The daylong symposium, Dulles at 100, celebrated the late cardinal’s birth centennial and kicked off a yearlong reflection of his distinguished life and career.

Cardinal Dulles lived and worked on Fordham’s campus—first as a Jesuit scholastic from 1951 to 1953—and later as the Lawrence M. McGinley Professor of Religion and Society from 1988 until his death in 2008 at the age of 90.

“He was one of the giants of our intellectual and Jesuit communities. One of the finest theologians that the American church ever produced,” said Joseph M. McShane, S.J., president of Fordham. “He was an ambassador who built bridges. He was a gift to us.”

Raised in the Presbyterian Church and educated in Switzerland, at Choate, and at Harvard, Dulles converted to Catholicism and went on to become the first American who was not a bishop to be named a cardinal.

Of her storied teacher and longtime colleague, Sister Elizabeth Johnson, C.S.J., distinguished professor emerita of theology, said “a narrative genre has grown that we might call Avery stories.”

“There are many that I could tell of his endearing, informal interactions with students,” said Sister Johnson, who gave a keynote at the event. “Of his gracious presence as a dinner guest, of his game participation in liturgical dance, of his sense of humor at the most unexpected times, of his ecumenical passion, of his interventions and conferences or faculty meetings that occasioned laughter, frustration, or insight.”

Joseph Komonchak, Ph.D., professor emeritus of theology and religious studies at Catholic University of America, recalled a colleague who drove a car which was rumored to be handed down from his uncle, former CIA Director Allen Dulles.

“He drove that big whale of a car, that probably got nine miles a gallon, with a sticker that said, ‘Fly Dulles,’” he said.

The Elusive ‘Supermodel’

Father Komonchak said though he and Cardinal Dulles diverged theologically, Dulles always responded to an argument by complimenting the strengths of his opponent’s point of view before proceeding to dissect their thesis.

In his seminal 1974 book Models of the Church, Cardinal Dulles laid out six major approaches, or models, through which the church could be explained: as institution, mystical communion, sacrament, herald, servant, and, in a later addition to the book, as community of disciples, which attempted to encompasses the other five. The book became a standard text for many ecclesiology courses.

“He had a very modest view of systematic theology. You will recall that in Models of the Church, he used a somewhat disparaging term, supermodel, for a view that would try to combine the virtues of each of the five other models without suffering their limitations. And he expressed his skepticism that one could find any one model that would be truly adequate, for the church is essentially a mystery. Then, he said, we are therefore condemned to work with models that are inadequate to the realities to which they point,” he said. “I have long disagreed with that view of systematic theology.”

He said that the two exchanged lengthy letters on subject, until Cardinal Dulles came to believe the differences between the two to be so narrow that they were not worth debating.

“I think he also got tired of reading five page single-spaced small print letters from me,” he said.

The Migrant Church

Inspired by Dulles’ models, Peter Phan, Ph.D., Ellacuria Chair of Catholic Social Thought at Georgetown University, argued in his closing keynote remarks that the historical church as we know it would not exist without migrants, though global migration was barely on “Cardinal Dulles’ theological radar.”

In his talk, “Imagining the Church in the Age of Migration,” Phan ultimately concluded that “outside migration there is no salvation.” Riffing on the cardinal’s six criteria, Phan developed his own model by focusing on three points:

One: A good model of theology has to be both explanatory and exploratory (explanatory, meaning that a model can summarize what we know, and exploratory, meaning the model must discover new aspects of the problem). Two: A good model must incorporate experience of the church (“If it doesn’t resonate don’t do it”). And three: The model must somehow impact the spiritual mind; it has to inspire a spiritual awakening.

In his lecture about migration Phan hit all of those points. He began with shockingly raw numbers about migrants, which he counts separately from the 68.5 million refugees forced to leave their county because of war and violence last year. In 2010, there were 200 million people migrating for a variety of reasons, from floods to food shortages and violence, he said. But mass migration didn’t begin in the 21st century, he said.

“It has happened throughout history, just look at the slave trade in 19th century, 11 million Africans [faced]a form of forced migration,” he said. “Again, in the 19th century, the Great Migration from Europe brought 200 million people who voluntary moved to the U.S.”

He took issue with President Donald Trump’s assessment that United States is currently “infected” by migration. Eighty-five percent of refugees, not migrants, he said, have settled in the world’s developing nations, such as Turkey, Pakistan, or Uganda—not in Europe and not in the U.S, which recently limited the number of refugees it will accept to 30,000 for next year.

“We are not overrun,” he said.

He added that Western nations also need to remember that they are the primary cause of the crisis.

“Most of this is caused by the wars initiated by the U.S. It’s not just a social-economic issue, it’s a deeply theological and spiritual issue.”

Scholars Needed: Viewing Church History Through the Migrant Lens

He encouraged students in the room to consider writing the dozens of dissertations necessary to rewrite the history of the church through the lens of migration.

“Each of these migrations produces a new face of the church,” he said.

He noted that in the Archdiocese of Los Angeles, Mass is celebrated in 42 languages and that a parish in the Bronx celebrates Mass in five languages. In Louisiana, the Catholic priests are mostly Vietnamese, he said.

Any decent history of the church, he said, examines the church through an immigrant’s lens, whether that be through the Irish, German, and Italian migrations of the 19th century or through the Central/South American and Asian immigrations of the 20th century.

He qualified that he was speaking of the church historically, not theologically, and of catholicity in the universal sense of the word, before concluding that “Outside of migration there is no American Catholic church, period! Outside of migration there is no catholic church at all,” he said.

“Without migration, the church as a whole would not exist as catholic. No migration, no catholicity.”

