Cardinal Avery Dulles in West Virginia
Emily and I drove to Wheeling Jesuit University last night to hear a lecture from Cardinal Avery Dulles, the famous Jesuit theologian and author of such books as Models of the Church. The lecture was part of the school’s “Jesuit Jubilee” year celebrating the founders of the Society of Jesus: Ignatius of Loyola, Francis Xavier, and Peter Faber.
I was a little disappointed with the topic. Dulles gave nothing more than a history of the founding of the Jesuit order, going into detail about the threesome’s personalities, and ending by simply indicating his admiration for their great faith in contrast to our contemporary world where faith is lacking. His insights into their personalities was pretty impressive, and appropriate to the occasion, but we wish he had shared more of his actual ideas with the packed theatre rather than a history lesson. Or at least made an attempt to apply that history to the Jesuit order and its apostolates today. His lecture read like it could have been a paper he wrote while in his novitiate. I could have called up one of my Jesuit buddies for the same information.
The most interesting part of the night, though, was the last question of the brief Q&A period. A woman stood up and asked the Cardinal what he thought his father, John Foster Dulles, would think of politics today. Cardinal Dulles said he wasn’t comfortable speculating what his father would think of politics today, that he wouldn’t know what to say, that he didn’t really care to talk about politics.
John Foster Dulles was Secretary of State under Eisenhower as the Cold War was intensifying. The elder Dulles is remembered for his intense anti-communism, his thinking on intensifying the arms race, and his love of capitalism: “For us there are two sorts of people in the world: there are those who are Christians and support free enterprise and there are the others.”
Somehow I think the elder Dulles would approve of the state of affairs today, what with the War on Terror and the destructive forces of global capitalism wrecking havoc throughout the world. But we’ll forgive you, Cardinal, for not wanting to step up to the plate on this topic.
That’s too bad that Dullas didn’t talk more about his own views, but I don’t think his unwillingness to answer speculative questions about his father is anything that requires forgives. Whether he agrees with the present state of affairs as his father may have (in which case I wouldn’t want him spouting those views) or he disagrees and didn’t want to publicly rebuke a dead parent (which I think is more likely), I believe silence is a perfectly reasonable response… perhaps the best one. Furthermore, as a historian, I want to say that speculation about what such and such historical figure would think about what’s happening today is silly. I tend to think it’s just an attempt to shortcut the processes of figuring out what they thought about injustice in their own time, deriving lessons from their experience and then coming to conclusions about how you should act in the present.
True true. Yes, you’re right. Damn.