The Rev. William Callahan was a physicist by training, a Jesuit priest by vocation and a nonconformist by temperament. In 1976, he started the nonprofit Quixote Center, now based in Brentwood, as an independent group promoting such iconoclastic ideas as the ordination of women in the Catholic Church and ministry to gay people.
As idealistic as his center's name implied, he devoted years to a succession of progressive causes.
He first challenged the church on gender equality with the formation of the Washington-based Priests for Equality in 1975 and became a vocal supporter of women's ordination.
He further rankled church authorities in 1979 when he urged male clergy to refrain from distributing Holy Communion at Masses during Pope John Paul II's United States visit because women were excluded.
"Perhaps this is not a human rights issue because women are not human or they do not have rights," Rev. Callahan was quoted as saying at the time.
(He later claimed he was citing another person's comments.) Yet he continued to challenge the church on women's issues, including artificial birth control.
Because of his work with the Quixote Center and his propensity of attracting headlines, Rev. Callahan emerged as one of the leading dissenters of the Catholic Church, a description he didn't entirely agree with.
"We are often labeled dissenters," he once told an interviewer, "but we care profoundly about the church."
In 1979, he was warned by Father Pedro Arrupe, then worldwide head of the Jesuits, to sever ties with the Quixote Center and to "refrain from any public advocacy of priestly ordination of women."
Rev. Callahan took a leave of absence but returned a year later. He later started a group called Catholics Speak Out to defend the right of Catholics to criticize the church.
During the 1980s, he was involved with Quest for Peace, a program run by the Quixote Center that sent aid to Nicaragua and opposed U.S. support to the anti-Marxist rebel group known as the contras.
"U.S. citizens are fed up with the illegal policy of our government toward Nicaragua, which has made the United States an international outlaw," he said.
Rev. Callahan's relentless work eventually led to calls for his removal from the Jesuits. After a 20-year history of activism in Washington, he was forced out of his religious order, formally known as the Society of Jesus, in 1991.
He died July 5 at the Washington Home and Community Hospices of complications from Parkinson's disease. He was 78.
"Bill Callahan stood firmly in the Dorothy Day-Berrigan Brothers wing of American Catholicism," said Colman McCarthy, a former Washington Post columnist and friend of Rev. Callahan's.
"Like them, he exemplified the Sermon on the Mount. It's lamentable that his Jesuit superiors didn't see it that way. They should have exalted, not banished, him."
Despite his expulsion from the Jesuits, Rev. Callahan's commitment to the Quixote Center and social justice issues remained.
"I do believe I am following the example of Jesus, who was never willing to shut up when preaching the good news to his disciples," he told The Post in 1989. He continued to work with the center until two years ago.
William Reed Callahan was born Sept. 5, 1931, in Scituate, Mass., a coastal town south of Boston. His mother died when he was an infant. His father sent him to live with his paternal grandparents, who were Catholic.
He joined the New England Province of Jesuits in 1948 and received his bachelor's and master's degrees from Boston College. He received a doctorate in physics from Johns Hopkins University in 1962 while he worked at NASA's Goddard Space Center on weather satellites.
In the late 1960s, Rev. Callahan taught physics at Fairfield University, a Jesuit school in Connecticut, before promoting civil rights causes for the Jesuits in Boston. In 1971, he co-found the Center of Concern, a social justice think tank in Washington that was supported by the Catholic Church.
According to his longtime partner, Dolly Pomerleau, whom he married days before he died, Rev. Callahan established the Quixote Center as a way to promote social causes independent of the church.
"He was perceived as a radical, and the center was seen as being on the cutting edge," Pomerleau said. "However, that wasn't the purpose, it was the result."
In addition to Pomerleau, survivors include three brothers and three sisters.
As the years went by, Rev. Callahan turned his attention away from opposing church policies and devoted his energies to raising humanitarian aid for impoverished people in Haiti and other countries.
When asked about losing his standing in the Jesuit order, he told The Post, "That is nothing compared to the daily threats of violence, death and economic ruin faced by so many."
SIC: TWP