William R. Callahan

Who was William R. Callahan?

Rev. William Reed "Bill" Callahan was an American Roman Catholic priest whose activism on behalf of changes in Vatican policy regarding the ordination of women, his ministry to gay Catholics and his activities on behalf of social justice led to his expulsion from the Society of Jesus in 1991, forbidding him to act as a priest.

Callahan was born in Scituate, Massachusetts on September 5, 1931. He was raised as a Catholic by his father's parents following the death of his mother when Callahan was 6 months old. He attended Boston College High School and joined the Society of Jesus in 1948. Callahan had originally intended to pursue training in agronomy, but was convinced to pursue education in physics as the Jesuits needed additional physics professors for the colleges in the Jesuit system. He attended Boston College, where he earned bachelor's and master's degrees in physics, and earned his Ph.D. in the subject in 1962 from Johns Hopkins University. After completing college, he taught at the Jesuit-operated Fairfield University and received his ordination as a priest in 1965.

Together with Dolly Pomerleau, he founded the Quixote Center in 1976. During the 1980s, the center raised $100 million towards humanitarian aid to the Sandanista-led government of Nicaragua. During the visit of Pope John Paul II to the United States in 1979, Callahan tried to discourage priests from helping the pope celebrate mass, hoping that this would create the need for lay women to participate in the services. After the pope declared that the church's position opposing the ordination of women was not a human rights issue, Callahan wondered that "perhaps this is not a human rights issue because women are not human or they do not have rights". In a 1980 article in The New York Times title "Equal Rights on the Altar of God", Callahan opined that the church's policy against the ordination of women was driven by the desire among the exclusively male clergy for power, which is "sexually satisfying [with] a certain act of love and passion all its own, and priests cherish it as one game they can play", questioning "why should they share their little playing field" with women?