ISBN: 9780567710253 (pp. 208); T&T Clark (Bloomsbury Publishing)
“Hindu and Catholic, Priest and Scholar: A Love Story” (2024)
Memoir of Francis X. Clooney, S.J.
“Hindu and Catholic, Priest and Scholar: A Love Story” is the extraordinary memoir of Francis X. Clooney, S.J., the Parkman Professor of Divinity and Professor of Comparative Theology, Harvard Divinity School, and the foremost Jesuit scholar on Hinduism. Clooney is 74 years old, author of 29 books, listed below. The memoir offers a sweeping account of his life as a Catholic Priest, Hindu Scholar, and a University Teacher for over forty years. The memoir provides intimate details of Clooney’s “life on display”, his “curriculum vitae”.
The overarching theme of the memoir, termed by Clooney as the “inner story” of his life, is God’s grace. Clooney offers a poignant summary of this in the Preface: “At every stage of my life, I have received far more than I have given. Early on, or even in midlife, I could not have imagined ending up where I am today. I am still surprised: that I was touched by God at age fifteen, infused with enough of God for a lifetime; that I became a Jesuit in 1968 at age eighteen, and stayed; that I surprised everyone, myself included, by wanting to go to Kathmandu in 1973 to teach, and was allowed to do so; that I was ordained a Catholic priest in 1978, at age twenty-seven; that I wanted to get a PhD in South Asian Studies rather than theology, and was allowed to do so; that I got a tenure-track position at Boston College in 1984, thanks to a chance opening there in 1982 and the proactive recruitment of a wise Jesuit chair; that I was offered a chair at Harvard in 2005, and encouraged by my fellow Jesuits to accept it; that over the decades I have visited South Asia twenty times, on visits as long as two years, as short as four days; that I was elected to the leadership of the Catholic Theological Society of America, and as I was desperately trying to finish this book, serving as its president during 2022–3; that over forty of my peers and former students have just published a festschrift for me; that I am now in my twenty-seventh year of helping out on weekends at one small parish in Sharon, Massachusetts. Most of all, I want to show something of what it has meant for me to be a priest and scholar, a Catholic immersed in Hindu studies for most of a lifetime. All of this is grace, none of it predictable. It is, as my subtitle tells us, a love story”
Clooney notes that his life and his work are “stubbornly intertwined”, and “inseparable”. No part of him “makes sense on its own, without the others: priest and scholar, Hindu and Christian”. In all his writing, and the memoir, Clooney’s goal is “to provide exercises, work to be done by readers themselves, inquiring into the deep currents of their own lives”. This is fundamentally a Jesuit approach, with “all of life as a series of intellectual-spiritual exercises”.
The memoir is divided into two parts. The first part (chapters 1-7) describes the origins and growth of Clooney’s intellectual and spiritual identity between 1966 and 1993, as a Jesuit priest and Hindu scholar. By 1993, his “double formation as a Catholic, a priest, and a Jesuit, and immersed in Hindu wisdom and insight” was largely complete. The second part (chapters 8-10) tells the story of his professional career as a teacher at Boston College (1984-2005) and Harvard University (2005-present), and as an academic forging new frontiers in comparative theology, i.e., faith seeking understanding across religious borders, of Catholic and Hindu faith traditions.
Clooney was born into a middle-class Irish Catholic family in Brooklyn, New York. His parents were “loving and conscientious”, and his early life “uneventful, quiet, and happy in an ordinary way.” When he was baptized in August 1950, Clooney was given the name, Francis Xavier, after the Jesuit founder, Ignatius Loyola (1491–1556), who traveled to India from Europe in 1540 to spend his life in Asia. More than 400 years later, Clooney traveled to India as well in the 1990s to learn from the country’s Hindu traditions.
Clooney was a brilliant student, with primary education at St. Christopher’s School (Staten Island). He won a scholarship to Regis High School, Manhattan (1964-1968), the best Jesuit school in the United States at the time. Regarding his Regis experience, Clooney writes, “it was good for me finally to be in a class with peers clearly smarter than me”.
