Jesuit recalls Dupuis' skirmish with Vatican

During the investigation, O'Collins acted as the one adviser the CDF allowed Dupuis.

Father Jacques Dupuis

New Delhi:  Jesuit Theologian Gerald O'Collins has published the second volume of his memoirs, which recalls the Vatican investigation on his late confrere Jacques Dupuis, who taught in India and developed a theology of religious pluralism.

Father Dupuis, who lived 35 years in India, was 81 when died of a cerebral hemorrhage on Dec. 28, 2004 in Rome. The Belgian-born missioner worked in India from 1949 to 1984, most of that time as a theology professor.

In the preface of the book, On the Left Bank of the Tiber, O'Collins writes that many who don't live in Rome have the impression that an academic who does live there is either captive in a "clerical ghetto" or is "looking fearfully over his shoulder all the time [with] the Vatican's truth police menacingly bearing down on him."

The latest National Catholic Reporter published excerpts from the memoirs of O'Collins, an Australian theologian who has been teaching theology since 1968 and authored to coauthored 62 books.

Though O'Collins recounts the episode on Dupuis as "the shadow side of the Vatican and its officials," he writes in his preface, "I found Rome to be at least as free and happy an environment for teaching as any I have experienced in North America, the British Isles, Australia, and other parts of the world."

During the investigation initiated by the Vatican's Congregation of Doctrine of Faith (CDF) in 1998, O'Collins acted act as the one adviser the CDF allowed Dupuis.

He recalls that CDF sent to Dupuis a nine-page, single-spaced document, having 14 theses challenging his book, Toward a Christian Theology of Religious Pluralism.

A covering page explained that the CDF found in this work by Dupuis "serious errors or doctrinal ambiguities on doctrines of divine and Catholic faith concerning revelation, soteriology [teaching on salvation], Christology and the Trinity."

The page ended by naming several "dangerous affirmations" that "cannot be safely taught," such as the application of "Mother" to the first person of the Trinity. Dupuis was given three months to reply.

Dupuis began by spending two weeks in hospital. As a chronically sick man, this may have been inevitable. But the stress he experienced under the quite unexpected onslaught from the CDF unquestionably played its part.