Green Leaves for Later Years by Griffin Emilie;

Author:Griffin, Emilie; [Griffin, Emilie]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: InterVarsity Press
Published: 2012-08-02T00:00:00+00:00

Transcending Loss: Avery Dulles

Another remarkable man who used the later years well was Avery Dulles, a gifted Catholic theologian whose specialty was thinking about the nature and character of the church. The son of John Foster Dulles, secretary of state in the Eisenhower administration, Dulles was an agnostic in his college years at Harvard but had a decisive conversion experience and became a Catholic, then, after serving in the U.S. Navy, a Jesuit scholastic and later a priest.

The decisive moment of Dulles’s conversion came about when he had been reading Augustine’s City of God in Widener Library, then left to walk along the Charles River. On a gray February day in 1939, he noticed a young tree starting to bud. This small event became an epiphany. “The thought came to me suddenly, with all the strength and novelty of a revelation, that these little buds in their innocence and meekness followed a rule, a law of which I as yet knew nothing,” he wrote. “That night, for the first time in years, I prayed.”

Dulles’s conversion in 1940, the year he graduated from Harvard, shocked his family and friends, he said, but he called it the best and most important decision of his life.

After a lifetime of influential writing, teaching and lecturing in such universities as Georgetown, Woodstock and the Gregorian, he became the Laurence J. McGinley professor at Fordham University in the Bronx in 1988, a post he held for twenty years. In 2001 he was named a cardinal, an honor conferred for his long years of outstanding work in theology. Since he was already past eighty, he could not vote and requested not to be named a bishop. Nevertheless he was an important presence among the American Catholic hierarchy in his last decade.

Dulles’s health declined in his later years. He suffered from the effects of polio in his youth, losing the faculty of speech and experiencing impaired use of his arms. However, his mind remained clear and he continued to work and communicate by computer. On April 1, 2008, Cardinal Dulles presented his farewell address as McGinley professor of religion and society. The former president of Fordham University, Father Joseph O’Hare, S.J., was the cardinal’s longtime friend and colleague. O’Hare read the address, in which Dulles talked about gratitude and suffering, drawing on the ideas of St. Paul about power being made perfect in weakness.

During the ceremony Father Joseph McShane, S.J., presented Dulles with the university’s presidential medal. That same evening the cardinal’s book Church and Society: The Laurence J. McGinley Lectures, 1988-2007 was released. Some days later, on April 19, 2008, Pope Benedict XVI visited Cardinal Dulles in the Fordham infirmary during his apostolic trip to the United States. Again Dulles composed formal remarks that were given on his behalf. Dulles died on December 12, 2008.

I came to know Father Dulles in the 1980s after I told his conversion story in my book Turning: Reflections on the Experience of Conversion (Doubleday, 1980). I had acquired a battered copy of his fine book Testimonial to Grace, which was then out of print.

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