Reading was a Clooney family tradition, “always visiting the local public library”, with parents setting “a great example”. Clooney says, “My learning has always been a matter of reading as patiently, carefully, deeply as I can”. Later on, he learned Sanskrit and Tamil the same way. Clooney was greatly enthralled by Russian novels, especially Dostoyevsky’s Brothers Karamazov that he read as a teenager. Clooney writes that reading Brothers Karamazov “gave words” to the “primal tension in my coming of age as a spiritual being”.
A pivotal moment in his life has been the night of July 6, 1966, when Clooney was fifteen. He had the “defining religious experience” of his life, “a single instance of God-touch.” He “felt a very strong presence, a physical nearness” that he “knew to be God coming to me”. Clooney embraced the experience to mean that his “life was now in the hands of the God who had touched me”, and that he could from then on “be only-for-God”. His life as a scholar, focused on research and learning from Hindu traditions, was “always going to be about glimpsing God’s presence everywhere, especially in moments of quiet study”. For Clooney, “everything changed all at once” on that July night, “all now a witness to the intense nearness of God.”
As he progressed in his faith journey, Clooney learned that his experience could be understood in “Jesuit terms, in light of the spirituality of Ignatius Loyola”, who had mystical experiences, including a defining moment by the Cardoner River in 1522, when he was recuperating from a leg injury. As Ignatius sat facing the river, “the eyes of his understanding began to be opened, though he did not see any vision”. It was “so great an enlightenment that everything seemed new to him”, as if he was “a new man with a new intellect, enough for his entire life.” The rest of his life was a “working out of that unexpected, transformative moment” for Ignatius. Reading about the Cardoner experience, Clooney felt “nourished by Ignatius’ wisdom” that allowed him to pray, “simply, patiently, quietly, words unnecessary, often impossible”.
Clooney also learned later that his religious experience in 1966 was “an almost commonplace claim in Hindu and Buddhist mystical traditions: a moment of illumination that changes everything because you come to see it all differently”. His “recognition of God-everywhere” paved the way later for the “world of Hindu wisdom and experience” into his life in 1973, when he went to Kathmandu, Nepal.
In the fall of 1966, Clooney told his family that he wanted to become a Jesuit. Following interviews and mandatory psychological testing, he was accepted as a novice in August 1968, one of the seventeen young men that entered the Jesuit novitiate in Poughkeepsie, New York. The late 1960s were “a time of turmoil in American life and great change in the church”. Only four of the seventeen made it to vows, and just three to ordination, consistent with the overall decline in the Jesuit Order membership during this time. Clooney notes that the “diminishment is essential to the American Jesuit story” that he has experienced, albeit “a purification, a stripping away of ego, freeing us of illusions of inevitable upward progress.”
In September 1970, Clooney completed the three vows of Jesuit formation: obedience, poverty, and chastity. Becoming a Jesuit “widened my small world more than I could have hoped”. The vows “introduced a bold set of submissions and restraints that would intensify and focus my life”. Jesuit life has been “a deep formation”, for Clooney, “crisscrossing the borders between two religions”. Clooney was “blessed to be formed a second time” a few years later, when he started learning Hindu traditions.
Clooney received a BA in Philosophy and Classics from Fordham University, New York, in 1973. From July 7, 1973, to early August 1975, Clooney lived and taught at St. Xavier’s School, Kathmandu, Nepal, a boarding school for classes 6–12. Clooney found Kathmandu, a “place of spectacular beauty, a long history, and ancient cultures not ruined by colonialism”, a great setting for reimagining “what it meant to be a Jesuit in the latter half of the twentieth century”.
Clooney had come to Kathmandu as part of the “regency” requirements of Jesuit formation, two or three years of teaching in a Jesuit high school, before theology studies. The period aims to test whether a young Jesuit can live in an ordinary Jesuit community, and function in a typical job later. Clooney came to teach in Nepal rather than America, treading a “singular path” that he devised mostly, but in reality “it was as if God was planning ahead”.
