# Avery Dulles American Jesuit priest, theologian, and **the first U.S.-born theologian to be made a cardinal** (2001) — and one of the most influential American Catholic theologians of the twentieth century. Author of more than twenty-five books, including the canonical 1974 work ***Models of the Church*** which became the standard text on Catholic ecclesiology for two generations of seminarians and graduate students. A principal Catholic signer of the 1994 **[[Evangelicals and Catholics Together]]** declaration, his participation provided the post-1994 evangelical-Catholic coalition with theological-respectability authority comparable to what [[J. I. Packer]] provided on the evangelical side. Dulles's family background was operationally significant. He was the son of **John Foster Dulles** (Secretary of State under Eisenhower, 1953–1959) and nephew of **Allen Welsh Dulles** (CIA Director, 1953–1961). The Dulles family was a fixture of mid-twentieth-century American Protestant establishment power — Presbyterian, Princeton-educated, Wall Street-and-Washington-connected — and Avery's 1940 conversion to Catholicism while at Harvard was a deliberate institutional breach with that legacy that he documented in his 1946 spiritual autobiography ***A Testimonial to Grace***. For the right-wing knowledge base, Dulles matters as the **canonical American Catholic theological respectability anchor for the 1994 ECT declaration** and as the principal academic-Catholic figure in the post-Vatican-II conservative-Catholic theological project that **[[Richard John Neuhaus]]** institutionalized through *[[First Things]]* and ECT. ## The Dulles Family Background The Dulles family was a fixture of mid-twentieth-century American Protestant establishment power. Avery's grandfather John Watson Foster had been Secretary of State (1892–1893) under [[Benjamin Harrison]]; his uncle Robert Lansing had been Secretary of State (1915–1920) under [[Woodrow Wilson]]; his father **John Foster Dulles** was Secretary of State (1953–1959) under Dwight Eisenhower and the principal architect of post-WWII American foreign policy in the early Cold War; his uncle **Allen Welsh Dulles** was Director of the Central Intelligence Agency (1953–1961) and the institutional architect of CIA covert operations through the 1950s and into the early 1960s. The family was **Presbyterian**, Princeton-educated, and substantially integrated into the East Coast Wall Street-and-Washington Protestant-establishment power network. Avery's path was substantially expected to be similar to his father's: Princeton (he graduated 1940), legal training, and either a Wall Street or Washington career. ## The 1940 Conversion While studying at Harvard Law School in 1940, Dulles converted to Catholicism. The conversion was a substantial institutional breach with the family legacy — a deliberate move out of the Protestant-establishment social-political world his family had built across three generations. He documented the conversion in the 1946 spiritual autobiography ***A Testimonial to Grace***, which became one of the canonical American Catholic convert-narratives of the mid-twentieth century. The conversion's intellectual trajectory was substantially philosophical rather than primarily religious-experiential. Dulles wrote later that his Catholic conversion emerged from substantial study of medieval philosophy at Harvard, particularly the work of [[Thomas Aquinas]], and from a developing conviction that Catholic natural-law moral philosophy and Catholic sacramental theology provided the intellectual coherence that Protestantism's continuing fragmentation could not. ## Jesuit Formation and Theological Career Dulles served in the [[U.S. Navy]] in WWII (1942–1946), then entered the **Society of Jesus (Jesuits)** in 1946. Standard Jesuit formation took him through Loyola Seminary (Shrub Oak, NY), Woodstock College (Maryland), and the Pontifical Gregorian University in Rome, where he received his doctorate in 1960. Ordained a Catholic priest in 1956 at age 38. Academic appointments at Woodstock College (1960–1974) and Catholic University of America (1974–1988) before his long-tenured appointment as **Laurence J. McGinley Professor of Religion and Society at Fordham University (1988–2008)**. The Fordham position was operationally significant: Dulles was substantially based in New York City for the final twenty years of his career, in close institutional proximity to [[Richard John Neuhaus]] (whose Institute on Religion and Public Life was based in New York) and to Cardinal John O'Connor (Archdiocese of New York). ## Models of the Church (1974) ***Models of the Church*** (1974) was Dulles's canonical theological contribution. The book proposed that Catholic ecclesiology — the theological understanding of the Church's nature and structure — could not be adequately captured by any single model and instead required interpretation through multiple complementary frameworks. Dulles proposed five models: 1. **The Church as Institution** — the hierarchical-juridical structure 2. **The Church as Mystical Communion** — the spiritual fellowship of believers 3. **The Church as Sacrament** — the visible sign of invisible grace 4. **The Church as Herald** — the proclamation of the Gospel 5. **The Church as Servant** — the social-justice and pastoral-care function The book's argument was that authentic Catholic ecclesiology required holding all five models simultaneously, with different models receiving different emphasis in different pastoral contexts. The framework became the standard text on Catholic ecclesiology for two generations of American Catholic seminarians and graduate students; the book has remained in print continuously since 1974 and has been translated into more than a dozen languages. A subsequent companion volume, ***Models of Revelation*** (1983), extended the methodology to the doctrine of revelation. Together with his 1985 ***Catholicity of the Church***, the trilogy is Dulles's canonical theological output. ## The Cardinal Appointment (2001) Pope John Paul II appointed Dulles to the College of Cardinals in **February 2001**, making him **the first U.S.