FATHER Jacques Dupuis’s long experience of India and its non-Christian traditions helped to shape his religious thinking. His attempt to respond to a world in which Christians are increasingly aware of the reality of different religious paths led him into conflict with the Vatican.

He was already developing his ideas by the time the world’s Catholic bishops gathered in Rome for the Second Vatican Council (1962-65) to debate the Church’s response to the modern world. Once on the fringes of theology, inter-religious dialogue was becoming a major and difficult issue for the Catholic Church. The council produced the document Nostra aetate, which tended to focus not on the differences between the Catholic faith and other religions, but on what they had in common. It stated that “the Catholic Church rejects nothing which is true and holy in these religions”.

Father Dupuis took the council’s thinking further, as he sought the significance of other religions in God’s plan for mankind. He saw the issue of revelation and salvation as broader and more complex than the Church acknowledged. Before the Second Vatican Council, evangelising had meant directly proclaiming Jesus Christ and converting non-believers, as St Francis Xavier and other Jesuits had done in India in the 16th century. Father Dupuis, however, was arriving at the conclusion that divine revelation is not limited to the Judaeo-Christian tradition but extends also to other faiths.

In this he was following his Jesuit contemporaries Henri de Lubac, Hans Urs von Balthasar and Karl Rahner, who began to speak positively of human values to be found in the other religious traditions.

Born in 1923 in Huppaye, Belgium, Jacques Dupuis entered a Jesuit novitiate in 1941. He moved to India in 1948, a year after independence, as a 25-year-old Jesuit student, and soon took up a teaching post at St Mary’s College, a Jesuit theological faculty based at Kuresong, high in the Himalayas. Meeting Hindus, Buddhists and Muslims became part of his daily life. He was ordained in 1954. From 1960 to 1984, he was professor of systematic theology at the Jesuit-run theological faculty, now Vidyajyoti Institute of Religious Studies, in Delhi. In 1984 he left his beloved India to become Professor of Christology at the Pontifical Gregorian University in Rome. He also edited Gregorianum, the university’s journal.

As an advisor to the Pontifical Council for Inter-religious Dialogue, he was instrumental in forming Dialogue and Proclamation, the Vatican’s 1991 guidelines on inter-religious dialogue, a subject at the heart of Pope John Paul II’s papacy.

However, the publication in 1997 of his book Towards a Christian Theology of Religious Pluralism brought about a clash with the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith. He was subjected to a series of cross-examinations by the Congregation, headed by Cardinal Ratzinger, and was suspended from the Gregorian University. This episode took its toll on the diminutive, quietly spoken Jesuit, and he spent two weeks in hospital.

At the heart of Father Dupuis’s theology is the idea that while Jesus is the saviour of mankind and the Catholic Church the true Church, God is also at work in other religious traditions. “The relationship between Christianity and the other religions,” he said, “can no longer be viewed in terms of contradiction and opposition between realisation here and stepping-stones there, much less between absoluteness on one side and only potentialities on the other.”

He never denied the primacy of Christianity, indeed his theology was of a distinctly trinitarian character: “It may be said that the divine Trinity is experienced, though hiddenly and ‘anonymously’, wherever human beings allow the Divine Reality that impinges upon them to enter into their life. In every authentic religious experience the Triune God of Christian revelation is present and operative.”

The conclusion of the investigation, published in 2001 in a Notification, came a few months after the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith published Dominus Iesus, a document that reiterated that Christ was the unique saviour and rejected the idea that all religions led to God. The Notification refrained from an outright condemnation of Father Dupuis’s work, but said that it contained “ambiguities and difficulties on important points which could lead a reader to erroneous or harmful opinions”.

While Dupuis was seen by some to doubt that Jesus Christ was the only saviour of all humanity, Father Peter Hans Kolvenbach, superior-general of the Jesuits, responded to the Notification by saying: “We hope that Father Jacques Dupuis can continue his pioneer research in the field of interreligious dialogue.”

After his retirement, Dupuis was appointed Professor Emeritus of Theology at the Gregorian University. His later years were spent lecturing around the world.

His most recent book, Christianity and the Religions: From Confrontation to Dialogue, passed without controversy. It was dedicated to Cardinal König and prefaced with a quotation about the need for men in the Church who show obedience and humility in their quest for truth — the words were Cardinal Ratzinger’s.

During an interview in London last September, Dupuis summed up his thinking: “In a sense we must be prepared to recognise the word of God in the sacred books of those other religious traditions. It remains true, of course, that the fullness of divine revelation is found in Jesus Christ. And the reason for this is that Jesus Christ as the Son of God made man can express the mystery of God more deeply than the prophets of the Old Testament and the prophets of the other religious traditions.”

He also spoke about his experience in India: “I went through a conversion by living for so many years in India. If I had not lived in India for 36 years, I would not preach the theology which I am preaching today. I consider my exposure to Hindu reality as the greatest grace I have received from God in my vocation as a theologian.”

Father Jacques Dupuis, SJ, priest and theologian, was born on December 5, 1923. He died on December 28, 2004, aged 81.