Clooney wanted to go to India for three reasons: (i) He admired Mahatma Gandhi and Mother Teresa; (ii) He learned that Sanskrit, “the ancient sacred language of Hinduism”, was of the same language family as Latin and Greek, so that he could build on and extend his knowledge of classical languages; (iii) He wanted to live among the poor. However, Clooney had to choose Nepal, given the near impossibility of getting a two-or three-year Indian visa in 1973 to teach at a Christian school. At the time, he lacked any informed sense of Hinduism, or familiarity with texts such as the Bhagavad Gita, which he read just before traveling to Nepal, or the practice of yoga. However, Clooney was “not one of the innumerable young people seeking spiritual nourishment in the East”, since the “presence of God in my life was already enough for many lifetimes”.
Slowly, he “entered in small ways into Hindu culture”. During his very first visit to a temple of the goddess Durga (Kali) outside the Kathmandu valley, Clooney experienced “a sense of connection and harmony”, though he could not explain or justify his “deep intuitive openness” to the Goddess. He “found the experience in an odd way in harmony with the rich piety and ritualism of my own Catholic faith growing up”. Given his Catholic upbringing, Clooney “could not imagine visiting a temple merely as a tourist or simply as an observer”, but “began to connect with Hindu religious culture”.
Clooney began to read as well, with Gitanjali (Garland of Songs), a book of 103 poems by Rabindranath Tagore (1861–1941), as the very first book in September 1973, “by chance and grace”. Tagore wrote Gitanjali in 1912, at a time of loss of his wife, daughter, and son, for which he won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1913, becoming the first non-Westerner to win any Nobel Prize. Clooney read Gitanjali’s opening verses (“Thou hast made me endless, such is thy pleasure”) with some “astonishment”, but also “with recognition, and a sense of connection”. Over the years, Clooney has used Gitanjali on innumerable occasions to show that what he means by an “openness to God” is an “openness to everyone and everything around us”. Clooney’s “theoretical sense of the East”, and his plan to learn from Hinduism, had “suddenly come alive”, in the “kindred spirit of Tagore, singer of songs”.
Clooney also had to explore new ground intellectually and spiritually, given the demands of teaching high-school students. He had to teach “moral science” to ninth graders, for which Clooney turned to the stories of gods and heroes of Hindu and Buddhist tradition, more relevant to his students. He also started sharing passages from the Bhagavad Gita in classes. Though he did not know the Gita well, Clooney taught by learning the material ahead of the class. Certain passages and themes stood out to him: “the eternal self (Gita 2); detached action (Gita 3–5); yoga as a way to Krishna (Gita 6); astonishing, terrifying love of God seen face-to-face (Gita 11); utter surrender (Gita 18.66)”. Clooney therefore became “a Catholic teacher of Hinduism and Buddhism”. He was also “graced with the gift of learning” from students, reading “with great interest” whatever they gave him. Clooney writes, “Unless we are willing to learn from our students, we cannot effectively teach them”. It was the classroom energy that sparked and energized his teaching in the decades to follow.
In 1974, Clooney became a vegetarian, “rather accidentally”. Some students complained that despite their “rhetoric”, the Jesuits ate much better than the staff and students, including meat. Clooney realized that the gap between “how I lived and how I wanted to live” was “intolerable”. Clooney “did not want to be a Jesuit in Asia” living “so much more comfortably” than those around him, as if the “Jesuit vow was a talisman warding off the ordinary poverty of the poor”. Therefore, Clooney decided not to eat meat at all, in solidarity with the students and the wider community.
St. Xavier’s provided a perfect setting for Clooney to juxtapose his traditional Catholic upbringing with the Hindu and Buddhist culture. While he was not interested in becoming a Hindu or Buddhist, Clooney wanted to be a Jesuit priest “deeply changed by Hindu learning”. Clooney’s life since 1975 may be viewed as “keeping up with what I learned and saw in Kathmandu”, and the “great opening that occurred in my hitherto provincial Catholic view of things”.
