Avery Dulles

Avery Robert Dulles, S.J. (August 24, 1918 – December 12, 2008) was a Jesuit priest, theologian, cardinal of the Catholic Church and served as the Laurence J. McGinley Professor of Religion and Society at Fordham University from 1988 to 2008.

The Catholicity of the Church

 * Catholicity, the focus of this study, has long been recognized as an essential attribute of the Church of Christ and has been of particular concern to those churches which designate themselves as 'Catholic'. It is not possible to analyse catholicity without speaking of other traditional attributes of the Church: unity, holiness, and apostolicity. In the context of planetization, in which the cultures of diverse peoples are interacting and interpenetrating, catholicity takes on new and challenging aspects, decisive for the future of Christianity. Catholicity has ramifications in many different areas of ecclesiology. The present work, although brief, necessarily touches on many problems of historical and contemporary theology. But it does not pretend to be, even in outline, a complete ecclesiology.
 * Preface