In 2004 Avery Dulles was asked by Commonweal magazine to respond to a disputed question: “How Catholic is the Catholic Theological Society of America?” The impetus was Cardinal Bernard Law’s charge that the CTSA, the largest and most prestigious association of Catholic theologians in the United States, had become little more than a “wasteland” of dissent against official Church teachings. The Boston Cardinal was provoked by a recent report issued by the Society on the possibility of ordaining women to the priesthood. Despite being a direct challenge to millennia of Church teaching and practice, the vote in favor was breathtaking in its lopsidedness: 216 to 22 (there were ten abstentions). For Law, such an action required a public statement that the CTSA should be considered Catholic no longer. Dulles, however, made his argument based on the published plenary addresses, concluding that together they represented “a series of attacks on Catholic doctrine more radical, it would seem, than the challenges issued by Luther and Calvin.”
Indeed, things had reached the point where young theologians were faced with a “drastic choice” between the CTSA and “the tradition as taught by the popes and councils.” The blowback was immediate and fierce, and took little account of the fact that Dulles was a longtime member and past president of the Society as well as the leading American Catholic theologian of his day. Dulles’s credentials, to which would soon be added the title of Cardinal of the Catholic Church, were plainly insufficient to give weight to his concerns.
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