Clooney returned to New York in August 1975, and moved to Cambridge, Massachusetts in September, to study theology at Weston School of Theology, which later became the School of Theology and Ministry at Boston College. At Weston, Clooney completed his formation as a Catholic priest and Jesuit; he was ordained as a deacon in 1977, and a priest in 1978 when he was twenty-seven.
Clooney found it hard to fit back into American life after two years of a “starkly simpler” life in Kathmandu. He had changed, missing “proximity to real poverty, small moments of bereftness, lack, marginalization”. Intellectually as well, the questions posed his time in South Asia had “no place in the curriculum or life of the community”. Despite the “erudition and generosity” of his professors, Clooney was “quietly bored by most theology courses”. He could not put aside the experience of his two years in South Asia, with the “images, scents, words, and practices of Hinduism” beginning to take root inside him spiritually, both as “objects of study” and “gifts not incidental to my vocation”. Clooney was “anxious that my experience not be talked and taught out of existence”.
While the Weston education was excellent, it did not draw on Clooney’s passion for the “close study of texts”. Clooney missed the “front and center interreligious realities” that he had begun to experience in Kathmandu. He also “yearned for a more demanding intellectual life”, where the questions would be “raw, hard, and not answered in advance”. He “did not want to be given answers”, but “wanted to be forced to think”. It was only during his doctoral studies that Clooney was able to expand “the borders of my intellectual life”.
Clooney also experienced personal challenges during this time, with the first year at Weston “the hardest in my fifty-five years as a Jesuit”. He was “confused, not sure of what I wanted”. But right then, “God visited me again”. One morning, as he stood on the rocks by the ocean in the warmth of the rising sun, Clooney was suddenly “flooded as if by beams of God’s warming radiance”. He “felt a wordless reassurance, God bathing me in the light of the morning sun: “You are in the right place; stay where you are; do not panic or run; all will be well.” Clooney felt transported back to July 1966, “when God came and touched me within”. After that experience, though his doubts were not gone, Clooney knew his “mission” and “direction” in life. Clooney remained a Jesuit and stuck with his studies, though still bored. He started becoming a scholar, “learning to travel back and forth between the worlds of American academe and the new world I had visited for the first time in Kathmandu”.
Clooney holds an “elemental sense of priesthood”, with the priestly ordination more fundamental than the Jesuit identity, and the Jesuit life, “a form and conduit” for being a priest. Clooney even imagines at times that his “vocation to priesthood” is older even than his identity as a Catholic, signifying “participation in the sacramental presence of God in the world, a kind of liminal status between worlds”.
For his doctoral studies in Hinduism, Clooney chose University of Chicago’s Department of South Asian Languages and Civilizations (SALC), in part to work with Professor JAB (“Hans”) van Buitenen, who had done pioneering work in the 1950s on Rāmānuja, the “great theistic Vedanta theologian of the eleventh century”. Like other Jesuits before him, Clooney was fascinated by the Vedanta’s teachings on the ultimate reality (brahman), the self (ātman), and the power of a unitive and liberative knowledge of ātman/brahman that frees one from this world. Clooney was interested in the great Upaniṣads that are at the core of Vedanta, and in the great “scholastic commentarial traditions” of studying the texts in Sanskrit and Tamil. Unfortunately, Professor van Buitenen died in September 1979, the very month Clooney arrived in Chicago. Though he contemplated leaving initially, Clooney decided to stay, surmising that even without the great professor, the department was “perfect for me at so crucial a point in my life”. He “needed to encounter new ways of knowing that I could not easily understand”, which SALC offered.
