Word has come down that Cardinal Avery Dulles, SJ, one of the great figures of the Catholic Church, certainly in the United States, died this morning at the Jesuit infirmary at Fordham University in The Bronx. He was 90 and had until the past year or so had been very active, but the effects of a childhood bout with polio began to take a toll. (Last April Pope Benedict XVI made a special side trip to greet Dulles, and honor him, as seen here in the photo.)
America’s blog has the announcement. I was always as impressed with Father Dulles’ character and his faith as I was by what I knew of his work, in large part because he was also a convert–like me–but also unfailingly kind–which I am not.
Dulles’ own journey to the church was remarkable: a scion of the great WASP Dulles dynasty, his father was John Foster Dulles, Eisenhower’s Secretary of State, and his uncle was Allen Dulles, director of the CIA, also during the 1950s.
Avery Dulles moved from the Presbyterian Church of his youth to agnosticism and then to a conversion to Catholicism–a very intellectual progression, as he always said, but one that clearly, and progressively, transformed him. He became a Jesuit, and he was a prolific writer, a popularizer with depth, one might say. (And he is one of the rare Jesuits to accept a red hat, though he refused to be made a bishop–God bless him!)
While he became a bit more conservative as he aged, his early work, “Models of the Church,” is a classic and required reading for anyone interested in the past, present, and possible futures of the Catholic Church. Dulles deals with all the wonderful possibilities of a changing church over the years and into the time ahead.
America magazine has also posted an archive of his writings and an interview with him. Dulles many other writings, on Newman, for example, are superb.
Much else will be written, but for now, requiescant in pace, and AMDG.