Friday, May 6, 2011

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.

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

Studies in the Spirituality of Jesuits, Spring 2011:

Fr. Milton T. Walsh, "To always be thinking somehow about Jesus": The Prologue of Ludolph's Vita Christi

From the San Francisco Chronicle, October 5, 2002:

The Rev. Milton T. Walsh was booked on charges of two counts of lewd or lascivious acts with a child under 14 years old and is free on $100,000 bail. He was placed on leave in August from St. Patrick's Seminary in Menlo Park, where he has been a professor of theology since 1997.

Anonymous said...

"But I think at the end of the day, I am still a Roman Catholic"--
Fr. Clooney

He said this. He really did. Pray for our priests.

Jack in Park Slope said...

In an interview Fr. Clooney, S.J. made this statement,

"But my job is to convert Christians, to open their minds and hearts to learn from the other traditions. In a sense, I am evangelising the Christian population. Luckily, I am not the Pope, so I do not have to solve the problem of how to balance everything exactly."

http://groups.creighton.edu/sjdialogue/documents/articles/clooney_frontline.html