Clooney found SALC to be a “refreshingly genteel” department with a stellar faculty, committed to the study of South Asia through language study, reading of texts, historical study, and field work. It was also a “deeply humane” department, welcoming students like Clooney, interested in Hindu philosophy and theology. For his doctoral exams, Clooney had listed “theology” as his scholarly discipline. A. K. Ramanujan, the department chair at the time, courteously told Clooney, “We are not prepared to examine someone in the area of theology. But since you have studied in that field and are a Jesuit, we will forego the exam and give you a pass without further testing.” Clooney notes that such courtesy “would never have been extended to me in a divinity school or in a Catholic theology department”. The department also had the “great grace of generally leaving us alone to do our work”. Clooney loved the experience, “knew I was at home”.
Clooney notes that he was “particularly fortunate” to meet Professor Edwin Gerow, a brilliant Sanskritist and scholar. He was a demanding teacher, but courteous and kind to Clooney. Gerow respected Clooney’s interest in Vedanta, and knowledge of Mimamsa, “the hermeneutics of traditional Hindu rules related to ritual”. Gerow was the perfect guide and dissertation director for Clooney. He knew nothing about Mimamsa when he arrived in Chicago, but discovered it accidentally when he began reading Sankara and Ramanuja, the Vedanta theologians, who “presumed knowledge of Mimamsa interpretive principles and drew on them repeatedly”. The Mimamsa Sutras of Jaimini (c. second century BCE) is the founding text of the tradition, comprising of over 2,700 sutras (short verses) encapsulating 900 cases that required investigation.
In September 1982, Clooney came to Chennai, India, on a Fulbright scholarship, after completing his coursework and exams. He had followed the advice of A. K. Ramanujan regarding the “immeasurable side benefits” from spending time in India, “meeting people, learning, and adapting to every aspect of the culture”. Clooney felt at home in Chennai, loving the South-Indian food, Idli and Dosai, and Coconut chutneys. He appreciated traditional Tamil music and dance, going to concerts regularly. He bicycled everywhere, and walked to temples in Mylapore, “the ancient heart of Madras”. Clooney became the topic of conversation, since he frequented neighborhoods far from the tourist areas. He spoke a little Tamil as well and found the people friendly, and remains “ever grateful to the people of Mylapore”.
Clooney also enjoyed traveling by train to Trichy, Madurai, Nagapattinam. Bangalore, Calcutta, and Varanasi. He also went to Goa for a Fulbright conference. He spent a day in Old Goa near the tomb of St. Francis Xavier, praying “for a time in the presence of the saint after whom I was named”. Though he “received no great enlightenment that day”, he “did have a sense that I was exactly where I needed to be, there by the saint’s tomb, pondering my own future mission and where God might lead me”.
In November 1983, Clooney returned to the United States, and connected with Edwin Gerow before he went on sabbatical. He completed his dissertation by May 1984, Thinking Ritually: Retrieving the Purva Mimamsa of Jaimini, which became his first published book in 1990.
Clooney’s study of Mimamsa “stimulated and nourished a fresh approach to Vedanta”. Vedanta was famous in the West, following the pioneering efforts of Swami Vivekananda, who “stressed the unity underlying all experience”. Vedanta consists of the “more speculative, philosophical, and theological thinking that developed in the late Vedic period”, explored in the Upanisads. By exploring Vedanta after Mimamsa, Clooney found that it was “a tradition of reading, study, insight through slow learning”. The simple dynamic of “read, read again, think, meditate, read, teach” has been a guiding principle for Clooney. His second book was entitled Theology after Vedanta, modeling the comparative theological study of Sankara and Thomas Aquinas.
Since the 1980s, Clooney has been reading the alvars, the eighth–tenth-century Vaisnava poet saints of Tamil Nadu. The poetry “opened my heart as Mimamsa had opened my mind”. Like other decisions in his life, Clooney felt that “a providential hand” was guiding him, when he selected Tamil as the modern Indian language for study, as per departmental requirements. Clooney was advised choose Tamil, since “it would suit well my theological motives in the study of Hindu traditions”.
