Without dismissing the importance of other leaders in the history of the Roman Catholic Church in the United States, it is fair to say that Dorothy Day remains, at the dawn of the new millennium, the radical conscience of American Catholicism.
Maybe the devil made me do it, but after reading Bishop (now Cardinal) Walter Kasper's essay "On the Church" (reprinted in America, 4/23) for the second or third time, I went back through the text and conducted a little test.
Jacques Dupuis is a Belgian Jesuit who taught theology for over 30 years in India before joining the faculty at the Gregorian University in Rome, where we were colleagues during the last decades of my professorship there. His many years in India gave him the experience of being a member of the Chris