[4][5][6] After April 1949 the affair became a public scandal when Feeney undertook in the press the defence of dismissed laymen[7] who were teaching in the Jesuit College (founded in Boston by the Society of Jesus in 1863) that those who were not members of the Catholic Church were damned.

Feeney began speaking on Boston Common, gathering large crowds of up to 2,000 people to his public meetings, both supporters and hecklers.

[10] Feeney would frequently throw visceral barbs back at his hecklers, describing them as "sexually degenerate, fairy, lewd, obscene, dirty, filthy, rotten, pawns, pimps, and frauds".

[10] On 8 August 1949, Cardinal Francesco Marchetti Selvaggiani of the Holy Office sent a protocol letter to Archbishop Richard Cushing on the meaning of the dogma extra Ecclesiam nulla salus ("outside the Church there is no salvation").

[12] Following his excommunication, Feeney co-founded a community called the Slaves of the Immaculate Heart of Mary with Catherine Goddard Clarke.

[18][19][20] This reconciliation without Feeney's recantation, reports the National Catholic News Service, "came about at least in part through the intervention of Cardinal Humberto Medeiros of Boston who had attended lectures at St. Benedict's during his days as a seminarian.

[20] Feeney made few public appearances in his final years, because he was suffering from Parkinson's disease and a chronic heart ailment.

[26] As a Harvard undergraduate, Robert Francis "Bobby" Kennedy attended a meeting of students at which he stood up and challenged Feeney, later storming out following the priest's assertion that there was no salvation outside the Catholic faith.

[27] A similarly negative reaction to Feeney's teaching was recorded by British novelist and Catholic convert Evelyn Waugh, who wrote of visiting the priest while in the United States:[28] I went one morning by appointment & found him surrounded by a court of bemused youths of both sexes & he stark, raving mad.

He shouted that Newman had done irreparable damage to the Church then started on Ronnie Knox's Mass in Slow Motion saying 'To think that any innocent girl of 12 could have this blasphemous & obscene book put into her hands' as though it were Lady Chatterley's Lover.

A case of demoniac possession & jolly frightening.A few years later Feeney wrote critically of Knox and Newman in his collection of essays London is a Place, with an unsympathetic passing reference to Waugh's biography of St. Helena:[29] on the list of [Knox's] recurrent callers, was Mr. Evelyn (pronounced Evil-in) Waugh, whose father, a London publisher, supplied his sons with early printing privileges in pornography, before one of them (Evelyn) turned to hagiography, and whitened his sepulchre with the life of a saint.

In 2003, in an article for The Jewish Week newspaper, editor Gary Rosenblatt wrote:[30]In a lesser-known case, Richard Cardinal Cushing excommunicated a priest, Leonard Feeney, in 1953, for preaching that all non-Catholics would go to Hell.