal Cushing for, among other things, accepting the church's definition of "baptism of desire". In January 1949, a number of individuals who attended the center formed, under Feeney's guidance, an unofficial religious community. That same year, Cushing declared the St. Benedict's Center off-limits to Catholics. Boston College and Boston College High School dismissed four of the center's members from the theology faculty for promoting Feeney's version of Extra Ecclesiam doctrine in their classrooms, and after they had sent a letter to the administration accusing the theology department of teaching heresy. In light of his controversial behavior, Feeney's Jesuit superiors ordered him to leave the center for a post at the College of the Holy Cross, but he repeatedly refused, which led to his expulsion from the order. Cushing suspended Feeney's priestly faculties in April 1949; Feeney continued to celebrate the sacraments, although he was no longer authorized to do so. After Feeney repeatedly refused to reply to a summons to Rome to explain himself, he was excommunicated on February 13, 1953 by the Holy See for persistent disobedience to legitimate Church authority.
Increasingly isolated in the Boston Catholic community, in January 1958, the group moved from Cambridge to a farm in the town of Harvard in Worcester County, where they settled into a semi-monastic life. With the death of Clarke in 1968, the group began to fragment. The Still River property was divided among the three groups.
St. Benedict Abbey, a member of the Swiss-American Congregation of Benedictine monasteries. For women who wished to become Benedictines, it was formed with assistance from Stanbrook Abbey, St. Scholastica Priory, and is now located in Petersham, Massachusetts.
Sisters of St. Benedict Center, Slaves of the Immaculate Heart of Mary, a canonically recognized religious community in the Diocese of Worcester.
The Slaves of the Immaculate Heart of Mary of Saint Benedict Center, Still River, Massachusetts, which Bishop McManus raised to a Public Association of the Faithful in the Diocese of Worcester in 2017. The sisters of the community teach at the school.
Immaculate Heart of Mary School is a private school located on the Saint Benedict Center property. It was established in 1976 and accommodates about 135 students in grades 1-12. Every school day begins with the Latin Tridentine Mass.
Richmond, New Hampshire
The "Feeneyites" moved to Still River in 1958 and, because of doctrinal-canonical disputes with ecclesiastical authority and divergent views on the future of the group, later split into three separate groups. A civil court divided the Still River real property among them. After an internal electoral struggle, and having lost a suit in civil court to compel his superiorship of the original group, Dr. Fakhri Boutros Maluf, who had taken the name Brother Francis, M.I.C.M., founded a branch of the group within the Diocese of Manchester, New Hampshire as "founding superior" in the mid-1980s. Maluf, a Melkite by ascription, had given Tuesday-night lectures in philosophy at the Saint Benedict Center in Harvard Square starting in the early 1940s. It was Maluf’s September 1947 article "Sentimental Theology", published in the Saint Benedict Center’s publication From the Housetops, that would definitively begin Feeney’s conflict with ecclesiastical authorities. In January 2019, the vicar for canonical affairs for the Diocese of Manchester advised the group that they were to stop representing themselves as Catholic. "The Diocese of Manchester said...the theological teachings of the Slaves of the Immaculate Heart of Mary in Richmond, N.H., were declared 'unacceptable' last year by the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith in Rome, charged with safeguarding Catholic teachings. Specifically, the group preaches that only Catholics can go to heaven." Out of pastoral concern for those who work, live at, or reside near the Saint Benedict Center, the Bishop of Manchester arranged for the celebration of the extraordinary form of the Mass at Saint Stanislaus Church in Winchester. The group was further directed to amend its IRS 501 filing to remove any representation that it was affiliated with the Catholic Church.
