Robert F. Drinan. (1920-2007)

 

Joyce Apsel, New York University

 

Robert Drinan, S.J.—priest, activist, and public intellectual, serving on the Advisory Board of the Institute for the Study of Genocide for decades---died on January 28, 2007 at age 86. He was a unique voice in American history for almost 50 years, a public intellectual and international human rights activist who was a priest, lawyer and law school teacher and dean, opponent of the Vietnam War and the first Roman Catholic priest to serve as a voting member of Congress (1970-1980).

 

He became Dean of Boston College Law School in 1969 in a city troubled with serious problems from education to segregation. Following his address at a rally on Vietnam Moratorium day on October 15, 1969, Drinan became the draft choice of an anti-war grassroots coalition and in an upset became the Democratic primary candidate and elected representative for Massachusett’s Third Congressional District. For a decade, he served in Congress where he spoke out passionately and worked on a range of social justice and human rights issues. He fought to end the Vietnam War, filed the first impeachment resolution against President Nixon, opposed U.S. funding for death squads in El Salvador, and worked to end the House Un-American Activities Committee. In 1981, the Vatican decreed that Roman Catholic priests could no longer hold elective office. Drinan complied with the decision and resumed his academic career, teaching law and ethics at Georgetown University Law School.

 

He continued to work for a range of social justice and peace organizations nationally and internationally and spoke up on human rights and peace issues. He was a founder of the Lawyer’s Alliance for Nuclear Arms Control, a member of the National Interreligious Task Force on Soviet Jewry to the Helsinki Watch Committee and National Council Advisory Member of the ACLU.

 

Drinan was the founder and faculty adviser of the Georgetown Journal of Legal Ethics. He authored 12 books on a range of public policy issues including Can God and Caesar Co-Exist? Balancing Religious Freedom & International Law (Yale University Press, 2004). His legacy of a life committed to social justice, linking morality to public policy, is a powerful one.