Dupuis died in 2004, aged 81, after collapsing in the Gregorian University canteen, depressed by allegations of heresy, embittered over having become the target of an inquisition procedure and being the ‘bête noire’ of the very document with which the Church backed away from dialogue with other religions, as well as humiliated by being suspended from teaching.
The book that has now been published in Italian by EMI (the Italian Missionary Editions, 210 pages) was curated by his American editor and friend, William Burrows, and contains two lengthy self-defence papers by Dupuis himself, against the “notification” (the sentence of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith) and opposing the “Dominus Iesus” he had been asked to agree with as evidence of his repentance. This meek theologian did not accept the request to express his agreement and sign the first version of the sentence accusing him of “serious deficiencies” and he devoted the last years of his life to drafting these papers. He later signed a second version of the notification (bowing to the ‘political’ needs of a situation that embarrassed him) in which the accusations had been reduced to “significant ambiguities.” That animated change to the wording involved Pope John Paul II in one of the most inglorious pages of Ratzinger’s career.
The Italian title reads, “Why I am not a heretic” while the English one was “Jacques Dupuis Faces the Inquisition”. The first, more prudent than the second one, however, reflects the bewilderment experienced by the theologian, described by Burrows as a “revisionist” but an Orthodox one, since he was not correctly understood and perhaps not really “read” by Cardinal Ratzinger. The author – to whom this information was imparted personally by the future pontiff, who looked him straight in the eye – states that allegedly the cardinal, unfortunately, entrusted himself to the opinions and written work of Secretary of State Cardinal Tarcisio Bertone and to the Congregation’s Consultor Angelo Amato, two key figures in the Benedict XVI’s papacy. Amato, later made a cardinal and currently Prefect of the Congregation for the Causes of Saints, is generally thought to have been the author of the “Dominus Iesus.”
Dupuis was always fully aware of the difficulties surrounding his theological endeavour. His objective, in his books and Christology courses, was to resume the ‘par excellence’ plural subject of levels of truth and possible redemption permitted outside the Church and to non-Christians, starting from where the Second Vatican Council had left matters with the Declaration Nostra Aetate (1965). His Church, like that of John XXIII and Paul VI, “rejects nothing of all that is true and holy” in other religions and acknowledges there is “a ray of the truth that enlightens all human beings.” These ideas had been strengthened by his extensive experience in Asia, after living in India for 36 years. Dupuis used to say that one cannot live in contact with the faith of millions and millions of human beings, devoted to their rituals, having morality and a sense of sin, and then imagine that for them there is nothing but damnation because they have not joined the Roman Church, an opportunity that three quarters of humanity has never even heard of.
He believed that the theology of dialogue remained closely within a “Christocentric” vision of redemption, distinct of course from the “Ecclesial-centric” perspective, for which he had not found the bases in Holy Books and that he believed was the evil result of fear. In these pages, as in many other previous ones, Dupuis wrote words of great fascination also for non-believers. Dupuis’ impressive work, censored by the Vatican tribunal, is entitled Towards a Christian Theology of Religious Pluralism (Queriniana, 1997). This is not just theology, but also a history of philosophy entirely revisited through his search for the principle of redemption from the early Alexandrians to current times. Dupuis identifies enlightening passages, as in Origen, who, equipped with his Platonism, envisaged for all humankind a final restitution or rehabilitation (apokatàstasis in Greek). He lingered on the pages of De Pace Fidei by Nicola Cusano, a humanist but also a powerful 15th century cardinal, who, a few days after the fall of Constantinople to the Turks, imagined in his dreams a heavenly council in which all the faiths of the world reached an agreement on the uniqueness of religion “in the variety of rites.” According to Cusano, in his dream, religions were different because God had sent different prophets at different times and speaking different languages, but that they were basically “complementary.” This daring, certainly suspected of heresy, did not escape Dupuis, or another reformist theologian such as Urs von Balthasar, who, on this subject, wrote that Cusano’s move was so “adventurous that one can only be surprise it was not listed as a prohibited book.” Dupuis himself speaks of this, avoiding a possible sin of indifference or equivalence, but this does not prevent him from addressing the most important subject, which, for a Christian as for the believer of any religion, presents the appearance and closeness of many different religions.
In analysing the broadness of the prospect of redemption in the Christian theology, Dupuis identifies three historical stages. A first one in which the principle “extra ecclesiam nulla salus” is stated in all its exclusivism, that of a minority and besieged Christianity in the Roman Empire before Constantine; a second period with a limited degree of openness to other religions as a primordial revelation, and a third, in which one seizes the positive values of other religions as preparatory. Dupuis then sees what the current task appears to be not only for Christian theology, but also for other faiths. The task is to answer the question, “What meaning do other traditions have in the divine plan?” This is the challenge for the “theology of religions” or “pluralist theology.” It is the ‘playing field’ that the authors of the “Dominus Iesus” imagined they could delete or “put in order” in the sense of entirely “subordinating” it to the hierarchy of truth dictated by Vatican doctrine. Dupuis’ posthumous book, I am not a Heretic provides us today with the most debated search for the “ambiguities” and “errors” in that document aimed at blocking the way to a resumption of the Second Vatican Council’s ideas and stopping interreligious dialogue, something that, also thanks to Depuis, in Vatican jargon is similarly known as the “Asian question.” It is a debate that must be resumed, one opened by the memoires of a Jesuit who awaits rehabilitation.
This article was published by the Italian newspaper “La Repubblica” on December 4th, 2014. Read the Italian version here