Rev Francis Clooney’s Insights from Catholicism, Dostoevsky, Tagore, and the Upanisads

Rev Francis Clooney’s memoir, Hindu and Catholic, Priest and Scholar, offers spiritual and life-lessons says Cherian Samuel

December 27, 2024

By Cherian Samuel*

Francis X. Clooney, S.J., a professor at the Harvard Divinity School, is the author of 29 books. His latest, published this year, is Hindu and Catholic, Priest and Scholar: A Love Story.

The central theme of the memoir, which Clooney says is the “inner story” of his life, is God’s grace. He writes, “At every stage of my life, I have received far more than I have given…even in midlife, I could not have imagined ending up where I am today.”

Clooney, 74-years-old, notes that his life and his work are “stubbornly intertwined, indeed, inseparable”. No part of him “makes sense on its own, without the others: priest and scholar, Hindu and Christian”.

The first part of the memoir covers the origins and growth of Clooney’s intellectual and spiritual identity between 1966 and 1993. In the second part, Clooney tells the story of his career as a teacher at Boston College (1984-2005) and Harvard University (2005-present.)

Clooney was born into a middle-class Irish Catholic family in Brooklyn, New York. His father James was a New York City policeman who became a social worker for Catholic charities. His mother Irene was a homemaker. He had an older sister Mary and a younger sister Regina. The family moved from Brooklyn to Staten Island, New York, when Clooney was a month old.

His parents were “loving and conscientious” and his early life was “uneventful, quiet, and happy in an ordinary way.” When he was baptized in August 1950, Clooney was given the name, Francis Xavier, after the founder of the Jesuit order, Ignatius Loyola (1491–1556). Loyola traveled to India from Europe in 1540 to spend his life in Asia. In 1973, Clooney began traveling to Nepal and India, making nineteen trips so far.

Reading was a Clooney family tradition, “always visiting the local public library”, with the parents setting “a great example”. James also wanted his children to spend the summer reading and “did not believe” in them working summer jobs.

After primary education at St. Christopher’s School, Staten Island, Clooney was selected to the Regis High School, New York City, 1964-1968. At that time, the all-male school which has been tuition-free since it opened in 1914, was reputed to be the best Jesuit school in the United States. At Regis, Clooney recalls, “it was good for me finally to be in a class with peers clearly smarter than me.”

Clooney was drawn to Russian novels, especially Brothers Karamazov by Fyodor Dostoevsky. He writes that the classic novel “gave words, even as I was reading it, to the primal tension in my coming of age as a spiritual being.”

On the night of July 6, 1966, when he was fifteen, Clooney had the “defining religious experience” of his life. 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 he could from then on “be only-for-God.”

Clooney learned later that his religious experience was “an almost commonplace claim in Hindu and Buddhist mystical traditions.” His “recognition of God-everywhere” paved the way for welcoming the “world of Hindu wisdom and experience” into his life when he reached Kathmandu, Nepal, in 1973.

(Photo: Francis Clooney, S.J., center, during a visit to India, 2023.)

In August 1968, after interviews and the mandatory psychological testing, Clooney was accepted as a novice in the Jesuit Order. He was one of seventeen young men to enter the Jesuit novitiate in Poughkeepsie, New York. The late 1960s, with the Vietnam War and anti-war protests, were a time of turmoil in American life and overall decline in the membership of the Jesuit Order. Only three of the cohort of seventeen made it to the ordination. Clooney notes that the “diminishment is essential to the American Jesuit story…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…(and) introduced a bold set of submissions and restraints that would intensify and focus my life.” In 1973, Clooney received a BA in Philosophy and Classics from Fordham University, New York.

To meet the Jesuit requirements, Clooney wanted to work at a church in India, rather than in the U.S., for three reasons: (i) he admired Mahatma Gandhi and Mother Teresa; (ii) Sanskrit, the ancient language of Hinduism, was of the same family as Latin and Greek, so that he could extend his knowledge of classical languages; and (iii) he wanted to live among the poor.