Recently established by America Media, the Joseph A. O’Hare, SJ, Post Graduate Writing Fellowship is awarded to recent graduates of Jesuit colleges and universities. The fellows will be housed at Fordham’s Lincoln Center campus while producing stories across town at the offices of America Media, and will also be invited to take part in events of the master’s program in public media being launched at Fordham in the fall.

Funded by a gift from William J. Loschert, GABELLI ’61, the fellowship will help meet the need for journalists who can creatively combine traditional reporting and new media skills while skillfully covering church-related issues, said Matt Malone, SJ, America Media’s president and editor in chief.

“It is hard to imagine a more appropriate honor for Father O’Hare than this fellowship program, created at the confluence of Jesuit, Catholic education and journalism, and of course created by generosity of Bill Loschert, a distinguished Fordham alumnus,” said Joseph M. McShane, SJ, president of Fordham. “We are pleased to welcome the inaugural fellows, and proud to support them in a program that places journalism in the context of our Jesuit identity.”

At America Media, “we tend to write about issues that are at the intersection of the church and the world,” Malone said. “Cultivating a group of young people who can actually stand at that intersection and who can understand both in some fundamental way I think will serve both the church and the larger media world very well.”

It made “perfect sense” to name the fellowship for Father O’Hare, president emeritus of Fordham, since he served as editor in chief of America Media’s America magazine before becoming president of Fordham in 1984, Malone said.

Announced by America Media on May 16, the three inaugural fellows are Wyatt Massey, Teresa Donnellan, and Nicholas Genovese, graduates of Marquette and Georgetown universities and Boston College, respectively.

During the yearlong fellowship, recipients will be prepared to write for either Catholic media or other professional outlets. They’ll produce content for print, web, digital, social media, and events; learn from America’s editorial staff members including James Martin, SJ, the bestselling author; and engage with high-profile members of the New York communications community and build their professional networks.

At Fordham, the fellows will be invited to lectures, workshops, and extracurricular activities of the master’s program in public media, and they’ll have access to the library and other facilities, said Jacqueline Reich, PhD, chairwoman of the Department of Communication and Media Studies.

The master’s in public media also involves Fordham’s public radio station, WFUV (90.7 FM, wfuv.org), and WNET/Channel 13 public television. Its focus is multiplatform journalism and strategic communication with an eye toward civic and social engagement, Reich said.

The department is checking out other possibilities for collaborating with America Media, like creating a series of lectures and workshops by America correspondents, she said.

“We’re basically exploring ways that we can collaborate with both the fellows and America Media in general,” she said. “We see a lot of synergy between America Media and our department.”

The fellowship includes health coverage and a stipend. More information about eligibility and applying is available online.

Adolfo Nicolás, S.J., Superior General of the Society of Jesus,
celebrates Mass in University Church at Fordham.
Photo courtesy the Society of Jesus’ New York Province

Fordham welcomed a notable member of the worldwide Jesuit community to campus recently, when Adolfo Nicolás, S.J., Superior General of the Society of Jesus, made a stop during an official trip to the United States.

The visit was part of a two-week tour to meet with American Jesuits and Jesuit scholastics, visit Jesuit high schools, and speak with administrators of Jesuit colleges and universities. The trip was Father Nicolás’ second visit to the United States since being elected Superior General of the order in 2008.

While in New York, Father Nicolás met with Jesuits in formation, visited retired Jesuits at the Murray-Weigel Jesuit Community, and celebrated Mass with 150 Jesuits, lay directors, and staff from the New York province.“Father Nicolás encouraged us to go deep in our prayer, work, and study, that this is what we can offer the church and the world,” said Thomas Scirghi, S.J., associate professor of theology and rector of the Jesuit Community at Spellman Hall.

“He is concerned that many Jesuits wear too many hats, spreading themselves too thin. The danger here is it keeps you on the surface and prevents you from plunging deeply into any one type of work.”In addition to New York, Father Nicolás traveled to Boston, St. Louis, and Chicago. He concluded his trip with the presidents, administrators, and board members of the Association of Jesuit Colleges and Universities (AJCU), an organization that represents the 28 Jesuit colleges and universities in the United States.At the gathering, Father Nicolás broached a topic that he said has not yet been fully confronted: the future of Jesuit schools in the face of changing demographics.

“In 1973, there were about 212 million Americans; today there are about 316 million. That means that if the number of Americans per Jesuit institutions of higher learning had been kept constant, there should be 42 AJCU institutions today,” Father Nicolás said. “And since 1973, the number of U.S. Jesuits has declined from 6,616 to 2,547. This means that if the total number of U.S. Jesuits per AJCU institution had been kept constant, there should be only 11 Jesuit colleges and universities today.“Since the supply of Jesuits is increasingly limited while the demand for more Jesuits seems to always expand, it would seem that some changes are in order.”

These changes are already happening—for instance, a number of AJCU presidents are not Jesuits, and some are not Catholic. Such changes reflect the important role that the laity plays in the Society’s mission, Father Nicolás said; but it is crucial that the 28 AJCU institutions and the Society of Jesus ensure their relationship does not become “stretched so thin that it becomes impersonal and meaningless.”

“[I have no doubt] you are capable of undertaking bold challenges and that you are ready to do whatever is necessary to serve this important ministry that serves so many individuals, so many communities, to say nothing of the Lord and his church,” he said. “You have the talents and temperament, the head and heart, to do what needs to be done.”For the full text of Father Nicolás’ remarks to the AJCU, read the transcript in America Magazine.

Father Nicolás with David S. Ciancimino, S.J., provincial of
the Society of Jesus’ New York Province,
and Joseph M. McShane, S.J., president of Fordham.Photo courtesy of the Society of Jesus’ New York Province

— Joanna Klimaski