Father J. Bryan Hehir and Radical Feminist Mary E. Hunt: Marxist-Christian Agitators

Back in the 1980s, the Institute for Policy Studies’ Washington School offered a course entitled “Matthew, Marx, Luke and John: Theology of the Oppressed.” Guest-speakers for this course included Father Bryan Hehir and radical feminist Mary E. Hunt, the co-founder and co-director of the Women’s Alliance for Theology, Ethics and Ritual (WATER) which is located in Silver Spring, Maryland. Ms. Hunt also served as Adjunct Assistant Professor of Women’s Studies at Georgetown University for five years and has taught and lectured at numerous other institutions.

In her book “Ungodly Rage: The Hidden Face of Catholic Feminism,” Catholic author Donna Steichen describes Mary Hunt as “the compleat feminist theologian.” Steichen notes that “WATER is a member of Women-Church Convergence. Hunt is also an uncloseted lesbian who serves on the board of directors of New Ways Ministry and is active with the Conference for Catholic Lesbians, a member of a Washington Women-Church group called Sisters Against Sexism, a policy advisor to Women’s Ordination Conference and a member of CFFC’s board of directors.”

Steichen notes how Mary Hunt gave a talk entitled “Being Church in the Twenty-first Century” in which the disgruntled feminist with a penchant for Marxist ideology predicted that, “lesbian and gay people in church will become as common as candles” because “the choice will be welcoming diversity or dying on the vine as the people of God.” Steichen then notes that for Ms. Hunt, “Such ‘diversity’ will mean ‘a shift of power’ in decision-making authority from the hierarchy to ‘the people who are the Church’; a priesthood open to women, homosexuals male and female and the married; ‘celebration of the goodness’ of remarriage after divorce, and homosexual marriage. ‘The reality will come first; the theology will come next.’ Like others in Women-Church, she said, her own hope is for an end to the ordained priesthood and the emergence of a Church without hierarchy.” (Ungodly Rage, pp. 108-110).

Beginning on page 343 of Ungodly Rage, Steichen provides some background on WATER. She writes, “Women’s Alliance for Theology, Ethics and Ritual (WATER) founded in 1983, is rarely called by its full name. Foundress Mary Hunt became a feminist at Harvard Divinity School, under Ruether [Rosemary Radford] and liberation theologian Juan Luis Segundo, S.J., before going on to Berkeley’s GTU for her double doctorate. There she met WATER’s co-foundress, co-director and chief ritualist, Diann Neu, then a nun. Neu holds a GTU master’s degree in sacred theology and an exaggerated view of her own qualifications. In October 1988, at a CFFC ‘reproductive options’ conference in Albuquerque, Neu said that she came to her ‘approach’ to ‘reproductive rights’ with ‘all the training and experience to be a bishop in my church.’..

Hunt is active in Conference for Catholic Lesbians (CCL), a homosexual ‘support group’ born of Women-Church in 1983. Her involvement, she says, ‘certainly emerges out of my own life, loving women, and living in a committed relationship with a woman.’ She airs her odd religious views in WATERwheel, WATER’s quarterly newsletter. In one edition, she says that a theological image of ‘divine child abuse’ – God the Father ‘carrying out’ the death of his own son – explains the prevalence of abuse in society. Oppression springs from ‘the notion of an all-powerful God’, which provides ‘a role model’ for the powerful while crushing the ‘disempowered.’ Violence is further encouraged, she says, by ‘the glorification of martyrs’ and of the crucified Christ.” (Ungodly Rage, pp. 343-344).

And so we have a better sense of who “the oppressed” are for Marxist-Christians such as Father Bryan Hehir and Mary Hunt. The institutional Church becomes the enemy of the masses, of the new “people of God” who have been oppressed by patriarchy and authoritarianism. The poor and the “oppressed” (and this includes women who desire ordination to the ministerial priesthood and homosexuals and lesbians who clamor for same-sex “marriage”) must liberate the Gospel and re-orient the Scriptures toward socio-political problems and reinterpret them to advance the Future-Church.

Fr. Vincent Miceli, S.J., referring to these Marxist-Christian agitators and propagators of a pseudo-Church, describes them as "infected..with the activist dialectics of the class struggle and violent revolution" and because of this "they go beyond dialogue to distortion and anathema against the faith, the Magisterium, the whole Church.  Such is their furor against the Church that, in opposing her teaching, they eviscerate the authentic Gospel revelation, demote Christ to the level of a mere man, the Church to the level of a mere natural institution and render Christianity meaningless." (Essay entitled Christian Marxism: Sacrilegious Demagoguery).


Related reading: Mary Hunt's reaction to Argentina's decision to legalize same-sex "marriage" in opposition to Catholic teaching and the Natural Law.

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