The Times of London Wonderful Obit on Cardinal Dulles

Tip of the hat to Mirrors of of Justice that has provided the link to a great obit the Times had on Cardinal Avery Dulles. The whole thing is very worth reading.

I also liked this part that is related to the part that Mirrors put up:

Perhaps that is why his greatest influence came as an interpreter of the Second Vatican Council. Explaining the liberalism of Vatican II to an older generation that had experienced only the unified, pre-conciliar Church, he was often identified as a voice for liberal Catholics in the 1970s. Explaining the conservatism of Vatican II to a new generation that had experienced only the fragmented post-conciliar Church, he became something of a leader for conservative Catholics in the 1990s.

But it always remained the centrality of the Second Vatican Council that he set himself to explain. From the beginning, the self-imposed work of the Dulles family — the discipline of their class — was to ensure that the centre held. That was true in the years that followed the Civil War, and again in the aftermath of the First World War, and again, in the long struggle of the Cold War. That was true as well for Avery Dulles, even though he had abandoned the world his family made for him.

The Irish-dominated, immigrant church of US Catholicism made for him something far different — an alien system of thought, an alien class — from anything his fathers had known. But still a Dulles was there, making certain that things did not fall apart.

After his consecration as a cardinal in Rome on February 21, 2001, the Gregorian University hosted a meal in his honor. Over the rattle of after-dinner coffee cups, various high-ranking ecclesial figures rose to praise Dulles’s life and work. The most revealing moment, however, may have come when, unexpectedly, one of his Dulles cousins stepped to the podium.

An aristocrat of that strange, old American variety — tall and puritanically thin, well but primly dressed, a daughter of stern Protestant New England — she explained that she had overheard as a child the outraged family discussions of the young Avery’s conversion. Uncle Allen, Aunt Eleanor, John Foster, all the senior family members gathered around to complain that the best and brightest of the family’s next generation seemed determined to throw his promising life away. “And, of course, they were right,” she said. “He did throw that life away. He threw it away for God.”