By J. Michael Parker
For Today’s Catholic
SAN ANTONIO • Poor health may have prevented Cardinal Avery Dulles from giving the May 16 commencement address at San Antonio’s Oblate School of Theology. But he still provided a lesson for the intended audience.
Archbishop José H. Gomez the substitute speaker, used the 89-year-old Dulles’ conversion to Catholicism nearly 70 years ago as the starting point for a lesson on defending truth in a world that assumes that God either doesn’t exist or is unknowable.
The archbishop joked that “the nice thing about being a substitute speaker is that the audience’s expectations go down.” He added that his highest “achievement” as a substitute speaker came in 2005 when he was asked to substitute for then-Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger at a celebration for Dallas Bishop Charles Grahmann.
“Cardinal Ratzinger wasn’t able to attend. He was in Rome being elected as Pope Benedict XVI,” Archbishop Gomez quipped, causing his audience to erupt in laughter and applause.
But he quickly got to the point of his message, showing how Dulles, a scion of a family of high-church Presbyterians, had rejected God and faith by the time he attended Harvard in the 1930s, but nevertheless became intensely interested in investigating truth.
Similarly, that’s the challenge of theology graduates — and indeed all who minister in the church today, he declared.
“Our world has learned so much. But maybe we’ve become too smart for God. We’re so advanced, so sophisticated, yet we don’t have any room in all our knowledge for God. It’s as if we can’t ever know him. We’ve made him the ‘unknown God’ and the ‘unknowable God.’”
The archbishop challenged graduates to help the church enable the world to know God again. He said the question they must help the world answer is “Can everything about us and our world be reduced to only what we can see or touch or ‘prove’ in a laboratory?
“If it is, then what about love? Is it an illusion? Is it biology alone that causes a mother to sacrifice for her children? That leads a martyr to die for the faith? How does our scientific worldview account for the love we hold in our hearts?”
Echoing Pope Benedict XVI, Archbishop Gomez called for the Catholic Church to open up a dialogue with culture, adding, “It must be an important part of your ministries and your witness to the faith, no matter where our Lord leads you on your journey.”
The archbishop said the graduates — who included seminarians for the Archdiocese of San Antonio and other dioceses as well as for the Missionary Oblates of Mary Immaculate, the Franciscans and Dominicans — are called to help people reach out for the transcendant.
“What reason and science have discovered about the world does not contradict what we know by faith; it radically confirms it. All the conclusions and findings of science come down to one basic point — that the world is intelligible, ‘reasonable.’ It behaves and operates according to patterns that have a precise order and logic that are predictable.”
The world, he said, is not chaos and chance; indeed, it’s the exact opposite. From the tiniest cell to planetary orbits, science has discovered that all creation has an “inner logic” and an intelligent structure.
But faith reveals something crucial that science cannot discover on its own — that divine reason, the Word through whom all things are made and sustained, is also divine love. Scripture reveals that God is love, Archbishop Gomez said.
“That is why faith and reason can never be separated because without faith, we can only discover how the world works, but not why. Reason alone can only give us partial truths. But we are made to desire the fullness of truth.”
The archbishop warned his audience not to settle for falsehoods and half-truths offered by the culture around them.
“Don’t let anyone tell you that there are no abiding truths, only opinions — that everything is relative. You know the truth is God and that God has shown his face to us.”
In today’s culture more than ever, he said, “it is especially crucial that you defend the truth about the human person. Our scientific and materialistic culture says the human person is nothing more than the sum of his biological makeup.”
In Dulles’ search for truth in the 1930s, Archbishop Gomez said, he discerned by reason the beauty of nature and that there must be a Creator.
“But only when he gave himself over to prayer and to seeking Christ in the Scriptures — only then was he able to know the living God.”
Dulles, son of former U.S. Secretary of State John Foster Dulles and a descendant of two other secretaries of state, wrote of the journey that led to his 1940 conversion to Catholicism in a memoir, “A Testimony to Grace.”
Ordained a priest for the Society of Jesus in 1956, he enjoyed a long and distinguished career as a professor and writer of Catholic theology. Dulles retired as Fordham University’s McGinley Professor of Theology earlier this year.
J. Michael Parker, formerly religion writer of the San Antonio Express-News from 1984-2008, now is director of communications for Oblate School of Theology and a freelance writer.