Francis X. Clooney, S.J., Parkman Professor of Divinity, Professor of Comparative Theology, director of the Center for the Study of World Religions

“Being a Harvard professor is thus deeply part of my vocation at the present moment. I could certainly be a priest who is not at Harvard, or a Harvard professor who is only nominally a priest. But in terms of my identity and what I care about, I am at Harvard as a person who is a scholar, a professor, and a priest.”

After earning his doctorate in South Asian languages and civilizations, Professor Clooney taught at Boston College for 21 years before coming to Harvard in 2005.

From New York to Kathmandu

I was born in 1950 in Brooklyn, New York, into an Irish-Catholic family. The recent movie Brooklyn speaks to the experience of the Irish moving to Brooklyn, though my grandparents would have been a generation before that movie, coming over around 1910 and settling in New York, gradually working their way into the middle class family. I was staunch Catholic growing up. Going to a Catholic primary and high school and college was the norm for most Catholics, 50 years ago.

I turned 18 the week I entered the seminary, which seems very young now, but that is how we did it in those days. In school and seminary, I was good at Latin, Greek, philosophy, and theology, and I enjoyed my studies. The standard story for somebody with my scholarly inclinations—and with no interreligious experience or evident interest in Asia—would have been: finish your theological study, get ordained, either teach Latin and Greek as a classicist, or get a PhD in Catholic theology and teach at a Catholic university—something like that. That was my likely path, but between my sophomore and junior years in college, I attended a conference on the international nature of the Jesuits. The key note speaker, Father Horatio de La Costa, S.J., from the Philippines, said, “If you want to be a Jesuit, your vision and your heart have to be as large as the world.” He said if you narrow your vision and sell yourself short and say, “I’m just American” or “Catholicism is only what I already know it to be,” you’re really not doing “the Jesuit thing,” which is expansive and comprehensive, beyond current boundaries.

I thought to myself, “If that’s the case, if I—after growing up in New York—teach high school in New York and study more Latin and Greek, and then get a degree to teach Catholic theology in a Catholic university, that’s pretty narrow.” So I had an intuition to go to India to teach for the part of my training known as “regency.” That seemed out of the blue, since I had no knowledge of Hinduism, but when I asked permission, they said yes. Getting a visa to go to India in the 1970s was actually hard, so I went to Kathmandu, Nepal, instead. I was 22 when I arrived there.

Being a high school teacher in Kathmandu was eye opening, exciting, and endlessly interesting. All the boys I taught were Hindu and Buddhist, and so I started studying Hinduism and Buddhism. Teaching them, and learning from them, opened the door to further learning: after all, you can’t teach someone if you know nothing about their culture or beliefs.

While teaching in Kathmandu, I became interested in Hinduism and realized early on that I had very much to learn from the Hindu traditions and that a key dimension of my mission, as it were, would be to back home and bring a deeper and fuller knowledge of Hinduism back to the West. That I was implicitly committing myself to a life-long learning from Hinduism was surely a decisive, unexpected turn in my life.

When I was ordained at the end of my 10 years of seminary training, the provincial superior suggested that I go to Germany to study theology at the doctoral level. That was his idea of what a smart scholarly Jesuit would do. But I asked, “Can I go and do a degree in Hinduism instead?” because I thought it would be more interesting and important, in the late twentieth century, to learn Indian languages and study Indian culture. This would be a way to ground Jesuit education no longer simply in the classics of the West, but in a global canon of great books. And so I worked for my PhD in Indian Studies at the University of Chicago, in the Department of South Asian Languages and Civilizations. There I learned Sanskrit and Tamil, and on a Fulbright spent more than a year in South India reading with pandits, and wrote a dissertation on Hindu ritual theology.

This learning confirmed and cemented professionally what I had learned during the two years in Kathmandu. In the 30-plus years since I finished my PhD, in my teaching at Boston College (21 years) and now at Harvard (11 years thus far), my work remains very much a back and forth learning, between Hindu and Christian traditions. My hope for my students is that they learn how to learn inter-religiously, with all the intellectual, moral, and spiritual commitments, the courage and risk-taking and yet too prudence, that true learning requires.

