Imagine you are a missionary among savages (which, let us ruefully admit, most modern Americans are). As Cardinal Newman once suggested, it is not fitting to begin with the intellectually demanding doctrine of the Trinity, much less teachings wholly apt to incite the benighted, attached as they are to their perversities.

Yet that is what Father seems to have done. In Cambridge, he converted a whole constellation of the children of the Eastern establishment elite. Naturally they were bewildered. Then, when the sapientially dull but diplomatically astute hierarchs asked him to tone down his socially tone-deaf rhetoric, his response was to effectively punch the village chief in the nose.

A just man may prudently challenge the insolent to a joust of honor only in a land where a modicum of justice reigns. But as Father well knew, if anyone knew, the United States was and is a vast land of the recalcitrantly unconconverted led by oligarchs limited in point of nicety of conscience.

That, I take it, is the innermost kernel of Avery Cardinal Dulles’ last comprehensive appraisal of Father. Yet irrespective of what Cardinal Dulles remembers, is there not enough on record outside of the recollections of his intimates to suggest that Father indulged his heroic spleen in ways that were counterproductive?

Nothing I have to say about Father is intended to berate. But like a man playing a chess match with hindsight, I am sad and disappointed when I think of what such an august figure could have accomplished had he modulated his game to fit the confines of the times. Does any of the foregoing not resonate with you?