Over at First Things, Peter Sprigg, who worked in Drinan’s office briefly and is now with the Family Research Council, remembers and tries to understand:

One thing that Congressman Drinan said during that period has always stayed with me. In the immediate aftermath of the pope’s order [for Drinan to step down] , there were several meetings of Drinan supporters to discuss what to do next. I should note that many of his closest political supporters were not Catholic, despite Massachusetts’ large Catholic population. Instead, they were Jewish, Protestant like me, or essentially secular. One of those supporters asked the congressman the question that may have been on the minds of many of them—“Why not just ignore the pope?”

I have never forgotten Drinan’s simple, four-word answer: “That would be unthinkable.

snip

A quarter of a century after my relationship with Robert Drinan ended, those two single words I heard him speak are what I remember most. One was his acknowledgment that abortion is “infanticide.” The second was his declaration that with regard to the end of his congressional career, defying the pope would be “unthinkable.” How tragic it is that defying the pope’s teaching on such “infanticide” was not equally “unthinkable.”