On April 8, colleagues, friends, and associates who knew him best closed out the University’s yearlong celebration of the cardinal with an evening of discussion, prayer, and fellowship.

“The Apologetics of Personal Testimony: A Celebration of the Life and Faith of Avery Cardinal Dulles, S.J.,” featured a panel discussion, a Mass and a dinner reception on the Rose Hill campus, Cardinal Dulles’ home for 20 years.

The day began at Tognino Hall, where Michael C. McCarthy, S.J., vice president for Mission Integration and Planning at Fordham, moderated a panel discussion featuring Michael Canaris, Ph.D., GSAS ’13, assistant professor at the Institute of Pastoral Studies at Loyola University Chicago, Anne-Marie Kirmse, O.P., former research associate for the McGinley Chair in Religion and Society at Fordham, and the Most Reverend James Massa, auxiliary bishop of the Diocese of Brooklyn.

Sister Kirmse focused on Cardinal Dulles’ journey of faith, from his early years in a deeply religious Presbyterian household to his casting off belief in God in high school and first two college years, to his conversion experience and his search for a church in which to practice his faith.

Cardinal Dulles was educated at Choate Rosemary Hall and Harvard University, and his family included a father who became secretary of state (Washington Dulles International Airport is named for him) and an uncle who became head of the CIA. He converted to Catholicism and went on to become the first American who was not a bishop to be named a cardinal. That same faith, she said, sustained him in the time of declining health in the years before his death.

Canaris as well picked up on that suffering—which he saw first-hand as Cardinal Dulles’ last doctoral student—speaking about “the crucible of torture in his last months.” In the end, Canaris, who is editing a volume based on papers on Cardinal Dulles delivered during events at Fordham this past year,  said Cardinal Dulles was like the tested man in the Letter of James.

“Blessed is a man who perseveres under trial; for once he has been approved, he will receive the crown of life which the Lord has promised to those who love Him,” he said.

Bishop Massa recounted Cardinal Dulles’ long engagement with ecumenical dialogue, as well as the cardinal’s growing disappointment with how that dialogue was conducted, and where it was headed. While he stressed that Cardinal Dulles never reversed himself on the subject and “personally stood by all the ecumenical statements he had ever signed,” he said Cardinal Dulles believed “the ground had shifted” since early years after the Second Vatican Council and said a new term for this new landscape was needed.

“Avery gave it a name: ‘Mutual enrichment by mean of personal testimony.’ That focus on the witness of one’s Christian life became a motif of Cardinal Dulles’ later years, and was powerfully testified to by his final illness,” he said.

A Mass of remembrance concelebrated by the Jesuit community of Fordham followed at the University Church. Bishop Massa served as principal celebrant, and Patrick J Ryan, S.J., the Lawrence J. McGinley Professor of Religion and Society, delivered the homily.

At a dinner reception at Bepler Commons, Joseph M. McShane, S.J., president of Fordham, recalled Cardinal Dulles’ humble nature, noting that after he was elevated to Cardinal in 2001, he pointedly declined the honorific “Your Eminence” in favor of the traditional “Father.”

Cardinal Dulles was also close friends with Edward Cardinal Egan, Archbishop of New York, he said, and when his health started to fail him in his later years, Egan visited him often and offered him a final resting place at St. Patrick’s Cathedral.

“Dulles flatly told him ‘no.’ After some back and forth, he explained his reason: he wanted to be buried next to his Jesuit brothers,” Father McShane said.

“Avery Dulles was buried next to man a who taught high school math—a good guy.”

The evening was sponsored by the Spellman Hall Jesuit Community, the Office of the President, the Office of the Provost, the Office of Mission Integration and Planning, and the Center on Religion and Culture.

—Additional reporting by David Gibson and David Goodwin

The words of renowned theologian Avery Cardinal Dulles, S.J., continue to inspire a generation of religion scholars. And it was conflict and dialogue among theologians that resulted in some of his important work.

Elizabeth Johnson, C.S.J., a long-time colleague to Dulles, the first American Jesuit ever to be named a cardinal, delivered a keynote on the “fluency of interpretation” of his thought at Dulles at 100, a recent celebration of his work and legacy at Fordham.

She began with Models of the Church, a book Cardinal Dulles wrote in 1974, after the Second Vatican Council, when conflict began to swirl among theologians as they debated different understandings of the church.

“Avery took this as a sign of vitality,” said Johnson, distinguished professor of theology emerita at Fordham. “His systematic mind created a way forward.”

In the book, Cardinal Dulles studied the writings of contemporary Protestant and Catholic ecclesiologists and laid out six major approaches, or “models,” through which the church’s can be understood: as institution, mystical communion, sacrament, herald, servant, and, in a recent addition to the book, as community of disciples.

“In this book, he showed how each these models had its own strengths, and how each also had its weaknesses. No one is sufficient to do justice to the full living reality of the church. So better to set up the dialogue among them and develop a theology that draws from the major affirmations of each,” she said.

It was not an ‘anything goes’ kind of approach,” Johnson said, but “it helped to wean ecclesiology from a one-horse sleigh way of traveling. The fluency of his way of thinking made theology even beyond ecclesiology more comfortable with pluralism, more at peace with diversity.

“To quote Avery, ‘We are as different from our medieval ancestors of the faith as the computer is different from the abacus.’ And that was written in the ’70s! ‘Thus, the religious language of one period needs to be revised for another,” Sister Johnson said.

Cardinal Dulles applied this approach not only to set topics in theology like ecclesiology, but to the teaching of the magisterium, she said, calling attention to his essay, “The Hermeneutics of Dogmatic Statements.”

The 15-page essay contained Cardinal Dulles’ six principles for interpreting doctrinal statements and a call for theologians to “refocus the message so that it speaks directly to the deepest concerns of people today.”

Johnson quoted the essay, calling attention to a great image he paints: “‘We cannot nourish people today with the stale fragments of a meal prepared for believers of the 13th, or 14th, or 16th century. We must articulate new theology with new doctrinal insights that will orient people to Christ in our day and relay the Christian message to ages yet to come.’”

She said she first read and discussed this essay under Avery’s tutelage in a graduate seminar, noting that it was something that influenced her own work and that she would go on to teach and discuss with new generations of graduate students.

“The fluency of his approach to interpreting theological differences and limitations of church teaching, an approach he later characterized in a different essay … as one of creative fidelity, opens a way to think deeply and critically about faith, and thus enables younger people to carry out the theological vocation with integrity,” she said. “Avery himself used this fluency broadly as some of his books made clear. He didn’t always carry it out. Avery was a complicated person. But this fluency, I think, is a rich part of his legacy.”

During the question and answer portion, Johnson was asked how “the Avery Dulles of later years” would look back on that essay. She said it was something the pair had discussed in his later years at Fordham.

“He never withdrew from these principles. They’re too deeply rooted in his own assessment of things. The practical way it would work out, though, is where we would differ; there would be differences.”. So if were interpreting a controversial issue, she said, he would feel he was still doing so using the principles laid out in the essay, “but with different assumptions about some people’s experiences that would lead him to a different conclusion. But, no, he never retracted. It was an interesting conversation. It was actually a painful conversation because I was writing things with which he would disagree, and so I’d say, ‘But you taught me how to do this.’ It does not change what he wrote and he stood by it.”