It is with great sadness that we have learned of the death of Cardinal Avery Dulles on December 12th aged 90.
Cardinal Dulles was one of the greatest thinkers in the modern Roman Catholic Church and probably its most prestigious representative in The United States of America.
Although a collection of his essays was published earlier this year, Continuum is extremely proud to have published the last book that he sat down and wrote as a book - this is his masterly short study of the life and work of Cardinal John Henry Newman.
This will be reissued early in 2009 with a new introduction by Newman`s biographer Ian Ker. It was Dulles`s express wish that Fr Ker should introduce this new edition.
To say that Dulles was an unusual recipient of a Cardinal`s hat would be something of an understatement. The son of John Foster Dulles, Eisenhower`s Secretary of State, he was received into the Roman Catholic Church while at Harvard Law School.
Dulles was an aristocrat of that old Protestant New England variety - tall and puritanically thin. His family were outraged by his conversion. They gathered round to complain that the best and the brightest of the family`s next generation seemed determined to throw his promising life away. But as a friend commented later ` Of course they were right. He did throw that life away. He threw it away for God`.
Central to his later years was the interpretation of The Second Vatican Council, and this was his lasting influence. He explained the liberalism of The Second Vatican Council to an older generation and the conservatism of the Council to a new generation.
I only met him once but what struck me most apart from his monumental intelligence were his impeccable manners and his courtesy. These are qualities I will most certainly miss.
Robin Baird-Smith
Publishing Director
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