Remembering Francis A. Sullivan, S.J.
I wrote the following memorial for Francis A. Sullivan, S.J. the other week for America, the Jesuits' national magazine, where I've published a few times over the years. To my disappointment, however, they passed on the piece. So I thought I would make it available here.
The Precise Doctor: Remembering Francis A. Sullivan, S.J.
(May 21, 1922 – October 23, 2019)
Michael Anthony Novak
The first thing Francis A. Sullivan ever said to me was that I should not write anything about him until he died. I did not take his advice. I had approached him by email in 2006 with the thought of writing a doctoral dissertation having to do with his theological work. These words, though, were his way of teasing me when I first met with him face-to-face, having flown out to Boston College, where he had retired into the Jesuit community there. He laughed that I might find myself with a useless dissertation should he change his thinking in some sudden or unexpected way. But “sudden” was not characteristic of his work. An analogy might serve here. If we think of Bob Dylan as the ecstatic poet of his songwriting generation, whose mere shopping lists might sprout into poetry in some inspired way, Frank Sullivan would then be more comparable to Paul Simon—the consummate craftsman of his kind of work.
He was a theologian’s theologian. That description works in two ways. In the more obvious sense, he was a theologian read by those more formally doing theology, rather than being a popularizer of theology, whose work is read more widely. His chosen topics could be more focused and technical, rather than being broadly appealing descriptions of the faith. In a less-obvious sense, he was a theologian who helped make other theologians. Francis Sullivan’s area of expertise was Ecclesiology—the study of the Church. And in decades where many of those who would go on to be professors of theology would themselves be clergy studying in Rome, he had in his classroom many of those who would become major figures in Ecclesiology in their own right. As a young professor, he sat on Avery Dulles’s dissertation committee. Those who did their doctorates under Sullivan spanned the theological spectrum, from Richard McBrien to William Cardinal Levada.
Born in 1922, Sullivan joined the Jesuits at sixteen after being impressed by some of his Jesuit teachers at Boston College High School, along with a Jesuit uncle. Eventually sent to the Jesuits’ Pontifical Gregorian University in Rome for his doctoral work, he thought he would be spending his academic career teaching Early Christianity back in Boston. He was surprised to be reassigned at the last minute to go back to the Gregorian to teach Ecclesiology. As a young professor during the Second Vatican Council, he was not senior enough to be brought into Council matters as a designated peritus or expert, although he listened to news of the Council with interest. Nevertheless, when the Council was debating the material that would become the Dogmatic Constitution on the Church, Lumen Gentium, the bishops of the United States asked Sullivan to come in and present to them some background on a subject then being discussed—the idea of charisms, or spiritual gifts within the Church. It was the only time that he had been given access to a draft version of a document before the Council, and he realized that he could improve the proposed text. He wrote a draft, passing it to his former superior (then in the Council as Bishop of Kingston, Jamaica) who had solicited any suggestions from him. Thus Sullivan, as a junior professor unaffiliated with the Council, contributed the bulk of a paragraph to the final text. (This became the second paragraph of n. 12 of Lumen Gentium.) This contribution would become more personally meaningful a decade later when Sullivan would become involved in the Catholic Charismatic Renewal as part of charismatic prayer group he began attending in Rome, after being invited by a student and by Carlo Maria Martini, S.J., then Rector of the Pontifical Biblical Institute, and later Cardinal Archbishop of Milan.
When at 70 he reached the mandatory retirement age at the Gregorian in 1992, he retired into the Jesuit community at Boston College, where he continued to teach a graduate seminar until the spring of 2009, ending his teaching ministry near his 87th birthday. In these later years, he turned his attention increasingly toward publishing, continuing to produce scholarly articles until the age of 92 in 2014, and turning his years of teaching into finely-crafted books where his talent for close, careful study were laid out for all to see. An early analysis of the roots of charismatic spiritual experience was Charisms and Charismatic Renewal: A Biblical and Theological Study (1982), which was followed by a variety of studies on the Church: The Church We Believe In: One, Holy, Catholic, and Apostolic (1988), Salvation Outside the Church? Tracing the History of the Catholic Response (1992), and From Apostles to Bishops: The Development of the Episcopacy in the Early Church (1996). But Sullivan is particularly known for his work on the Church’s teaching authority. In response to Hans Küng’s critical Infallible? An Inquiry, he laid out an alternative case in Magisterium: Teaching Authority in the Catholic Church (1983). This classic remains an indispensable conversation-partner in any subsequent treatment of the subject, as can be seen in works by Dulles and Gaillardetz in the last decade. Building upon Magisterium, Sullivan released Creative Fidelity: Weighing and Interpreting Documents of the Magisterium in 1996, where he taught his careful method of analysis of teaching documents of the Church, and understanding their differing weights. This is particularly important in an age of instant media where there is often little distinction recognized between the significance of documents of an ecumenical council, papal encyclicals, or off-the-cuff airplane interviews, or where volume and emotion can be rewarded over careful reasoning.
This careful, exacting reading and analysis is what Sullivan was known for, and it has been interesting to see a younger generation of theologians come to appreciate his attention to detail. An old tradition from the medieval Church was to recognize their great teachers with a title: Albert the Great was “the Universal Doctor;” Thomas Aquinas was “the Angelic Doctor;” Duns Scotus was “the Subtle Doctor,” and so forth. In appreciative laughter, I have heard him called the “Master of Precision,” and recognized that resonance with the old Scholastic accolades. He recognized, gratefully, that he seemed to have a gift or charism for clarity as a teacher, and so he might fairly be remembered as “the Precise Doctor.” I am sure he would demur regarding the accolade, but he would recognize its origin. He bore new names with humor. He was born Francis Alfred Sullivan, but someone at the Library of Congress conflated him with an older Jesuit classicist named Francis Aloysius Sullivan, and several of his books are so attributed. His students in Rome gave him another A-name, he discovered, with the nickname “Arizona.” He had earned this distinction because he was “clear and dry,” he explained with (dry) relish.
Francis Sullivan was a professor for 53 years. He was a priest for 68 years. He was a Jesuit for 81 years—for just over one-sixth of the order’s storied history. His was a faithful part of that story.
Michael Anthony Novak is Assistant Professor of Theology at Saint Leo University outside Tampa, Florida, where he has just been unanimously elected to receive tenure.
