An influential theologian who taught for 37 years at the University of Chicago Divinity School, David Tracy wrote about the significance of mystery within religions and examined how literature influences theology.
A professor of Catholic studies and an ordained Roman Catholic priest, Tracy was known for his independence of thought and commitment to free expression. Though generally a supporter of the Catholic Church’s leadership, Tracy joined 20 other professors at the Catholic University of America in 1968 in formally dissenting from Pope Paul VI’s encyclical letter objecting to artificial birth control. That prompted the university to fire those professors, including Tracy, and, with help from the American Civil Liberties Union, they fought the university and were reinstated.
“He was the most important Catholic theologian of the second half of the last century,” said Roman Catholic theologian Bernard McGinn, who grew up with Tracy and later taught with him at the U. of C. “His writings have been very influential not only in the U.S. but worldwide.”
Tracy, 86, died of natural causes April 29 at Rush University Medical Center in Chicago, said his nephew, actor John Emmet Tracy. Tracy was a longtime Hyde Park resident.
Born in Yonkers, New York, Tracy attended the Cathedral College in New York City and then undertook seminary training in philosophy and theology at St. Joseph’s Seminary and College in Yonkers. Tracy studied further at the Pontifical Gregorian University in Rome, and he was ordained as a Roman Catholic priest in 1963.
Tracy earned a licentiate of sacred theology in 1964 and a doctoral degree in 1969, both from the Pontifical Gregorian University. Tracy’s studies were during the Second Vatican Council, or Vatican II, which concluded in 1965 and deeply influenced how Tracy’s theology evolved, his family said.
While earning his doctorate, Tracy worked as a priest in a diocese in Bridgeport, Connecticut, and he also began teaching at the Catholic University of America in Washington, D.C. In 1968, Tracy, McGinn and 20 other Catholic University of America professors tried to dissent from the pope’s encyclical reaffirming the church’s position barring artificial birth control. The university’s president and senate fired the 22 professors, who later were vindicated and allowed to continue teaching.
“We said that our theological expertise, such as it is, and also our pastoral experience of counseling young married couples, leads us to a respectful dissent of this position because we felt that young people, especially young married couples, needed to make use of, if necessary, artificial birth control,’ McGinn said.
U. of C. Divinity School professor Wendy Doniger said Tracy generally was pleased with Vatican II and what it achieved, but that he strongly disagreed with church leaders “who, in his opinion, departed from that legacy.”
Vatican II spurred the U. of C. Divinity School to hire Catholic scholars for the first time and Tracy was invited to join the faculty.
Throughout his decades at the U. of C., Tracy developed a reputation for acknowledging the mystery and power of religious faith, instead of rigid orthodoxy. His views drew critics within the Catholic Church, but plenty of plaudits outside of it, as he studied theology’s elevation of life’s complexities and mysteries of existence.
Tracy once told The New York Times that “religion’s closest cousin is not rigid logic but art,” and that “real religion does not give final answers; it makes us ask better questions.” Tracy’s scholarship also brought him into dialogues with Jewish, Buddhist and Muslim scholars.
“He was a great scholar, a great intellectual and a man with a real gift for teaching, both in mentoring young scholars one by one and by mesmerizing them in groups in classroom lectures,” Doniger said. “So he found great fulfillment in his life in the academic world.”
Alejandro Nava, one of Tracy’s graduate students in the 1990s, said Tracy helped him find his own voice “not only as a young scholar of religion but as a complete human person.”
“He was a deeply caring teacher and human being, and his teaching and scholarship were essential to my intellectual and spiritual development,” said Nava, now a religious studies professor at the University of Arizona. “He had a stunning range of knowledge: The ancient Greeks and the Bible, medieval and modern art, the history of Christianity, modern philosophy and literary criticism, the world religions — he soaked it all in and didn’t lose any of it once he committed it to memory.
“Ultimately, the mystery of God was an existential question for him, a matter not only of thinking better, but of living more justly, more humanely, more lovingly.”
Nava said Tracy’s emphasized the need for intellectuals and scholars to listen to the voices of the less fortunate, particularly those from non-European backgrounds.
“He never presumed to have all the right answers,” Nava said. “It was the love of the question, and the pursuit of human understanding, that inspired his scholarship.”
Tracy published numerous influential essays and books. His 1975 book, “Blessed Rage for Order,” takes its title from a Wallace Stevens poem and explores how the human imagination endeavors to find meaning in a world often random and chaotic. Other books followed, including “The Analogical Imagination” in 1981 and “Plurality and Ambiguity” in 1987.
“Whoever fights for hope, fights on behalf of us all,” Tracy wrote in “Plurality and Ambiguity.” “Whoever acts on that hope, acts in a manner worthy of a human being. And whoever so acts, I believe, acts in a manner faintly suggestive of the reality and power of that God in whose image human beings were formed to resist, to think and to act. The rest is prayer, observance, discipline, conversation and actions of solidarity-in-hope. Or the rest is silence.”
Although no longer a parish priest in Chicago, Tracy celebrated Saturday night Mass on the Hyde Park campus for many years.
Tracy retired from the U. of C. in 2006, but continued to write and lecture. In 2020, he published a collection of more than 40 essays titled “Fragments and Filaments,” and at the time of his death he had been working on a book tentatively titled “Infinity and Naming God.”
Tracy hailed Pope John XXIII and Mahatma Gandhi for understanding intuitively that love is at the heart of everything.
“The religious imagination of people is touched and comes to life in these classic lives, events and texts,” Tracy told The New York Times in 1986. “They make us aware of this great mystery — that love is the basic reality. And that is what my work is all about.”
In a statement, his surviving family, which consists of cousins, nieces and nephews, said Tracy “will be remembered for his extraordinary body of work, the breadth of his influence, his rigorous explorations of the meaning and symbol of God in modern life, and his commitment to equality, social justice and interfaith and intercultural dialogue.”
Services are private.
Goldsborough is a freelance reporter.