ROME – Any journalist who’s ever worked a beat cultivates as many contacts as possible, but usually there’s that one source you rely on more than others – the figure whose intelligence, integrity and reputation mean that when the chips are down, it’s the voice you always want front and center.
For the first fifteen years or so of my career covering the Vatican, for me that go-to figure, especially on anything involving Catholic theology, was Jesuit Father Gerald O’Collins, who became not just a valued source but a good friend.
His Aug. 22 death at the age of 93, therefore, left me profoundly sad. More than that, it leaves the entire Catholic Church impoverished, at a time when his sanity, balance, and lack of rancor will be especially missed.
I first met O’Collins in the mid-1990s, when he was already two decades into his 33-year run on the theology faculty of Rome’s Jesuit-run Gregorian University, a perch from which he not only produced some of the most profound works on Christology in English-language Catholicism after the Second Vatican Council, but also directed the theses and dissertations of at least two generations of future academics and bishops from all over the world.
One of the things that immediately attracted me to O’Collins was that even after all that time in Rome, his Australian accent when speaking Italian was even stronger and more stereotypical than my American version … and that, ladies and gentlemen, is truly saying something, since I’m more or less Father Guido Sarducci in reverse. (If you’re too young to get the reference, watch some old Saturday Night Live re-runs.)
Like he did with pretty much everyone, O’Collins took me under his wing and patiently answered my novice-level questions about Rome, the Vatican, and the discipline of Catholic theology, never once making me feel like he had better things to do, though I now realize he pretty much always did.
Case in point: When St. John Paul II appointed Bishop Brian Farrell as secretary of the then-Pontifical Council for Christian Unity in 2022, the question arose of whether he had any background in ecumenism. A friend told me he thought Farrell had written a dissertation at the Gregorian on a matter of ecumenical interest, so I called O’Collins and asked if he could help me dig it out. He immediately told me to come over to the university and walked me down to the library, sitting with me as I perused the text, since, at least back then, technically only faculty members were supposed to have access.
Somehow, it never crossed my mind that the dean of Roman Christologists, the author or co-author of some 75 books and a speaker in demand all over the world, might not have time to hold a cub reporter’s hand, especially without any advance notice. Looking back, I suspect the thought never occurred because O’Collins never made me, or anyone else, feel like a burden … he always came off as genuinely happy to see you and glad to help, however inane or annoying the query actually might have been.
Over time, what really came to impress me about O’Collins was how fair he always seemed, always willing to give someone the benefit of the doubt. I remember one time a colleague had published an essay critical of other theologians, on a point with which O’Collins strongly agreed. Nonetheless, when I asked his opinion of the essay, he responded that it “cried out for a judicious use of the word ‘some,’” meaning that even people with whom he disagreed shouldn’t all be lumped into the same pejorative categories.
I was also impressed – and, I have to say, a few times actually made a little uncomfortable, since it tended to expose my own spiritual superficiality – by the depth of his faith, especially in the person of Christ. His was a classic “kneeling theology,” born not merely of cognition but also profound and constant prayer.
I got know O’Collins especially well during the Vatican’s 2001-2003 investigation of his fellow Jesuit, Belgian theologian Jacques Dupuis, who spent much of his career in India and developed a passionate interest in the relationship between Christianity and the great religions of Asia.
When Dupuis published his landmark 1997 work Toward a Christian Theology of Religious Pluralism, the then-Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, led at the time by Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, the future Pope Benedict XVI, became concerned that the book watered down Catholic teaching on Christ as the lone and unique savior of the world. Many observers believe to this day that the congregation’s controversial 2000 document Dominus Iesus, which asserted that non-Christians are in “a gravely deficient situation” vis-à-vis salvation, was prompted in part by Dupuis’ writings.
As the Vatican probe gathered steam, O’Collins took on the role of Dupuis’ theological advisor, insisting both in public and private that his confrere’s Christology was thoroughly orthodox and that the congregation’s observations on his work repeatedly imputed positions to Dupuis which he didn’t actually hold.
O’Collins never wavered in his belief that Ratzinger, whom he respected enormously, would make things right if he got personally involved. In the course of one of our many conversations at the time, O’Collins delivered himself of a line about the future pope that I would come to regard as oracular: “The problem with Ratzinger is never Ratzinger himself,” O’Collins told me once over lunch at the Abruzzi, a restaurant near the Gregorian that functioned as his de facto refectory.
“The problem is some of the people around Ratzinger,” he said.
In the end, O’Collins was basically correct: Although Dupuis was asked to clarify some of his positions, he was never disciplined, nor was his book ever censured.
To be clear, O’Collins was hardly an inveterate knee-jerk critic of the Vatican or of church authority. As a true believer, he had little patience for theology he regarded as monkeying around with the deposit of faith. Memorably, he once described the Christology of another fellow Jesuit, Father Roger Haight, as “a triumph of relevance over orthodoxy.”
More than anything else, O’Collins was a man who prioritized truth over politics, fairness over prejudice, calm over anger, friendship over ideology, and faith over academic and intellectual rivalries.
O’Collins, in other words, was among the most truly “Catholic” theologians I’ve ever met. I felt his absence in Rome after he returned to Australia in 2009, and I admit to my shame that I didn’t do much over the subsequent years to stay in touch.
Nevertheless, for the years we shared together in the Eternal City, no theological figure left a deeper impression on me, both personally and professionally, than Gerry O’Collins. I pray he’s now at one with his “constant companion,” Jesus Christ, upon whom his mind and heart alike were forever trained.
