The Cardinal From The Establishment- Cardinal Dulles RIP

I am going to do a round up od what people are saying about the death of Cardinal Dulles later today.

However there is another facet I want to touch on. His place in American and American Catholic history. American Catholics are pretty horrible at knowing their own history. They are ignornat of its very beginnings or the Cathoic thought in the decades following the Civil war that had lasting effects.

What has always struck me about Dulles was his background. I really think that together with WWII where protestant Americans lived and dies and fought with Catholics that Dulles conversion also played a part in a small way in integrating Catholics in American society. That of course had good and bad effects.

When a Dulles became a Catholic well one could not exactly keep them him (or to be more exact people like him - Catholics with Pedigrees like that)out of the Country Club or the numerous organizations (Northeastern Boys club) that were largely Protestant (Catholics and Jews need not apply) well some serious power was going on.

The Atlantic Magazine covered Dulles becoming a Cardinal in 2001 in a very good piece called One Establishment Meets Another Besides talking of his conversion to the Catholic faith they also mention his background which is pretty striking

In January, when Pope John Paul II announced the latest elevations, three Americans were on the list. The first two, Edward Egan and Theodore McCarrick, the recently named archbishops of New York and Washington, were no surprise. How could the head of a major American archdiocese not become a cardinal these days? Besides, Egan and McCarrick are Irish, like most of the Church hierarchy in the United States. One can read in their faces the history of American Catholicism—primarily a tale of Irish immigration, struggle, and rise to wealth and power, with the Italians and now the Hispanics in supporting roles.

In Avery Cardinal Dulles's face one can read the history of the other world—the world from which those Irishmen long felt excluded. It wasn't simply money and status that the Dulleses possessed (though, Lord knows, they had enough). Their primary gift was assurance. Behind them, like perpetual graces, stood Princeton and Harvard, weekends on sailboats, grand tours, a house out on Long Island, a summer place upstate, the Navy, the foreign service. Avery Dulles's great-grandfather, John Watson Foster, was President Benjamin Harrison's Secretary of State. His great-uncle, Robert Lansing, was Woodrow Wilson's. His father, John Foster Dulles, was Dwight Eisenhower's. His uncle, Allen Dulles, headed the CIA from 1953 to 1961. His aunt, Eleanor Dulles, wielded influence as a State Department officer and a Washington hostess.

And behind that modern establishment stood earlier American establishments: the long line of New England intellectuals who discovered transcendentalism in the pages of Emerson, the longer line of Protestant ministers who preached Calvinism from the Second Book of Kings. Avery's grandfather, Allen Macy Dulles, had been a Presbyterian pastor and a co-founder of the American Theological Society. John Foster Dulles—coming to believe that only the Gospels and international organization could preserve world order—gained wide notice as an expert on international affairs by chairing a 1941 peace commission for the Federal Council of Churches.