The Legacy of Avery Cardinal Dulles, S.J.: His Words and His Witness

Lecture to Sodality Alumni

Lecture to Sodality Alumni Mr. Avery Dulles, S.J. September ,  I am very happy to be able to talk to this group. My relatively large number of years as a layman gave me some opportunity to observe, from a layman’s point of view, the enormous possibilities of the apostolate of laymen by laymen. As you will hear from me in a few minutes, in my own journey to the faith I was completely out of contact with the clergy but was greatly helped by several apostolic laymen such as yourselves. While in the navy during World War II, I saw a great deal of heroic devotion and Catholicity in a number of my fellow officers and men. I feel that we are in an age when the laity are regaining the important place that they had in the apostolate in the early centuries of the Church. This is, is it not, an age of collective action? The wars of our age are total wars, not the work of a few professional soldiers. Every citizen is actively engaged in the struggle. The Church on earth is a Church at war—it is the Church militant—locked in eternal struggle with the powers of darkness. If the Church is to be abreast of the times—and through God’s providence she is abreast—all Catholics are called upon for active service. Collectively organized. That is what the Holy Father has been proclaiming. Last February, speaking to the Roman people, he called upon them, clergy and laity together, to initiate a ‘‘mighty spiritual reawakening . . . having as its aim the complete renewal of Christian life . . . and the reconstruction of a Christian order.’’ The sodality is consecrated to just that task. That is why the sodality is an instrument ideally suited to our times. That is what the Holy Father said in 1948 in his apostolic constitution! The perfect Catholic, the Catholic of the stature that the sodality has ever been accustomed to aim for, is 89 90 兩 Cardinal Dulles’s Legacy in His Witness more than ever needed in our times to overcome the ‘‘spiritual barrenness ’’ that afflicts men’s hearts. It is my privilege to work with the sodality of Fordham College, and I consider it a double privilege to address you today, who are postgraduate sodalists, super-sodalists. My topic, as announced in the letters which were mailed to you, is ‘‘How I found my faith at Harvard.’’ The title will perhaps strike you as strange and almost paradoxical. Harvard, no doubt, symbolizes to your mind the epitome of secularism, of faithlessness. How many there are who could stand up, if they were here, as soon as I have sat down, and address you on the topic of how they lost their faith at Harvard. Now I am not here to make any generalizations about Harvard or about the Catholics there. I am not going to discuss what happens to others at Harvard but to tell you, as simply as I can, my own story. The topic, how I found my faith, is a very personal one—and how can the subject of faith be phrased in anything except personal terms. For each of us the story of his faith is the intimate history of his own personal relations with the divine Person who seeks to enter into each of our hearts by every door which we will open to Him. I was raised a Presbyterian, but most modern Presbyterians, as you no doubt know, have shelved the teachings of John Calvin, with the result that they are left with what could be called a nondogmatic brand of Christianity. Religion among liberal Presbyterians is pretty much divorced from any well-defined creed. That was my home environment. But my ideas were molded far less by home influences than by the schools which I attended. From the age of twelve I was in boarding schools, and my teachers were, almost to a man, a negative influence on my religion. The whole curriculum of the modern secular school, at least in the hands of nearly everyone teaching in it, is, in my opinion and from my experience , calculated to lead the student away from God. I studied languages, history, and physical science, but in no course that I took did it seem that God had any place in it at all. Even the chapel service conducted in these schools seemed to have nothing to do with God. The...