Abstract
Between 1998 and 2004, Gerard O’Connell (Rome correspondent for the Tablet and for the Union of Catholic Asian News) conducted with Jacques Dupuis, SJ, a series of interviews about his life, including the formative decades in India, his teaching, his theology (“Antecedents,” 3–55), and then particularly the crisis arising with the investigation by the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith (CDF) of his Toward a Christian Theology of Religious Pluralism (“The Pangs of a Process,” 56–205). The interviews also cover the unexpectedly sad period of suspicion and nagging scrutiny that lay between his 2002 exoneration and his death (“Aftermath of a Trial,” 206–54). It includes finally a hitherto unpublished text, “The Theology of Religious Pluralism Revisited: A Provisional Balance Sheet” (257–98), written around 2002 as a robust defense of his book; once again, he makes as clear as possible his positions and reasons for them. There is nothing careless, ill-informed, or impious in the writing of this most Catholic theologian. It is also truly a final testament: O’C. gave to Dupuis the full manuscript on December 24, 2004; Dupuis reviewed it, made a photocopy on December 26—and died on December 28. O’C. waited on the publication of the book until after Pope Benedict’s retirement in 2013, and then published it with the warm blessings of Adolfo Nicolas, SJ, General Superior of the Jesuits. The title, echoing Karl Rahner, was Dupuis’s own choice.
The book is another welcome resource toward understanding Dupuis’s theology of religious pluralism, his momentous effort to draw on the full riches of church tradition in order to engage faithfully and fruitfully today’s world of many religions, and will be useful to scholars and in classrooms around the world for a generation to come. It stands as a fine complement to the collection of documents made public by William Burrows in Jacques Dupuis Faces the Inquisition, and stands nicely alongside another tale of failed communication and misunderstanding, Peter Phan’s The Joy of Religious Pluralism: A Personal Journey, his painful yet wry account of Phan’s own dealings with the CDF and the USCCB’s Committee on Doctrine.
The interviews are particularly helpful for their insights into Dupuis’s person. We are given a much fuller sense of how his years in India made him recognize religious pluralism as a pressing reality that simply had to be engaged with the full wisdom of tradition. His shift to Rome placed him among officials and professors who either lacked such experience or who had failed to think about it; this was a situation that predicted the disaster to follow, as this prudent and scholarly professor implausibly came to appear, to some, to be a radical. We learn too of his brave pushback against critics who in his opinion had not carefully read his work and who were unable to recognize the deep grounding of his book in the very tradition they claimed to defend. Though told from Dupuis’s own viewpoint, this is no rambling complaint or lament. Each of his replies to O’C.’s questions is detailed and documented, sometimes running for pages in response to brief questions.
The book offers us a very ample account of a CDF investigation seen from the perspective of the accused theologian, not just by its careful review of the documents, but also its sobering take on the behavior of the CDF, the wavering attitudes of Dupuis’s brother Jesuits at the Gregorian, and Dupuis’s grateful recollection of those who, such as Gerald O’Collins, SJ, Daniel Kendall, SJ, and friends in Asia, bishops included, stood by him throughout, even as others left him undefended and alone. It thus calls our attention to a substantive problem in the life of today’s church: the disjunction between the machinery of orthodoxy and its effect on actual human beings, in this case a most loyal and erudite theologian. Does the CDF really understand the cost of the investigations of individual theologians in a system that heavily favors the CDF, prosecutor, judge, and jury? We do have the CDF’s “Commentary on the Notification of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith regarding the Book Toward a Christian Theology of Religious Pluralism by Father Jacques Dupuis, S.J.” This document insists that it is appropriate for the CDF to use impersonal and declarative statements when dealing with doctrinal matters: “This form of communication is not a sign of authoritarianism or unjustified harshness, but is rather characteristic of the literary genre of magisterial pronouncements whose aim is to set out precise points of doctrine, to censure errors or ambiguities, and to indicate the degree of assent that is required of the faithful”; indeed, this “is not a tone of imposition, but one of declaration and solemn celebration of faith” (n. 6). Such arguments merit our consideration, but they still do not excuse the slowness of the process and its somber aftermath, the one-sided communications and chill silences, and the apparent failure ever to engage this erudite theologian’s actual proposals with the care and courtesy they deserved.
The more we know, the harder it is to make sense of the sheer inhumanity of it all. In the book’s most chilling scene, Dupuis recalls a 1999 encounter of Hans Kolvenbach, SJ, Superior General of the Society, with Cardinal Ratzinger, after Dupuis had been hospitalized for a heart ailment exacerbated by the investigation: “When he once met Cardinal Ratzinger while I was in the hospital, Father General mentioned to him my state of health and my being in the hospital at the time. The cardinal observed somewhat sarcastically, ‘So these problems have psychosomatic consequences.’ He neither manifested any sympathy nor asked Father General to convey to me his good wishes.” Dupuis observes, with a necessary edge, “to do this would have supposed ‘A Church with a Human Face’. . . a thing which is not foreseen in the Agendi Ratio of the Congregation” (120).
In practice and administrative choices, Pope Francis is showing that he indeed knows something of the church’s “human face”; but some deeper, radical rectification of the church’s own offices is clearly necessary, to prevent such spectacles in the future. Dupuis was a dedicated senior theologian and a lifelong servant of the church. His proposals on pluralism, steeped in knowledge of tradition, could have been contested robustly by other competent theologians without causing, by ineptitude, slack effort, and lack of concern, a scandal that will not be forgotten any time soon. Perhaps there was no one in Rome who knew enough to argue with him.
All of this is a sad story, but O’C. is to be warmly commended for having the foresight to undertake these interviews, write them up so meticulously, and see them through to publication for all of us to read. It is all now on the public record. Perhaps Father Dupuis’s critics will respond to this volume.