“If we don’t get Jesus right, we won’t get the church right.”
These words from a 2015 America interview with Gerald O’Collins, S.J., might provide a decent introduction to the intellectual and spiritual passions of this prominent systematic theologian who died in Melbourne on Aug. 22, 2024. In the same interview, he called Jesus the “constant companion of my life,” saying that “Jesus is the One on whom I want to center all my thinking and loving.”
The reality of Jesus and the reality of the church—and how both should be interpreted and understood—were the topics of many of the more than 75 books Father O’Collins wrote or co-wrote over his long life and career, and certainly the focus of his teaching over the years. His books are used as theological textbooks in many locales, but probably none has been thumbed through by more students than his 1995 book Christology. O’Collins revised it twice, incorporating new trends and insights in the field to expand the book’s scope.
Born in Melbourne in 1931, Gerald O’Collins entered the Society of Jesus in 1950. Ordained in 1963, he earned a licentiate in sacred theology at Heythrop College in London in 1967. After stints at what was then the Weston Jesuit School of Theology in Cambridge, Mass., and the Jesuit Theological Center in Melbourne, he became a professor of theology at the Gregorian University in Rome in 1973. He would remain there until 2006, serving a term as the dean of the theology faculty.
After leaving the Gregorian, Father O’Collins taught at the University of Surrey before returning in 2009 to Australia, where he taught at Australian Catholic University and the Jesuit College of Spirituality, Parkville, and was a research fellow at Catholic Theological College. In 2006, he was honored as a Companion of the Order of Australia (the “A.C.” seen in many obituaries for him) for his service to the Catholic Church over the years.
Father O’Collins wrote for America many times over the years; his first contribution came in 1970, and his last was just two years ago, an appreciation of the great “dean of Jesus research,” the Rev. John Meier. The year before, he contributed reflections on the Rev. Hans Küng, who had died just four days before. These were just some of the literally dozens upon dozens of reflections on Scripture, faith, Christology, ecclesiology, interreligious dialogue and more that he wrote over more than 50 years of contributions. One of his earliest was a 1971 article on the search for the historical Jesus, an essay so erudite and yet so commonsense in tone and approach that I want to share it with every Catholic theology teacher I know.
O’Collins emphasized three points in that essay, ones that many preachers might also want to consider when speaking about Jesus. First, Jesus should not be turned into our contemporary; he lived when and where he lived. “To describe Him as a revolutionary leader, a truly secular man or the first hippie may be emotionally satisfying, but for the most part these stereotypes are intellectually worthless,” O’Collins wrote.
Second, we can’t really construct a biography of Jesus with the materials we have (which hasn’t stopped us from trying). “Our knowledge of Him is practically restricted to the last two or three years of His life. Even for these years very little chronology can be established. The sources we possess make it notoriously difficult to penetrate His inner life,” O’Collins noted. And third, “we need to respect the nature of the Gospels as brief testimonials of faith,” meaning they are not historical sources in the way we think of such, but at the same time they are not just the “devotional literature of the early Church.”
The teaching moments in O’Collins’s life did not all come in print, however: He knew and taught many scholars who have become leading figures in Christology, ecclesiology, interreligious dialogue and more. And among his academic tasks at the Gregorian University, noted the Australian Jesuits in an obituary, was to supervise the dissertations of countless future bishops. It gave him a foot in two worlds and a unique view of the global church, something he explored in his 2014 memoir, On The Left Bank Of The Tiber.
O’Collins was one of the most prominent defenders of Jacques Dupuis, S.J., when that theologian and scholar of interreligious dialogue faced investigation, trial and censure from the Congregation (now Dicastery) for the Doctrine of the Faith at the turn of the century. (You can read Ladislas Orsy, S.J., on the entire affair here.) In On The Left Bank Of The Tiber, O’Collins argued that not only was the C.D.F.’s investigation lacking in due process, but Father Dupuis was accused of holding views he had never expressed.
Father O’Collins also wrote the introduction in 2017 to Do Not Stifle the Spirit: Conversations with Jacques Dupuis, by America’s Vatican correspondent Gerard O’Connell (that’s Gerald and Gerard, though to add to the confusion, both went by Gerry), which I edited at Orbis Books.
His close association with Dupuis—and aforementioned admiration of Küng—did not mean that O’Collins could always be found on the progressive side of theological issues. Among his published works are The Legacy of John Paul II and Pope John Paul II. A Reader. He also was firmly on the side of the Vatican in some Christological disputes with theologians, as John Allen reported in 2005 in the National Catholic Reporter.
In a 1988 Christmas reflection for America, O’Collins returned to the centrality of the incarnation in the church’s understanding of itself. “To speak of the Son of God coming ‘among us’ to live ‘with us’ sounds like simple talk,” he wrote. “But we have little help here from the philosophers, and in any case this belief points to a unique mystery, the qualitatively new, personal presence of God in our world.” And more:
Christmas shows us that we contact God not only through what we see and hear, but also through what we touch. We can see God acting in history. We can open our ears to hear the divine message to us. But we can also reach out and touch the Son of God, now mysteriously but truly present among us in a rich range of new ways.
On a more academic level, what lessons might O’Collins offer future generations of theologians, beyond love for Jesus and love for the church? First, learn the languages. “Driven by the pastoral needs of our world and church, too many up and coming theologians are reluctant to learn the languages, ancient and modern, and do the research required by their calling,” he told America in 2015. “More than ever, Catholic theology needs men and women ready to devote themselves to tough study.” And second, words matter. “Over the years I have learned the need to ‘watch my language’ in the presence of God. We theologians need to be scrupulous about the words we use.”
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Our poetry selection for this week is “Original Bodies,” by R/B Mertz. Readers can view all of America’s published poems here.
Members of the Catholic Book Club: We are taking a hiatus this summer while we retool the Catholic Book Club and pick a new selection.
In this space every week, America features reviews of and literary commentary on one particular writer or group of writers (both new and old; our archives span more than a century), as well as poetry and other offerings from America Media. We hope this will give us a chance to provide you with more in-depth coverage of our literary offerings. It also allows us to alert digital subscribers to some of our online content that doesn’t make it into our newsletters.
Other Catholic Book Club columns:
- The spiritual depths of Toni Morrison
- What’s all the fuss about Teilhard de Chardin?
- Poet, feminist and nun: Sister Madeleva Wolff
- Moira Walsh and the art of a brutal movie review
- Father Hootie McCown: Flannery O’Connor’s Jesuit bestie and spiritual advisor
- Who’s in hell? Hans Urs von Balthasar had thoughts.
Happy reading!
James T. Keane
