Cardinal Dulles, Fr. Neuhaus, Fr. Christiansen, America And First Things

• Avery Cardinal Dulles, the closest of collaborators and friends, died December 12 at age ninety in the infirmary of the Jesuit residence at Fordham University. Avery Dulles was a master of the Catholic theological tradition by which he was mastered and which he joyfully served.

He combined erudition, intellectual intensity, and ecclesial fidelity in a lifelong devotion to the Church, joined to a wry sense of humor and disarming humility about his part in the grand scheme of things. Generations of Christian thinkers have been placed in his everlasting debt.

You can be sure that there will be much more about Avery Dulles in these pages. For the moment, we thank God for love’s fire that burned to the end, and we pray that the truth to which he bore tireless witness is now opened to him in the fullness of the Beatific Vision for which he longed with nothing less than everything. (February 2009)

• Just one more word on our friend Avery Dulles. I note the obituary written by Fr. Drew Christiansen, S.J., editor of America, which suggests that Dulles’ conservative turn in the 1970s had to do with his signing the 1975 Hartford Appeal for Theological Affirmation “at the request of his friend Richard John Neuhaus.”

This is, I am afraid, a grave disservice to Cardinal Dulles’ intellectual integrity in his determination to “think with the Church.” Others have also suggested that Dulles’ betrayal of liberal orthodoxy is attributable to his having fallen under the influence of the FIRST THINGS crowd. As a matter of fact, Dulles did not simply sign the Hartford Appeal. He was one of its initiators and architects, having spent several days hammering out the statement in cooperation with such luminaries as Peter Berger, George Forrell, Stanley Hauerwas, Thomas Hopko, George Lindbeck, Ralph McInerny, Richard J. Mouw, Carl Peter, Alexander Schmemann, Gerard Sloyan, George Tavard, and Robert Louis Wilken.

Far from having signed the statement as a personal favor, in the book on Hartford, Against the World for the World, Dulles wrote a major essay in its support, “Unmasking Secret Infidelities: Hartford and the Future of Ecumenism.” As a matter of further fact, Dulles had about the same time, in his capacity as president of the Catholic Theological Society of America, made a memorable address on why many, if not most, academic Catholic theologians were no longer doing Catholic theology as he understood that task. These were themes he constructively developed in his numerous essays in FIRST THINGS over the last almost twenty years. The truth is that many Catholic theologians are deeply embarrassed that their most distinguished and honored colleague was unabashedly a conservative in that he was a formidable and persuasive defender of the faith as it is taught by the Church. Those who, like then Cardinal Ratzinger, admired Avery Dulles and supported his creation as a cardinal understood that his life’s work was marked at every step of the way by courage, candor, and care.

As Benedict XVI wrote on the news of his death: “I join you in commending the late cardinal’s noble soul to God, the Father of Mercies, with immense gratitude for the deep learning, serene judgment, and unfailing love of the Lord and his Church, which marked his entire priestly ministry and his long years of teaching and theological research. At the same time I pray that his convincing personal testimony to the harmony of faith and reason will continue to bear fruit for the conversion of minds and hearts and the progress of the gospel for many years to come.”

Link (here) to the full piece in First Things