Clooney got the opportunity to proofread the galleys of A. K. Ramanujan’s book, Hymns for the Drowning, at this time. The book is a translation of ~100 verses of Nammalvar, Satakopan, the most-important alvar from the ninth century. Clooney loved the translation, which “succeeded in evoking beauty and moods of the original poems”. Clooney writes, “As earlier in my life, small graces abounded: had I not come to Chicago to work with Professor Van Buitenen, who died so young, I would have missed Tamil all together. Had Ramanujan not been finishing that book of translations just then, I might never have turned to the alvars at all”.
Clooney found that his ongoing study of the alvars “gripped me affectively as Mimamsa had gripped me intellectually”. He found the experience to be “beautiful, resonant with my Christian faith”. The new learning and desire for more, drew Cooley back to India. During 1992–3, he lived again in Chennai, reading the alvar along with traditional commentaries, like he read Mimamsa and Vedanta before. Clooney found in the alvar’s poetry “a mirror for my own experience of God in 1966, such as has permeated every moment since then”. His 1992–3 Chennai sojourn resulted in the Seeing through Texts book in 1996, a comparative theology contribution. The book “expressed more intensely the affective dimension of my theological and spiritual awareness”.
Clooney returned to Boston College in July 1993 to teach and work as Director of Graduate Studies in the Theology Department. He became a full professor in the spring of 1996, at the age of forty-five. Clooney’s final vows as a Jesuit, “expressive of a complete and irreversible self-surrender”, took place on December 3, 1993, on the day of the feast of St. Francis Xavier, “my namesake and the first Jesuit to travel to India”. As Clooney writes, “My personal sense of calling to a more permanent commitment to life and service in the Society of Jesus was deepened by beginning to understand more deeply one Hindu tradition’s understanding of intense love for God and total surrender.”
At Boston College, Clooney faced the challenge of opening “an intellectual space for myself”. He found the department “welcoming and supportive”, in his efforts to create a space for “interreligious learning”. Clooney found that Jesuits at BC formed “a very good community”, with ~140 Jesuits in the mid-1990s, consisting of professors, administrators, doctoral students, and retirees. Clooney “convened scholarly conversations”, initiating the “Jesuit Postmodern” project, on being Jesuit scholars at the turn of the century. The outcome of these efforts was published in a 2005 book, Jesuit Postmodern: Scholarship, Vocation, and Identity in the 21st Century.
Overall, BC was “a very good place to be, and I was blessed to be there”. Therefore, Clooney’s move from BC to Harvard in 2005 surprised “those who knew me and assumed I would be at BC my whole career”. Clooney notes that he “did not apply for a position at Harvard”, as “Doing so would not even have crossed my mind”. He felt “too Catholic for Harvard in its modern secular persona, or the Divinity School with its low-church Protestant demeanor and emerging low-church multifaith persona”. Clooney was surprised “to receive a direct invitation”, when he received a call from the Dean of Harvard Divinity School (HDS) in Spring 2004, “inquiring whether I would consider accepting a tenured position on the HDS faculty”. Clooney was “the only person under consideration”. All he had to do was “to meet with a search committee, talk with students, give a lecture, and then wait”, until it was approved. On July 1, 2005, Cooney became the eleventh Parkman Professor of Divinity at Harvard University, one of the university’s oldest professorships, established in 1829 as “the Professorship of Pulpit Eloquence and the Pastoral Care.”
Clooney found Harvard “breathtakingly diverse, possessed of a fabulous faculty that leads in so many fields, and wealthy beyond the dreams of other universities”. Except at Regis High School, he has “never been among so many really smart and talented people, working side by side, and sometimes even working together”. At times though, Clooney found the conversations to be “parochial, too insular, too secure within the general liberal discourse of the modern and postmodern West, where religion has its place, and must be kept in that place”. But, the “less predictable and less community-oriented climate of Harvard” has kept him “alert”. Clooney has repeatedly improvised “a way to think and write integrally” in Harvard’s “disparate environment”, finding his “voice as a Harvard professor who remains a Catholic priest”. Clooney “was happier at BC, but Harvard has been more interesting”. At Harvard, he has “experienced a kind of homelessness, as if on a mission to an unfamiliar principality of some sort”.
