the last book I ever read (Jesus Wept: Seven Popes and the Battle for the Soul of the Catholic Church, excerpt twenty)

from Jesus Wept: Seven Popes and the Battle for the Soul of the Catholic Church by Philip Shenon:

In 1998, Ratzinger launched an investigation that, more than any other in his years at the congregation, would outrage the world’s theologians with its heartlessness. It targeted a revered professor at the Gregorian, Father Jacques Dupuis, a seventy-four-year-old Belgian Jesuit who had spent much of his career working with refugees in India. He had just published a book, Toward a Christian Theology of Religious Pluralism, in which he argued that since God existed before Jesus, there would be evidence of God in other, even more ancient religions. He urged Catholic missionaries in the developing world to focus less on converting souls and more on dialogue. He cited Vatican II documents championing the idea that other religions had wisdom to offer Christians.

In a review, O’Collins, Dupuis’s colleague at the Gregorian, described the book as a “genuinely magisterial work” that reflected the “profound shift in the Christian understanding of other religions.” Cardinal König of Vienna, who had taken on several Vatican assignments in retirement to promote interfaith dialogue, declared the book a “masterwork” that reflected views he often heard from John Paul. The Catholic Press Association of the US named it Book of the Year.

Ratzinger, however, condemned the book—and was prepared to destroy Dupuis’s career. The congregation opened its investigation of Dupuis in the spring of 1998. He knew nothing about it until October, when Father Kolvenbach, as head of the Jesuits, received a nine-page letter from Ratzinger that cited “errors and doctrinal ambiguities” so serious that the book “cannot be safely taught.” The letter contained a list of purported examples of heresy throughout the book, along with a demand that its author respond in writing.

Dupuis, chronically ill throughout his life, was so physically sickened by news of the letter that he immediately checked himself into a hospital. He looked back on it as the day his life ended. “The joy of living has gone,” he said. “I feel like a broken man who can never fully recover from the suspicion that the church—a church which I love and have served during my whole life—has thrust upon me.”