Avery Dulles, leading U.S. theologian, dies at 90

Cardinal said the Church is in dire need of renewal and we need to focus on 'how God comes to us'

Cardinal Avery Dulles

BY MARK PATTISON
CATHOLIC NEWS SERVICE

NEW YORK — Cardinal Avery Dulles, a Jesuit theologian who was made a cardinal in 2001, died Dec. 12 at the Jesuit infirmary in New York. A cause of death was not released but he had been in poor health. He was 90 years old.

Dulles gave what was described as a farewell address in April, delivering the Laurence J. McGinley lecture at Jesuit-run Fordham University.

In the presentation, he reconfirmed his faith, his orthodoxy, his spirituality and his commitment to the Society of Jesus.

He also offered a final word against the materialism, relativism, subjectivism, hedonism, scientism and superficial anti-intellectualism he said is found in modern society.

Later that month he had a private meeting with Pope Benedict during the pontiff’s visit to New York.

Meeting of the minds

“It was a lovely meeting,” said Dominican Sister Anne-Marie Kirmse, the cardinal’s executive assistant for the past 20 years. “The pope literally bounded into the room with a big smile on his face,” she told Catholic News Service.

The session was called a significant meeting of “two of the leading Catholic theologians who interpreted Vatican II for a generation,” by Father James Massa, executive director of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops’ Secretariat of Ecumenical and Interreligious Affairs.

Massa said Dec. 12 that Dulles was a “reliable and faithful interpreter” of the Second Vatican Council for “a generation of priests, scholars and faithful.”

Dulles, the son of former Secretary of State John Foster Dulles and nephew of onetime CIA director Allen Walsh Dulles, both of whom served in the Eisenhower administration, became known in his own right for his groundbreaking 1974 work Models of the Church — one of 22 books published under his name — in which he defined the Church as institution, mystical communion, sacrament, herald, servant and community of disciples, and critiqued each.

Born Aug. 24, 1918, Dulles was the grandson of a Presbyterian minister. He joined the Catholic Church as a young man after he went through a period of unbelief.

Body of believers

“In becoming a Catholic, I felt from the beginning that I was joining the communion of the saints,” he said at a 2004 lecture in New York on author C.S. Lewis. “I found great joy at the sense of belonging to a body of believers that stretched across the face of the globe.”

He entered the Catholic Church in 1941 while a student at Harvard Law School. He served in the Navy in the Second World War, then entered the Jesuits after his discharge in 1946. He was ordained to the priesthood in 1956.

Trip to Edmonton

Dulles gave the annual Anthony Jordan Lecture Series at Edmonton’s Newman Theological College in 1994.

Past president of both the Catholic Theological Society of America and the American Theological Society, Dulles served on the International Theological Commission and was a regular consultant to the U.S. bishops.

The cardinal was a frequent lecturer on religious and Church matters well into his 80s.

In a 2005 lecture, Dulles said, “The true spirit of the council is to be found in, and not apart from, the letter” of Vatican II texts.

“When rightly interpreted, the documents of Vatican II can still be a powerful source of renewal for the Church.”

Also in 2005, he said the 1551 teaching of the Council of Trent on the real presence of Christ in the Eucharist “remains today as normative as ever.” The council described the presence with three adverbs — “truly, really and substantially” — that are “the keys that open the door to Catholic teaching and exclude contrary views,” he said.

In a New York lecture on the start of the 2004-05 Year of the Eucharist, Dulles said Catholics must be aware “the Church is in dire need of renewal.”

Although “holy in her head and in her apostolic heritage,” the Church remains “sinful in her members and in constant need of being purified,” he said, adding many Catholics are ignorant of Church teachings, and a few even reject the teachings.

At the first National Catholic Prayer Breakfast in Washington in 2004, Cardinal Dulles said that although for Americans “there is nothing more sacred to our lives than the idea of liberty” the “negative pull” of freedom from responsibilities is drawing the nation into immorality.

“Once freedom operates in a moral vacuum, it becomes meaningless,” he said.

The United States has proven successful at overthrowing tyrannical regimes, Dulles said, but seems unable to create anything more than a “moral vacuum, which is painfully filled by the demons of fraud, drugs and violence.”

He said, for example, in post-Taliban and post-communist societies “too many citizens begin to hanker for a return of the ousted rulers who provided at least a minimum of order and security.”

In another 2004 talk Dulles called for “a rebirth of apologetics,” the defence of Christian faith by reason, because “the time is ripe, the need is urgent.”

But he called for an apologetics centred on “the living testimony of believers” rather than the traditional arguments from philosophy and historical science, one focused not on the traditional question of “how we get to God” but “how God comes to us.”

Personal testimony

“The apologetics of personal testimony is particularly suited to the genius of Catholicism,” he said.

“Such testimony invites us not only to individual conversion but to communion with the whole body of believers.”

An evening wake for the late cardinal was held Dec. 16 and 17 at Fordham University Church.

A funeral Mass was scheduled for Dec. 18 at St. Patrick’s Cathedral, followed by burial at the Jesuit Cemetery in Auriesville, N.Y.

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