Jesuit Cardinal Said "No" To Calvinism

There is nothing like Debrett's "Peerage" in these United States. If there were, Avery Cardinal Dulles, S.J., who died on the feast of Our Lady of Guadalupe, Dec. 12, would surely have been in it.

His great-grandfather, John W. Foster, was President Benjamin Harrison's Secretary of State--a service done for President Wilson by his great-uncle, Robert Lansing, and for President Eisenhower by his father, John Foster Dulles. His uncle, Allen Dulles, was America's European spymaster during World War II, and his aunt Eleanor (whom many thought the most formidable of the clan) was largely responsible for negotiating the Austrian State Treaty and getting the Red Army out of Vienna in 1955. John Foster Dulles was also the most prominent Protestant layman of the 1940s, serving as chairman of the Federal Council of Churches's Commission to Study the Bases of a Just and Endurable Peace in the days when that predecessor to the National Council of Churches stood at the apex of the American establishment, alongside the American Medical Association and the American Bar Association.

Foster Dulles's robust Calvinism didn't take with young Avery, who would say in later years that he left Choate for Harvard a thoroughgoing skeptic and agnostic. But neither did his agnosticism last. As he recounted in his memoir, "A Testimonial to Grace," he was walking along the Charles River on a blustery, early spring day in 1938 when he noticed the veins in a leaf on a blossoming tree; such precision, beauty, and purpose could not, he thought, be an accident. The universe, he imagined, must be governed by "an all-good and omnipotent God." "That night," he wrote, "I prayed for the first time in years."

Link (here) to George Weigel's full article.