The Rev. David Tracy, a leading liberal Catholic theologian who open-sourced his understanding of God, borrowing from Jews, Buddhists, and great works of art and literature, and who rejected Rome as the sole authority on how to be a good Christian, died April 29 in Chicago. He was 86.
His death, in a hospital, was announced by the University of Chicago Divinity School, where he taught for nearly 40 years.
Father Tracy lectured widely, wrote nine books, and was recognized as one of the most influential Catholic theologians of the late 20th century. His best-known book, “The Analogical Imagination’’ (1981), argued that man’s knowledge of the divine proceeds through analogies. Christ is an analogue for God, he wrote, but great works of literature and art also revealed God’s presence.
“Religion’s closest cousin is not rigid logic but art,’’ he once said.
His independence from Roman Catholicism’s top-down authority was manifested early, in 1968, when he and more than 20 other faculty members at the Catholic University of America in Washington were tried before a religious tribunal for rejecting the Vatican’s ban on birth control. He was acquitted, though he left the next year when he was recruited by the University of Chicago Divinity School. He remained there through his retirement in 2007.
He also served on the faculty of the Committee on Social Thought, a prestigious doctoral-granting program at the university. Writer Saul Bellow, a fellow committee member, liked to say that its faculty was composed mostly of “highly conservative secular Jews — and the only leftist is a Catholic priest.’’
Father Tracy had been a student in Rome during the Second Vatican Council, a significant moment of modernization in the church. He had a lifelong allergy to the idea of a papal monopoly on how to practice Catholicism.
“It is easy to get uniformity in religion,’’ he told The New York Times Magazine in a 1986 profile headlined “A Dissenting Voice.’’ “All you have to do is to remove the mystery. But if you remove the mystery, you destroy religion at the same time.’’
His objections to church authority were not generally over politics, social justice, or cultural issues, but over more arcane matters of doctrine. He was an intellectual maverick in an age when theologians were no longer read by the wider public, as Reinhold Niebuhr and Paul Tillich were in the mid-20th century.
Father Tracy “never was designed to be a popular writer,’’ a colleague at the University of Chicago, Martin E. Marty, told Commonweal, a liberal Catholic magazine, in 2010. “He influenced the influencers.’’
Father Tracy engaged in a three-year exchange of academic papers and discussions with Buddhist and Christian thinkers. He was one of the few Catholic priests elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, in 1982.
He also wrote an essay for a 2018 exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, “Heavenly Bodies: Fashion and the Catholic Imagination.’’ The curator, Andrew Bolton, called him “the J.D. Salinger of the theological world.’’
An early book of Father Tracy’s, from 1975, “Blessed Rage for Order’’ (its title is from a line in a Wallace Stevens poem), embraced the pluralism of religions.
Christianity, he said in a 2019 interview for Commonweal, “has been for me the decisive, definitive way’’ to salvation and revelation, “but there are other ways.’’
To critics, Father Tracy and other progressive Catholics who rejected the authority of Rome had lost their faith. “Tracy isn’t developing doctrine, he’s denying it,’’ Monsignor George A. Kelly, president of the Fellowship of Catholic Scholars, told The New York Times Magazine in 1986. “The issue is really Christ, and Pope John Paul II speaks for Him. That is fundamental. I think some of these theologians have lost the faith. If I followed David Tracy and others, the end would be that I wouldn’t be a Catholic. In fact, I wouldn’t be anything.’’
David William Tracy was born Jan. 6, 1939, in Yonkers, New York, one of three sons of John and Eileen (Rossell) Tracy. His father was a union organizer. No immediate family members survive.
Ordained a priest in 1963, he was appointed to a parish in Stamford, Conn., where he recruited his parishioner William F. Buckley Jr., founder of conservative magazine National Review, to be a lay lector at Mass.
Over the last 25 years of his life, he was consumed with writing a final work on the ineffability of God, which would roll together theology, philosophy, mathematics, and cosmology. But “the God book,’’ as his admirers called it, kept expanding, being rethought, and was never done.
