Drinan and the FBI

Michael Paulson up at The Boston Globe used a Freedom of Information Act request to obtain copies of the late Rev. Robert Drinan’s FBI file. The fact that the FBI even kept a file on Drinan (the first and only Jesuit priest to serve in Congress) was the subject of controversy. Pope John Paul II […]

Michael Paulson up at The Boston Globe used a Freedom of Information Act request to obtain copies of the late Rev. Robert Drinan’s FBI file. The fact that the FBI even kept a file on Drinan (the first and only Jesuit priest to serve in Congress) was the subject of controversy. Pope John Paul II made Drinan resign from Congress in 1981, saying it wasn’t proper for men of the cloth to be serving in government.

Money quote:

“The file indicates that the FBI had run its first check on Drinan in 1960, a decade before his election to Congress; upon his election, a note indicates that the bureau’s files “reflect that the Reverend Drinan has been active in civil rights matters.”


In 1971, a suspicious nun wrote FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover, saying, “I had doubted Father Drinan’s authenticity as a Catholic priest because I had read of certain views he expressed that seemed to be un-American, as well as unorthodox, from a religious standpoint. If he is someone who has been ‘planted’ in the church, he could do great harm.”

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