Avery Dulles, a giant of American Catholic theology
Avery Dulles, S.J. (Wikimedia Commons)Last Friday marked 62 years since the opening of the Second Vatican Council. Between reading commemorations of that anniversary and absorbing the constant flow of news from the ongoing Synod on Synodality in Rome—America has a whole squad there these days—I have felt a bit this past week like I am back in graduate school for theology. Parsing synodality in particular has required brushing up a little on ecclesiology, and sent me to the bookshelf for an old classic: Avery Dulles’s Models of the Church.
First published in 1974 and updated over the years, Models of the Church is probably Dulles’s best-known work, and one that I suspect every Catholic graduate student in theology over the past five decades has read. In a 2008 reflection published in America, the Rev. Robert Imbelli noted that the book “allowed us to articulate a legitimate pluralism in our understanding of church, and hence to promote dialogue among different (sometimes competing) perspectives, whether in religious communities, in seminaries or in parishes.”
Dulles would publish 22 other books over the course of his career, including Models of Revelation in 1983 and The Assurance of Things Hoped For: A Theology of Christian Faith in 1994. He also published more than 800 scholarly articles, and in his longtime role as the McGinley Chair at Fordham University he also delivered semiannual lectures for 20 years that were published in America or First Things. He served as president of the Catholic Theological Society of America in 1975-76 and of the American Theological Society three years later.
Despite a reputation as a theological conservative whose views on many subjects were at odds with those of most American Catholic theologians, particularly during the long reign of Pope John Paul II, Avery Dulles was also widely respected across the Catholic theological spectrum for his scholarly acumen and even-handed, measured approach to complex doctrinal questions. A classic example of his style can be found in a lengthy 1996 article on women’s ordination for Origins, republished in America in 2001. Another example of his honest appraisal of issues in the church can be found in this 1991 obituary for Henri de Lubac, S.J.
Born in Auburn, N.Y., in 1918, Dulles was the son of John Foster Dulles, who would later serve as the U.S. Secretary of State. His uncle, Allen Dulles, was later the director of the Central Intelligence Agency, and his aunt, Eleanor Lansing Dulles, managed the American aid program in West Germany after World War II.
Dulles attended Harvard University, graduating in 1940. (Patrick Ryan, S.J., wrote in a 2018 appreciation of Dulles that Dulles was once almost expelled after he and some friends stole a cab in Harvard Square and took it for a joyride). Raised Presbyterian, Dulles considered himself an agnostic when he arrived at Harvard but found himself drawn more and more to Catholicism, and was received into the Catholic Church in the fall of 1940.
Dulles attended Harvard Law School after graduation, though he left halfway through his second year to enlist in the U.S. Navy. While in law school, he also co-founded the Saint Benedict Center, a Catholic student center adjacent to Harvard that would later be run by the Rev. Leonard Feeney. While stationed in Naples during World War II, Dulles contracted polio, the effects of which he would struggle with again later in life. Tall and lanky, he already had a peculiar gait: In Picnic in Babylon, the writer John L’Heureux described Dulles as “an incredible man: all bony and elongated, made of rake handles and broomsticks and old umbrellas.”
Dulles entered the Society of Jesus in 1946 at St. Andrew-on-Hudson, near Poughkeepsie, N.Y. He was ordained in 1956 and received his doctorate in theology from the Pontifical Gregorian University in Rome in 1960. He taught for the next 14 years at the Jesuit theologate in Woodstock, Md., and for 14 more at The Catholic University of America in Washington, D.C.
Having reached the mandatory retirement age at CUA in 1988, he was offered a one-year renewable appointment at Fordham University to serve as their inaugural McGinley Chair. As he related in his final lecture upon his retirement from Fordham in 2008, he re-upped 20 times.
Dulles wrote countless articles for America over the years, with his first appearing in 1962 at the start of Vatican II. His broad intellectual range allowed him to write on disparate topics in addition to his many articles on theology, including everything from papal conclaves to sex abuse to American culture to Jesuit spirituality. In 2019, America partnered with Ave Maria Press to publish a collection of his writings for the magazine (full disclosure: I edited that volume).
In 2001, Pope John Paul II named Dulles to the College of Cardinals—the only American theologian ever recognized with such an honor—though he dispensed him from the customary ordination as a bishop. As his polio symptoms returned, Dulles eventually lost the use of his limbs and his voice, with the result that his final McGinley lecture in 2008 was delivered by Joseph O’Hare, S.J., former editor in chief of America and former president of Fordham University. Dulles noted his physical challenges in that text:
Suffering and diminishment are not the greatest of evils, but are normal ingredients in life, especially in old age. They are to be accepted as elements of a full human existence. Well into my 90th year I have been able to work productively. As I become increasingly paralyzed and unable to speak, I can identify with the many paralytics and mute persons in the Gospels, grateful for the loving and skillful care I receive and for the hope of everlasting life in Christ. If the Lord now calls me to a period of weakness, I know well that his power can be made perfect in infirmity.
Avery Dulles died on December 12, 2008. At his funeral in St. Patrick’s Cathedral in New York on Dec. 17, Father O’Hare spoke of Dulles’s impact on so many theologians and other people of faith:
Through his extraordinary gifts of insight and expression, he has left us a guide to his own personal pilgrimage that can enlighten the search of others, whether they be men and women of faith, seeking understanding, or citizens of the academy, where understanding is often searching for faith.
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Our poetry selection for this week is “Bible Study,” by Joshua Kulseth. Readers can view all of America’s published poems here.
Members of the Catholic Book Club: We are taking a hiatus while we retool the Catholic Book Club and pick a new selection.
In this space every week, America features reviews of and literary commentary on one particular writer or group of writers (both new and old; our archives span more than a century), as well as poetry and other offerings from America Media. We hope this will give us a chance to provide you with more in-depth coverage of our literary offerings. It also allows us to alert digital subscribers to some of our online content that doesn’t make it into our newsletters.
Other Catholic Book Club columns:
The spiritual depths of Toni Morrison
What’s all the fuss about Teilhard de Chardin?
Moira Walsh and the art of a brutal movie review
Father Hootie McCown: Flannery O’Connor’s Jesuit bestie and spiritual advisor
Happy reading!
James T. Keane
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