Monday, October 04, 2010

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.

The latest at Bryan Hehir Exposed regarding Matthew, Marx, Luke and John.













5 comments:

  1. Marie Tremblay10:31 AM

    On page 152, Steichen explains that: "The phenomena of frankly occult theory and rituals, cultivated by Zsuzsanna Budapest, Carol Christ and [witch] Starhawk and put into folk-level practice at events like the annual Mankato Women and Spirituality Conference and Limina's programs, is an authentic acting out of feminist theology. Kolbenschlag and Weaver, Ruether, Mary Hunt, Mary Daly and others provide the rationalization, and the activity directors at the sabbats translate it into rituals for those seeking a substitute faith. Dances, mask making, chants and invocations, the retelling of old myths with a feminist slant: what they all express is the 'theology' Kolbenschlag proclaimed in Washington, the ancient gnostic preference for the serpent over the Creator."

    Hunt's "theology" is nothing less than demonic.

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  2. Marie, in an essay entitled "Don't Cry For Me Argentina, Cry For the Catholic Church," Mary Hunt writes [in part]: "Argentina’s legalization of gay marriage is a defeat of the Roman Catholic Church every bit as much as the political opposition...

    Two women drinking coffee together in a Buenos Aires café during the dictatorship (1973-1983) could have been arrested merely for being together. Today they can marry. What a difference a few decades can make. Eva Peron was right in her address to her people from the balcony, as crooned memorably by Madonna in the movie Evita: “The truth is I never left you/All through my wild days/My mad existence/I kept my promise/don’t keep your distance…”

    Argentina delivered same-sex marriage on July 15, 2010 (the bill was officially signed into law on July 21) after a bitter but decisive legislative battle. President Cristina Fernandez de Kirchner’s supporters backed it and some commentators have alleged that the 33-27 vote in the Senate was less a sign of major cultural change than a way for the president’s husband, Nestor Kirchner (former president of Argentina hankering to run again), to look liberal enough to be reelected in 2011. That may well be, but it misses an important religious angle; namely, that the Roman Catholic Church was defeated as soundly as the political opposition on this one. Maybe it is a sign of things to come in Latin America—on abortion, for example—and around the world as the institutional church fritters away its symbolic capital."

    Source:

    http://watervoicesblog.blogspot.
    com/2010/07/dont-cry-for.html

    This is what the Boston faithful are dealing with: institutionalized apostasy.

    ReplyDelete
  3. I am posting a better link within the article.

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  4. Mary Hunt has described the 1986 CDF document "Letter to the Bishops of the Catholic Church on the Pastoral Care of Homosexual Persons," written by Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger - now Pope Benedict XVI - as "theological pornography."

    http://thewildreed.blogspot.com/2009/09/ratzinger-letter-of-1987-as-theological.html

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  5. BostonCatholic20114:01 PM

    Every week we learn more about Bryan Hehir and his dissenting background. Every week we learn more about the shady goings on of an archdiocese which is now fracturing. And as the evidence continues to pile up and Cardinal O'Malley continues to ignore it all, faithful Catholics get angrier and angrier.

    We need leadership in Boston.

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