Otto Hentz was born in 1938 and entered the Society of Jesus in 1955 after graduation from the Jesuit high school in Philadelphia, St. Joseph’s’s Prep. As a seminarian, before theology studies and ordination, he taught philosophy at Georgetown from 1962 to 1965. Following the ordinary course in theology, he was ordained to the priesthood in 1968. He did doctoral studies at the University of Chicago and returned to Georgetown as a professor of theology in 1973.