Faith and Scholarship

I am a Catholic priest who has studied Hinduism for over 40 years. This is not the usual profile of a Catholic priest, to be sure, but it is in fact the life and story of an actual priest who still belongs in a religious order, still presides at Eucharist in a parish on the weekends, and still, on occasions, witnesses marriages and leads the prayer at funerals. Who knows what I would be if I had not studied Hinduism all these years, but I doubt very much that some alternative career would have made me a better priest.

Some academics think, and will sometimes say, “Your being Catholic weakens your objectivity, and harms your study of Hinduism—South Asia, the ‘religions’ of India—because you can’t be objective. You’re reading through Christian eyes, and that makes you either too critical of Hinduism, or too sympathetic with these other religious people.”

But nobody is purely objective or purely neutral. Either you’re a member of a religious tradition and you read from that tradition to the other and back, or if not, you have spiritual-but-not-religious eyes that likewise affect how you see the other. Or, you have secular eyes, or Marxist eyes, or postmodern eyes, or whatever, and you see the world in critical ways that can only be in part neutral and objective. The key is to admit where you’re coming from and be aware of how your biases affect—and perhaps infect—your study of religious traditions, your own and those of others. On the whole, I think it safe to say that religious practitioners who are thoughtfully aware of their own tradition are in a best position to study and understand the other.

Some Catholics I have known over the decades have been concerned that if you study another tradition too seriously and take it too sympathetically, you might lose your faith and convert to the religion you study; better then to know less, and to preserve an unsympathetic attitude that “protects the faith.”

But really, it’s a pretty weak faith that you defend by remaining ignorant about other religions. It’s better to actually know and understand and learn from the other—which requires you to then learn and understand your own tradition: one ends up going deeper, twice over. As you demythologize the other tradition by studying it and learning it in its complexity, your attitude toward your own faith and tradition changes as well; you demythologize your own, you see what is unique to it and what is not, you work with the best of it while knowing that your own religion too has its dark side.

Over the decades, many Hindu friends have observed that I’ll never read these texts the way Hindus read them because I’m not a Hindu, and I agree. But it is also true that I bring to the fore certain insights that most Hindus would never see because they don’t come from a Christian background; Hindu scholars can teach me about Christian theology, by noticing elements that I myself might otherwise miss. So it’s a good dynamic, I think.

It is true that inter-religious learning challenges faith. But in fact, any solid education challenges settled, comfortable ways of thinking and acting. Of course, there are people who (explicitly or implicitly) think education is dangerous to your faith. Certain anti-intellectual, often sectarian groups—religious or secular—might think that complexity is inconvenient. Extremists will indeed go to the extreme and try to prevent learning and dismantle the resources essential to education. But even in calmer times, it is a fact that studying literature thinking through philosophical issues and being exposed widely to religions and cultures in a multi-cultural society can be unsettling, because such learning exposes students to ideas that do not merely repeat what they already believe.

What is new can provoke crises in thinking and acting. What we learn does not all fit together neatly; the differences are real, and lasting, and intelligent and informed persons need to make choices. But of course change is inevitable, necessary, and largely good. If you don’t keep growing in your faith you’re going to be stuck at age 30 or 50 with the faith of a five year old. If you have the faith of a five year old when you’re 50, you are like just to drop it and say, “I don’t believe any of that.” So the learning is challenging. It means you have to keep changing over time and asking questions and even facing up to the difficult answers to those questions. Veritas, after all, is not a motto or just about asking the questions; it has to do with true answers as well.

Questions and Ambiguities

We can get more particular still, since different kinds of inter-religious learning pose different challenges. Catholic-Jewish study raises certain issues about how Christianity came about: Is Jesus the Messiah or not? Islam raises questions about the prophet Muhammad, who is revered as a prophet after Jesus. The Quran may be questioning the divinity of Christ, as well as his death on the cross. With Hinduism the challenges are usually not historically determined—despite the long history of Hindu-Christian interactions—because Hinduism is not part of the same lineage as it were as Judaism, Christianity, and Islam: we have so much room to imagine, play as it were, and make connections for ourselves. The polytheism of some forms of Hinduism, the caste system, reincarnation, goddesses, views of radical non-duality—all of these things are very different. It is not unreasonable to think, “This is bewildering to me. So much of this doesn’t fit into my faith.”

