How far can Catholics go in “interreligious learning”? Jesuit Father Francis X. Clooney hinted at the answer to this question in a Jan. 15 posting on the internet site of America magazine, a Jesuit national weekly.
Fr. Clooney related his trip, during the second week of January, to the Culver City-based Jesuit novitiate, where he gave a three-day seminar “on interreligious dialogue and related issues to the first year novices of the California and Oregon Provinces.” The seminar featured, in part, the viewing of documentaries. One of the films presented was Swamiji, about the life of a French Benedictine, Henri Le Saux, who, said Clooney, “went to India in the late 1940s to help start a Catholic ashram -- a kind of monastic enclave.” However, Le Saux, said Clooney, found over a 30-year period “that he was learning and receiving far more than he could give in return.” Turning to “a renunciant life, taking the name Abhishiktananda (‘He whose bliss is in the Christ’),” Le Saux, Clooney noted, “struggled to reconcile Christian Trinitarian thought with a radical Nondualism, and lost and found himself in the process.”
For Clooney, Le Saux “is an example not many can follow, but certainly makes us think about how far we can go in interreligious learning.” Clooney’s seminar explored Vatican II’s document on ecumenism, Nostra Aetate, and other magisterial documents “all the way to the December, 2007 ‘Doctrinal Note on Some Aspects of Evangelization,’” which Clooney called “another effort by the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith to clarify how dialogue and evangelization go together.” Though he has not been “a fan of every word coming from the CDF,” Clooney said he welcomes this document; for, “while stubborn issues remain, it nonetheless captures the spirit of dialogue and the spirit of total commitment to Christ, and in Christian hope points out a way they might be kept together.”
Clooney and the novices visited “three religious sites: an evening session in Buddhist meditation; noonday worship as [sic] an Islamic Center; and morning worship at a Hindu temple.” All three religious groups were hospitable, said Clooney. They invited the Catholics “to ask any questions easy or difficulty [sic], and welcomed to visit, and share insofar as we could, the meditation/worship that was undertaken while we were there.” “Reflecting on all these things in Culver City did not push us to extremes,” said Clooney. “We did not venture to try to become Hindu or Buddhist or Muslim, nor did we try to imagine a perfect, 100% pure Catholicism -- but it did (I think; the novices would have to speak for themselves!) give us a way to reflect on where we are as Catholics and Jesuits today, how we choose to live out the Catholic faith amidst the many religious possibilities around us, and how we can best make interreligious openness and learning features essential to who we are.”