Anthony de Mello

Anthony de Mello was born in Bombay in 1931 to a Goan Catholic family and entered the Society of Jesus at eighteen. He studied philosophy in Spain, theology in India, and psychology at Loyola University Chicago, and was ordained a Jesuit priest in 1961.

He directed the Sadhana Institute of Pastoral Counselling near Poona, where he ran retreats that drew participants from around the world, and his work fused Ignatian spiritual exercises with Buddhist and Hindu practice, Sufi teaching stories, and clinical psychology. He was not shy about the fusion, and it is the reason both for his reach and for the trouble that followed.

His method was conversational and confrontational in roughly equal measure. He told stories, let them land, and then turned them against the people laughing. His central claim was that most people are functionally asleep, running on values and wants installed by family and culture and never examined, and that what they call love is frequently attachment, meaning the belief that they need a particular thing or person before they can be all right.

He published Sadhana: A Way to God, The Song of the Bird, and Wellsprings during his lifetime. Awareness, assembled from recordings of his talks and published in 1990, is the best known and the least like a book. He interrupts himself, repeats, and loses patience with the audience, and the transcription preserves all of it.

He died suddenly of a heart attack in New York in 1987, at fifty-five, shortly before a scheduled speaking engagement.

In 1998 the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith issued a notification warning that some positions in his later writing were incompatible with Catholic teaching, particularly regarding the person of Christ and the nature of revelation. His books remain in print and remain widely read within Catholic retreat circles.