-born theologian elevated to the cardinalate**. Dulles received the title cardinal-deacon of *Santi Nomi di Gesù e Maria in Via Lata*. He was 82 at the time of appointment, two years past the standard age limit for participation in papal conclaves — the appointment was therefore explicitly an honorific recognition of his theological contributions rather than an institutional preparation for future conclave participation. The appointment was institutionally significant for the broader **John Paul II – Benedict XVI conservative-Catholic theological project**. Dulles's elevation signaled the Vatican's institutional recognition of American Catholic theological conservatism — particularly the *First Things* / [[Ethics and Public Policy Center]] / ECT cluster — as a substantive intellectual contribution to the broader post-Vatican-II Catholic theological landscape. ## Evangelicals and Catholics Together (1994) Dulles was a principal **Catholic signer of the 1994 ECT declaration** and the most theologically substantive Catholic academic to participate in the founding declaration. His ECT participation provided the post-1994 evangelical-Catholic coalition with theological-respectability authority within American Catholic academic circles comparable to what [[J. I. Packer]] provided within evangelical Reformed circles. Dulles's principal defense of ECT — articulated in essays in *First Things* across the 1994–2008 period — was that **ECT did not propose doctrinal compromise** on issues of substantive Catholic-Protestant disagreement. The declaration proposed **operational cooperation on shared moral-cultural concerns** while preserving the underlying theological disagreements (on justification, sacraments, papal authority, Marian doctrine, and adjacent questions) as ongoing subjects of ecumenical dialogue rather than settled-by-treaty matters. Dulles's framing was substantially closer to the post-Vatican-II conciliar position on Catholic-Protestant relations than to either the pre-Vatican-II Catholic exclusivism or to the more aggressive ecumenical-merger positions that some post-Vatican-II Catholic theologians advocated. The framing was strategically important for ECT's intra-Catholic acceptability: by positioning ECT inside the post-conciliar trajectory rather than departing from it, Dulles made the declaration substantially more defensible within the broader American Catholic theological community. ## Significance for the Knowledge Base Dulles matters to the KB for three reasons: **1. As the canonical American Catholic theological-respectability anchor for ECT.** Dulles's signature on the 1994 declaration was institutionally consequential within American Catholic academic circles in the same way [[J. I. Packer]]'s was within Reformed evangelical circles. His sustained published defense of ECT participation, framed inside the post-Vatican-II conciliar trajectory, made the post-1994 evangelical-Catholic coalition substantially more defensible within American Catholic theological community. **2. As the canonical post-Vatican-II conservative-Catholic theologian whose academic output established the framework other theologians worked inside.** *Models of the Church*, *Models of Revelation*, and the broader Dulles theological output is the standard text-set on which two generations of American Catholic seminarians and graduate students were trained. The contemporary conservative-Catholic theological landscape — including the *First Things* / EPPC / Catholic-neoconservative cluster — operates substantially inside theological framing that Dulles helped establish. **3. As the documentary case of the family-trajectory breach from Protestant-establishment power to Catholic theological scholarship.** The Dulles family's mid-twentieth-century Protestant-establishment power (Eisenhower-era State Department, CIA leadership, Wall Street/Washington-establishment network) makes Avery's 1940 Catholic conversion an instructive documentary case of intellectual-religious trajectory away from the mainline-Protestant cultural-political consensus toward the conservative-Catholic intellectual project that subsequently became operationally significant in the contemporary American religious right. ## See Also - [[Evangelicals and Catholics Together]] — the 1994 declaration Dulles signed - [[Richard John Neuhaus]] — ECT co-architect; close institutional collaborator at Fordham/NYC - [[Charles Colson]] — ECT co-architect - [[Ethics and Public Policy Center]] — adjacent Catholic-conservative institutional infrastructure - [[Bill Bright]] / [[J. I. Packer]] — major evangelical ECT signers