Since 1997, Clooney has assisted as a priest on weekends at one parish, Our Lady of Sorrows in Sharon, Massachusetts. The opportunity came from a Summer Saturday 1995, when Clooney had gone to witness as wedding, another instance of “providence at work”. The church is small, suitable to a town “where there have never been very many Catholics”. Clooney found it a “privilege” to pray and work with a wonderful community of women and men, priests and lay people. Clooney states that the “good people of Sharon” have helped him to be an “honest priest, preacher of God’s Word, not just my word”. He notes that the “homily is a part of the Mass as a whole, and not a showpiece unto itself”. Ritually, “a Catholic homily is a midpoint”, at the end of the “Liturgy of the Word”, a point of transition to a “more direct and participatory encounter with God in the Liturgy of the Eucharist”. Clooney notes that he is a good preacher “when I do not distract”, but helps in the journey to “encounter with the Eucharistic Christ”.
In 2010, Clooney became the director of Harvard’s Center for the Study of World Religions (CSWR), founded in 1960, “quite improbably”. He was “reluctant” initially, as the dean and the retiring director were persuading him. Clooney accepted the position, recognizing it as an opportunity to bring his “interests and values to life at Harvard”, and served as the director for seven years.
Clooney states that his musings are meant to be an “encouragement” to the readers. He exhorts them to “create the future of faith”, in a world of many faiths, by “doing things small and intense—translating, teaching, singing, serving, loving—in a way that will cross religious borders without certainty, without fear”. Clooney suggests that “a sadness deeply infuses” the memoir perhaps. This is because of “the empathy and powerlessness of the intellectual who sees and feels compassion, even if they do not act in any way adequate to what they see”. Further, “Whatever we do, we need to be deeply troubled by the world around us, by what we do and fail to do for our sisters and brothers in need. We need to speak and teach and write more vulnerably and honestly, however arcane our studies must be”.
Clooney states that his “Jesuit formation” gave him depth in the wisdom of Catholic tradition. His “second formation, learning from Hindu traditions”, has pushed, stretched, and torn a bit all he had known before. Mimamsa gave him “access to a way of thinking that Western and Catholic systems can never digest”. Vedanta has shown him “how patient reading affords” life-transforming insights, “with an intensity that is not often matched in unpracticed experience”. The poetry of the alvars and a millennium of commentary on it have touched his heart and soul, “right where Christ has touched and enlightened me”.
Clooney concludes the memoir with an elegant section on love, “Finally, there is love”. He notes that “love is the key to all that I have lived, been given, struggled to keep alive and honest and vulnerable”. Without love, his life “could not possibly have taken the course that it has”. He “would not have become a Jesuit and stayed a Jesuit, a companion of Jesus, a priest blessed with the opportunity for regular parish Masses, preaching, and ministry on campus too”. Without love, he could not have made his “learning in Hindu traditions so personal to myself”. Without love, he would not have had the “energy to immerse myself over and over and with great effort in texts that yield wonderful meanings for small audiences, and only after hard labor”. He would not have “persisted in such learning over many decades, evading what for me would have been lesser and easier paths outside my studies and teaching, my preaching and ever simpler praying”. He would not have “dug so deeply into scholastic Brahminical thinking”, nor would have “identified with the self-surrender of a Tamil saint, so that even now I cannot read his verses without a thrill, a recognition, a few tears”. Without love, he would not “even have believed it worthwhile to write this book, showing you my life and work as just one simple thing”. He could not have “given it all to you without fear of exposure, or worry that I’ve said too much or too little”. If he had “not been loved first—God looking at me before I ever looked at God—none of this would have taken place”.
