As expected, the tributes to Avery Dulles are beginning to pour in, and one of the sweetest and most personal comes from a frequent visitor to The Bench, James Martin, S.J., who has blogged about his friend and colleague. He remembers a train trip to Boston with the man he called “Avery,” and the return trip home the next morning, just weeks after 9/11

The next morning the two of us caught the 8:00 a.m train to New York. Back in the Jesuit dining room at Fordham, over lunch, a few Jesuits asked how things were in Boston; the country was still reeling from the Sept. 11 attacks. “People in Boston were very upset that two of the planes that his the World Trade Center came from Logan airport,” I explained, relating what I heard the night before. Avery said, “Well, gee, how do you think I feel? One of them came from Dulles!”

That was one of the rare times he referred to that place, out of humility. Once, during his time in Washington, D.C., when he was being driven to the airport, a Jesuit asked Avery, “Which airport are we going to, Father? National or…?”

Avery said, “The other one!”

Avery Cardinal Dulles, S.J., was unfailingly generous to me during the few years I knew him. When one of my first books was published, he not only furnished the publisher with a “blurb,” he also sent me, unbidden, a typewritten letter with a list of helpful corrections. He was a teacher, he said apologetically, so couldn’t resisted making corrections. (For one thing, he saved me from confusing the Fruits of the Holy Spirit with the Gifts of the Holy Spirit.) And when I wrote about a topic I was afraid would prove too controversial, it was Avery who patiently read through a 400-page manuscript He didn’t have to read the whole thing, I explained, worried about the demands on his time. If he wanted to, he could read only the part in question. “Of course I want to read the whole thing,” he said. “How else will I understand it in its full context?” A few weeks later he wrote me a generous letter saying that all was in line with “faith and morals.”

But later on, he also offered a few corrections. Was I really sure about the spelling of St. Thomas Aquinas’s mother’s name?

Avery, who I knew only for a few years, was a model Jesuit. Devoted to Jesus, to the Church, to the Society of Jesus, as well as intelligent, hardworking, prayerful, humble, and, to use and underutilized word, kind. In the few years that I knew him, he helped me to understand better not only what it meant to be, in Jesuit parlance, a “man for others,” but, in more common parlance, a Christian. A friend and a hero. Pray for all of us.

There’s more, so please do go and read the rest.