Clooney clarifies that he 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.”

He chose Nepal since at that time it was nearly impossible for an American to get a visa to teach at a Christian school in India. From July 1973 to August 1975, Clooney lived and taught at St. Xavier’s, Kathmandu, Nepal, a Jesuit-run residential school for classes 6–12.

Clooney found Kathmandu as 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.”

Slowly, Clooney “entered in small ways into Hindu culture.” During his very first visit to a temple - of the goddess Durga (Kali) outside the Kathmandu valley – he “found the experience in an odd way in harmony with the rich piety and ritualism of my own Catholic faith growing up.”

He began to read books by Indian authors, starting with Gitanjali (Garland of Songs), a book of 103 poems by Rabindranath Tagore (1861–1941), a Bengali Hindu writer. Tagore wrote Gitanjali in 1912, at a time of loss of his wife, daughter, and son. The book won the Nobel Prize for Literature. Clooney has cited Gitanjali on innumerable occasions to show what he means by an “openness to God” is an “openness to everyone and everything around us.” Clooney’s plan to learn from Hinduism had “suddenly come alive…in the kindred spirit of Tagore, singer of songs”.

To teach “moral science” to ninth graders, Clooney turned to the stories of gods and heroes of Hindu and Buddhist tradition as well as passages from the Bhagavat Gita, that were more meaningful to his Nepali students. 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 by accident. Some students complained that despite their “rhetoric”, the Jesuits were served meat at least twice a day and the staff and students perhaps three times a week; the local people could afford small servings of meat only at festival time. Clooney decided not to eat meat at all, in solidarity with the students and the local community.

In 1975, Clooney returned to the U.S., to study theology at the Weston School of Theology, Cambridge, Massachusetts, which became the School of Theology and Ministry at Boston College.

Two years in Kathmandu had changed Clooney and he “did not want to fit back” into the American life. He missed “proximity to real poverty, small moments of bereftness, lack, marginalization.” Intellectually as well, the questions raised by Clooney’s 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 “bored by most theology courses.” He was “anxious that my experience not be talked and taught out of existence.” He “did not want to be given answers”, but “wanted to be forced to think”.

Clooney also experienced personal challenges during his first year at Weston, “the hardest in my fifty-five years as a Jesuit.” He was “confused, not sure of what I wanted.” One morning, as he stood on the rocks by the ocean, in the warmth of the rising sun, Clooney suddenly felt a wordless reassurance from God: “You are in the right place; stay where you are; do not panic or run; all will be well.” After that moment, while his doubts were not gone, Clooney knew his mission and “direction in life.” He remained a Jesuit, stuck with his studies, though still bored, and did the best he could.

At Weston, Clooney completed his formation as a Catholic priest and Jesuit and was ordained as a priest in 1978, when he was twenty-seven. He also earned an M.Div. degree.

(Photo: Francis Clooney, S.J.,center, during a visit to India, 2023.)

It was during his doctoral studies that Clooney was able to become 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.”

For his doctoral studies in Hinduism, Clooney chose the 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 on Rāmānuja, the great theistic Vedanta theologian of the eleventh century. Like other Jesuits before him, Clooney was interested in the Vedanta’s teachings on ultimate reality (brahman), the self (ātman), and the power of a unitive and liberative knowledge of ātman/brahman that frees one from this world.

Unfortunately, van Buitenen died the very month Clooney arrived in Chicago, September 1979. Though he initially contemplated packing up, Clooney decided to stay since he was challenged by his work at SALC and its stellar faculty.

Clooney found SALC to be refreshingly genteel and committed to language study, the reading of texts, and, as needed, historical study, and field work. It was also a “deeply humane department,” he writes. He had listed “theology” as his scholarly discipline for his doctoral exams. 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.”

Such courtesy, Clooney notes, “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.”

