NOTE: Enjoy this excerpt from The American Daily Reader, by CatholicVote president Brian Burch and Emily Stimpson Chapman. To order the complete volume, visit the CatholicVote store today!
On a gray February day in 1939, Avery Dulles went for a walk along the Charles River. Dulles was a junior at Harvard that year, and great things were expected of him.
Great things were, in fact, the family business: Dulles’ grandfather was an eminent Presbyterian theologian. His great-grandfather and great-uncle both had served as U.S. secretary of state. Soon, his father would do the same, while his uncle would become director of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA). Dulles was different from his family though. He couldn’t share their Presbyterian faith—he’d long doubted God’s existence—and wasn’t committed to a career in politics. He became even more different after that February stroll.
As he walked, Dulles spotted a tree in bud. In a moment, his doubts about God disappeared.
“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 later explained. “That night, for the first time in years, I prayed.”
Much to his family’s chagrin, Dulles entered the Catholic Church within a year. Six years later, he joined the Society of Jesus, and on June 16, 1956, he was ordained a Catholic priest.
In the decades that followed, Dulles would become America’s preeminent Catholic theologian—teaching at Woodstock Seminary, The Catholic University of America, and Fordham University; serving as president of the Catholic Theological Society of America; and authoring hundreds of articles and books.
Through it all, Dulles defended Catholic orthodoxy in an age of dissent, saying once, “Christianity would dissolve itself if it allowed its revealed content, handed down in tradition, to be replaced by contemporary theories.”
For his theological contributions, Pope John Paul II bestowed upon Dulles the cardinal’s red hat in 2001. He was the first American theologian to receive such an honor.
Cardinal Dulles died in 2008, having become every inch the great man his family expected him to be.