Yet there is another side of this that, too, could also be surprising: Hinduism is surprisingly like Christianity, in its Catholic form. In some Hindu traditions, there’s a single supreme god who’s loving and gracious, who cares for you, who comes into the world to save you, who gives you salvation—very similar to the Christian belief. Like Catholicism, much of Hinduism is vivid in its appeals to the sense, “sacramental” in a good and strong sense. Even if there are large and difficult questions raised by the differences between Hinduism and Christianity; there are doctrinal differences the Church is justly concerned about that require serious attention, though with an attitude of respect for differences.

Hindu ways of thinking have taught me not to panic over difficult questions that lack clear answers now. Hinduism opens up so many possibilities. Hindus, insofar as they step back and contemplate the whole of what we call “Hinduism,” are quite familiar with, or often quite comfortable with, ambiguity. There are questions we cannot resolve here and now. Nobody is asking us to reach consistence and clarity on all issues; in fact, I do not, in a broad sense, speak for my Church, and needn’t decide things right now. My study of Hinduism encourages a longer view, tolerance of ambiguity in the current moment, and hope for a growing harmony over an arc of time that is greater than any of us. Venturing into unknown territory in order to learn is better than holding back because not all the details are clear.

Spiritual Practice

“Healthy mind in a healthy body,” the saying goes, and living life well entails many values and practices. I do some yoga, perhaps not very expertly, but nonetheless it helps keep body and soul together. I still jog between three and four miles, around four times a week. I’ve been a vegetarian since 1974. And of course, there are the vows of religious life, poverty (all in common, no storing up of personal wealth), chastity (celibacy, being for God-alone), and obedience (to come and go, sent on mission)—vows that, despite the challenges, certainly help to keep life simple, honest, and focused.

From the time I entered the Jesuit order, our guides emphasized to us the importance of daily prayer, daily meditation. I have a very busy life and a lot going on, but I begin every day early in the morning—often when it’s still dark—with an hour of meditation prayer, which is often just quietly sitting. In the house where I live, we have a chapel, so I often go there and sit there early morning with a cup of tea, to see and be seen, as it were, without words. So, too, the daily communal celebration of the Eucharist is an ideal for Catholics, even if on many days this turns out not to be possible to gather that community. But a Eucharistic attitude, once it is inside you, overflows into daily life: Share the meal, break bread together, wherever you find yourself. Many academics, and perhaps Jesuits in particular, are individualists, stars and loners. Remembering and returning to community is key, too, for we aren’t ever really alone.

Catholics believe strongly that God does communicate with us, wordlessly or not. Praying, talking to God, and listening to God, are not just metaphors for something else. It is thus too meaningful to speak of having a vocation. You can have a call from God to do something with your life, a sense of mission, that God is asking you to do something in particular. The Gospel narratives—how he seeks how those in need as he preaches the Good News and enacts it, how Jesus summons individuals to follow him and continue his work—thus retain, or regain, their immediacy: to leave everything and follow the Lord even now, even here. Hearing and adhering to this call is why I became a Jesuit nearly 50 years ago, and it is the same sense of vocation that makes it possible for me to still be a Jesuit and a scholar and a professor even now.

Learning to be quiet and listen is therefore important, if it all is to hold together. Meditating regularly helps keep us balanced and steady, lest we become the victims of our hectic lives, scattered and without a clear direction. If you have a foundation—feet on the ground, in a kind of elemental humility—then you can handle all the stuff that happens all day long. But if you don’t have a spiritual base, it is more likely that you will get overwhelmed by what happens to you.

My life as a professor and priest includes a lot of travel of course, far and near, the life of an academic pilgrim of sorts. It also includes preaching (as I do regularly in a nearby parish and sometimes on campus), teaching (as I have for more than 30 years) and, for now, serving as director of the Center for the Study of World Religions. It takes a certain fortitude to run a center at Harvard, to deal with administrators and faculty and students, and to try at least to infuse the institution—the building, the people, the programming—with the right mix of intellectual and spiritual values: gather the community, share the meal, exchange ideas that go deep into mind and heart in a Center that does the work of centering us all.

Being a Harvard professor is thus deeply part of my vocation at the present moment. I could certainly be a priest who is not at Harvard, or a Harvard professor who is only nominally a priest. But in terms of my identity and what I care about, I am at Harvard as a person who is a scholar, a professor, and a priest.

You can read Professor Clooney’s regular blog posts at America Magazine.

Photos: Leise Jones, Pat Westwater-Jong, and Laura Krueger