Slaves of the Immaculate Heart of Mary may refer to a number of different religious communities who all trace their roots to the St. Benedict Center founded in 1940 by Catherine Clarke in Harvard Square, Boston. 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. Bernard Center in Harvard Square, 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 ("outside the Church there is no salvation"). Feeney criticized Boston Archbishop Richard Cardinal Cushing for, among other things, accepting the church’s definition of “baptism of desire". Finally, in 1949, Cushing declared Feeney's St. Benedict's Center off-limits to Catholics.[1] That same year Boston College and Boston College High School dismissed four of the Center's members from the theology faculty after they sent a letter to the administration accusing the theology department of teaching heresy.[2][3] In light of his controversial behavior, his Jesuit superiors ordered him to leave the Center for a post at 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.[4] 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 due to his refusal to comply.[1]
Clarke and Feeney established the Slaves of the Immaculate Heart of Mary as an unofficial Catholic community. In January 1958, the group moved from Cambridge to a farm in the town of Harvard. With the death of Clarke in 1968, the group began to fragment.(Feeney died in 1978). The Still River property was divided among the three constituent groups.
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.[8] "The Diocese of Manchester said on Tuesday 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."[9] 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 (Latin Mass) at Saint Stanislaus Church in Winchester.[10] The group was further directed to amend their IRS 501(c)3 filing to remove any representation that they were affiliated with the Catholic Church.[11]