Books by Prof. Francis Clooney
Hindu and Catholic, Priest and Scholar: A Love Story, Bloomsbury Publishing, 2024
Saint Joseph in South India. Poetry, Mission and Theology in Costanzo Gioseffo Beschi’s Tēmpāvaṇi, Vienna, Austria, University of Vienna, 2022
Western Jesuit Scholars in India, Leiden, The Netherlands: Brill, 2020.
Reading the Hindu and Christian Classics: Why and How Deep Learning Still Matters, Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, October 28, 2019
Learning Interreligiously: In the Text, In the World, Minneapolis: Fortress Press, June 2018
The Future of Hindu-Christian Studies: A Theological Inquiry, The 2015 Westcott-Teape Lectures.
Abingdon, Oxon; New York, NY: Routledge, 2017
How to Do Comparative Theology: European and American Perspectives in Dialogue, Edited by Francis X. Clooney, SJ and Klaus von Stosch. New York, New York: Fordham University Press, 2017
European Perspectives on the New Comparative Theology, Thematic issue of the online journal Religions, with additions for the print version. Edited by Francis X. Clooney, S.J. and John H Berthrong. MDPI Publishing, 2014.
His Hiding Place is Darkness: A Hindu-Catholic Theopoetics of Divine Absence, Stanford, California: Stanford University Press, 2013
The New Comparative Theology: Interreligious Insights from the Next Generation, Edited by Francis X. Clooney, S.J., New York and London: T & T Clark, 2010
Comparative Theology: Deep Learning Across Religious Borders, Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 2010
The Truth, the Way, the Life: Christian Commentary on the Three Holy Mantras of the Srivaisnava Hindus, Leuven, Belgium: Peeters Publishing, 2008
Beyond Compare: St. Francis de Sales and Sri Vedanta Desika on Loving Surrender to God, Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press, 2008
Jesuit Postmodern: Scholarship, Vocation, and Identity in the 21st Century, Lanham, Maryland: Lexington Books, 2006, Edited by Francis X. Clooney, S.J.
Fr. Bouchet’s India: An 18th Century Jesuit’s Encounter with Hinduism, Chennai, India: Satya Nilayam Publications, 2006
Divine Mother, Blessed Mother: Hindu Goddesses and the Virgin Mary, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005
Hindu God, Christian God: How Reason Helps Break Down the Boundaries between Religions, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001
Preaching Wisdom to the Wise: Three Treatises by Robert de Nobili, Missionary and Scholar in 17th Century India, Introduced, annotated, and translated by Anand Amaladass, S.J., and Francis X. Clooney, S.J., St. Louis, Missouri: Institute of Jesuit Sources, 2000; Indian edition, 2005.
Hindu Wisdom for All God’s Children, Maryknoll, New York: Orbis Books, 1998.
Seeing through Texts: Doing Theology among the Srivaisnavas of South India, Albany, New York: State University of New York Press, 1996. Indian edition published by Indian Book Centre, New Delhi.
The Art and Theology of Srivaisnava Thinkers, Madras, India: T.R. Publications for Satya Nilayam Publications
Theology after Vedanta: An Experiment in Comparative Theology, In the series, Toward a Comparative Philosophy of Religion. Albany, New York: State University of New York Press, 1993.
Thinking Ritually: Rediscovering the Purva Mimamsa of Jaimini, Volume 17, De Nobili Research Series, ed. G. Oberhammer. Vienna, Austria: Indological Institute of the University of Vienna, 1990.
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A shorter version of this review was first published under the title, “Rev Francis Clooney’s Insights from Catholicism, Dostoevsky, Tagore, and the Upanisads” by Global Indian Times:
https://www.globalindiantimes.com/p/francis-clooney-harvard-122024
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After earning his PhD in economics from the University of Maryland, College Park,
Cherian Samuel joined the World Bank Group as an Evaluator, retiring from the Multilateral Investment Guarantee Agency (MIGA) in 2021.
He is based in Washington DC, and now continues contributing to the world as an editor and writer.
