Cardinal Avery Dulles, 90; was influential church voice

NEW YORK - Cardinal Avery Dulles, a convert to Roman Catholicism who was the first US theologian to be named a cardinal, died yesterday. He was 90.

Cardinal Dulles, a Jesuit and the son of a US secretary of state, died in an infirmary at Fordham University, where he was a professor for two decades, said the Rev. Jim Martin of America, a Jesuit magazine that regularly published Dulles's articles.

Considered the dean of Catholic theologians in the United States, Cardinal Dulles was appointed to the College of Cardinals in 2001 by Pope John Paul II. He was the first American Jesuit and the first American cleric who was not already a bishop to be named a cardinal.

He came from a family of American statesmen. The grandson of a Presbyterian minister, he was the son of Secretary of State John Foster Dulles, who served under President Eisenhower. The cardinal's uncle was Allen Dulles, who led the Central Intelligence Agency in the Eisenhower administration.

A native of Auburn, N.Y., Avery Robert Dulles was a graduate of Harvard College and joined the Jesuits after he was discharged from the US Navy in 1946. He was ordained to the priesthood in 1956, later earning a doctorate in sacred theology from the Pontifical Gregorian University in Rome.

He served for 14 years as a professor at The Catholic University in America, becoming an internationally known lecturer, and joined the Fordham faculty in 1988 in New York.

The author of more than 20 books, Cardinal Dulles specialized in ecclesiology, studying the nature and mission of the church in the world.

He wrote widely on many topics, from Jesus to sacraments to Scripture, said Thomas Groome, a Boston College professor of theology and a former student of Cardinal Dulles.

"He was the total Catholic theologian," Groome said.

Cardinal Dulles was considered a progressive thinker around the time of the Second Vatican Council, the 1960s-era meetings that enacted modernizing changing in the church. However, in his later years, he was viewed more as a defender of Catholic orthodoxy.

Still, he spoke against division within the church.

"He always took views other than his own very seriously, and he tried to incorporate what he found good in divergent views," said Terrence W. Tilley, a Fordham theologian who knew Cardinal Dulles. "Not everybody is quite so charitable."

Cardinal Dulles remained active even into his older years, attending meetings of the US Conference of Catholic Bishops and rising to correct the prelates if he felt they had misspoken. After the clergy sexual abuse crisis erupted in 2001, he said the church's decision to bar all guilty priests from public church work went too far and violated priests' due process rights.

Among his books are "A Testimonial to Grace," the story of his conversion. He said he was drawn to Catholicism through his studies of philosophy, the medieval church, and the Protestant Reformation.

Cardinal Dulles contracted polio as a young man and suffered from post-polio syndrome, which can cause muscle weakness and difficulty breathing. He eventually had to use a wheelchair and could not speak for long periods.

When Pope Benedict XVI visited the United States last April, he made time for a private meeting with the cardinal in New York, underscoring Cardinal Dulles's importance to the church. In April, a colleague at Fordham delivered the last lecture that Cardinal Dulles wrote.

"The most important thing about my career and many of yours," he told the students, "is the discovery of the pearl of great price, the treasure hidden in the field, the Lord Jesus himself."