Cardinal Avery Dulles, who died on December 12 aged 90, was an American theologian appointed to the Sacred College in old age for his loyal work in interpreting the second Vatican Council. Although he did not attend the Council in the 1960s, Dulles was swept up by the enthusiasm it created, and identified with the outpouring of progressive hopes.
But as the resulting damage to the Church became clear in the subsequent decades he emerged as an important figure in the reaction, presenting the Council not as a break with the past but as another turn in the course of the Church's 2,000-year history.
Although an exceedingly boring lecturer, Dulles was a sharp-witted conversationalist in private; and as a writer his lucidity was almost unmatched among senior churchmen.
Claiming to take off only Easter Sunday and Christmas morning from work, he wrote some 800 articles and 22 books.
The latter included A History of Apologetics (1971), which featured a review of the Church's attitude to Islam, discussing not only some highly prejudiced judgments, but also Peter the Venerable's call in the 12th century for Christians to address Muslims with reason and love, as well as a 15th-century author who argued that the Koran could profitably be studied as an introduction to the Gospel.
In his influential work Models of the Church (1974) Dulles attempted to identify the diverse understandings of the Christian Church and to harmonise hotly disputed theological positions. He denied that the Church had ever changed its stand on slavery or the death penalty, insisting it had always rejected both.
In 2002 he produced a book on Cardinal Newman, the great 19th-century convert and author, whom he resembled in maintaining an epistolary ministry, spending several hours a day writing to those seeking advice.
Avery Robert Dulles was born at Auburn, New York, on August 24 1918 into a family of New England Presbyterians. His great-grandfather, John Watson Dulles, served as Secretary of State to President Benjamin Harrison in the 19th century; his great-uncle, Robert Lansing, did the same for Woodrow Wilson during the First World War.
His grandfather, Allan Macy Dulles, was a Presbyterian pastor and founder of the American Theological College; while in the 1950s his father, John Foster Dulles, was Dwight Eisenhower's Secretary of State, whose earnestness gave rise to the saying "Dull. Duller. Dulles".
Young Avery went to schools in New York, Switzerland and New England before arriving at Harvard as an agnostic in 1936.
One wintry afternoon three years later he was walking beside the Charles river at Cambridge, Massachusetts, when he saw a tree beginning to flower. From then on he never again doubted the existence of "an all good and omnipotent God". That night he prayed for the first time in years.
He continued to feel some traditional hostility towards the Roman Church, but gradually came to believe in the depth, subtlety and coherence of Catholicism, and was received into the Church the following year. In later life he would joke about how he had relished the ritual of abjuring his former heresies.
Dulles's first book was his undergraduate thesis on Pico della Mirandola, a brilliant philosopher who died at 31 after rolling everything from Aristotelian logic to Egyptian astrology into a unified Christian humanism, leading his contemporaries to call him the "prince of concord". After 18 months at Harvard Law School, Dulles was commissioned in the US Navy.
For a year he pursued enemy submarines around the Caribbean in a patrol boat, and was then transferred as a liaison officer to a French ship at the invasion of southern France. He was awarded a Croix de Guerre. As the war drew to a close, however, he spent five months in a naval hospital with polio, from which he recovered with no apparent ill effects.
On returning home he astonished his family by eschewing the normal career paths trod by a Dulles, instead entering the Society of Jesus to embrace a life of poverty. He was ordained priest in 1956, spent a year in Germany, then studied at the Gregorian University in Rome before settling down to teach at Woodstock College in Maryland from 1960 to 1974. He was at the Catholic University of America in Washington (1974-1988) before finally becoming the Laurence J McGinley professor of religion and society at Fordham University, in the Bronx. His stalwart defence of the Church, particularly his sharp criticism of the Catholic Theological Society for its support of women's ordination, brought him to the attention of Pope John Paul II, whose theology he set out to synthesise in The Splendour of Faith (1999).
Although other theologians had been created cardinals beyond the age at which they were permitted to vote in a papal election, it still came as a surprise in 2001 when Dulles became the first American theologian to be so honoured.
As a man accustomed to wearing the cheapest clothes and repairing his shoes with tape, his first concern on being told of his promotion was to ask if he could avoid being made a bishop – which he did.
When he knelt to receive his red hat from John Paul, it fell off. He chose as the motto for his coat of arms Scio cui credidi (I know in whom I have believed), St Paul's explanation of why he was not concerned for his sufferings or his future.
In his last year Dulles suffered a serious recurrence of his polio, which left him unable to speak. But in his farewell address as McGinley professor at Fordham, which was read for him, he explained how his condition now enabled him to identify with the many paralytics and mutes in the Gospels: "If the Lord now calls me to a period of weakness I know well that his power can be made perfect in infirmity."
He presented a copy of his latest book, Church and Society, to Pope Benedict XVI on his American visit earlier this year and, his mind as clear as ever, continued to work almost to the end. When a friend asked if he could do anything for him, Cardinal Dulles scratched on a notepad: "Put more paper in the printer."
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(Source: DMO)