At SALC, Clooney spent years reading texts in Sanskrit and Tamil, the South Indian language which became pivotal in his life. Clooney was also interested in the Upaniṣads, ancient Hindu scriptures, and in the great “scholastic commentarial traditions” arising from the study of the texts.

In September 1982, Clooney arrived in Chennai, India, on a Fulbright scholarship, after completing his PhD coursework and exams. He followed the advice of Ramanujan regarding the “immeasurable side benefits to spending time there, meeting people, learning, and adapting to every aspect of the culture.” He felt at home in Chennai right away, including enjoying idlis, dosas, coconut chutney and other South-Indian vegetarian food and attending Tamil music and dance concerts.

Clooney bicycled everywhere, and walked to temples in Mylapore, “the ancient heart of Madras (Chennai)”. 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, writing that he is “ever grateful to the people of Mylapore.”

During a visit to Goa by train, for a Fulbright conference, Clooney 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”.

Returning to Chicago in December 1983, Clooney worked on his PhD thesis under the supervision of Edwin Gerow, a Sanskrit scholar. Clooney completed the 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 “immediately stimulated and nourished a fresh approach to Vedanta”, which was the school of Hindu thought that had interested him from the start. Vedanta was famous in the West, following the pioneering efforts of Swami Vivekananda, who “stressed the unity underlying all experience.”

Like other Jesuits before him, Clooney was interested in the Vedanta’s teachings on ultimate reality (brahman), the self (ātman), and the power of a unitive and liberative knowledge of ātman/brahman that frees one from this world.

“Learning from Hindu traditions,” Clooney writes, “has pushed and stretched and torn a bit all I had known before. Mimamsa gave me access to a way of thinking that Western and Catholic systems can never digest. Vedanta has shown me how patient reading affords us 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 my heart and soul, right where Christ has touched and enlightened me.”

Clooney taught at Boston College’s Theology Department, from 1990 to 1997 and earlier from 1984 to 1989. His final vows as a Jesuit, “expressive of a complete and irreversible self-surrender,” took place on December 3, 1993; marking the feast of St. Francis Xavier. He also taught at Oxford University, 2002-2004.

Clooney found Boston College, which is run by Jesuits, had “a very good community” with 140 Jesuits, including professors, administrators, doctoral students, and retirees. He initiated the Jesuit Postmodern project, organizing regular gathering to share their work in progress, guided by two questions: “What are you working on now? How is it of interest to you as a Jesuit?” The outcomes of these efforts were published in a 2005 book, Jesuit Postmodern: Scholarship, Vocation, and Identity in the 21st Century.

In 2005, Clooney’s move to Harvard came as a surprise to “those who knew me and assumed I would be at (Boston College) my whole career.” He did not apply for a position at Harvard since “I was surely 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 therefore was surprised to receive a call from the Dean of the Harvard Divinity School, “inquiring whether I would consider accepting a tenured position.” Being the only candidate under consideration, all Clooney had to do “was to meet with a search committee, talk with students, give a lecture, and then wait, as the faculty voted and the administration ruminated, until it was all approved.”

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. In Harvard’s “disparate environment,” Clooney finds his “voice as a Harvard professor who remains a Catholic priest.” Clooney writes he “was happier at (Boston College), 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 Our Lady of Sorrows, a Catholic church in Sharon, Massachusetts.

His goal in all his writing, and the memoir, “is to provide exercises, work to be done by readers themselves, inquiring into the deep currents of their own lives.” This is of course a very Jesuit approach, with “all of life as a series of intellectual-spiritual exercises.”

Clooney concludes by suggesting that perhaps “a sadness deeply infuses” the memoir 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, “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 notes, “Finally, there is love.” This is because “love is the key to all that I have lived, been given, struggled to keep alive and honest and vulnerable.”

*Cherian Samuel, a writer based in Washington DC, retired from the World Bank. He earned a PhD in economics from the University of Maryland.