A Book Review Of The Jesuit Authored "Divine Mother, Blessed Mother"

While attending a Catholic Record Society conference in England a while back, I came across Francis X. Clooney’s book Divine Mother, Blessed Mother among those Oxford University Press had put on display. I skimmed a few pages and surmised that it might be the fruit of anti-Marian feminism grafted onto anti-missionary ecumenism. I was wrong. It’s even worse. It’s an invitation to apostasy. 

In the preface, Clooney, a Jesuit priest, recalls that he first visited a “goddess temple” at age 23, in 1973. He has studied Hinduism for thirty years and has taught comparative theology at Boston College since 1984. In Divine Mother, Blessed Mother, he takes three hymns addressed to three Hindu “goddesses” and contrasts them with three hymns addressed to Our Lady, in order to teach us “what it means to worship a goddess.” 

He is writing, he says, with feminist scholarship as his “guiding frame,” to contribute to the rectifying of “gender imbalances.” No surprise, then, that his tome is dedicated to women who are “silenced” and “ignored,” especially in the Catholic Church.

Link (here) to the full and lengthy review of the book at The New Oxford Review.