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 on 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.
Mr. Tracy (he was almost never addressed as “Father Tracy”) was an ordained Catholic priest who 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 Ph.D.-granting program at the university.
The 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.”
Mr. Tracy had been a student in Rome during the Second Vatican Council, seen as 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.
Mr. Tracy “never was designed to be a popular writer,” a colleague at the University of Chicago, Martin E. Marty, told Commonweal, the liberal Catholic magazine, in 2010. “He influenced the influencers.”
Mr. 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 Costume Institute 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.”
The Rev. Richard P. McBrien, then the chairman of the department of theology at the University of Notre Dame, said of Mr. Tracy in The Times in 1986, “More than any other theologian, he really does understand modern philosophy, literature and language, and he can see connections nobody has seen before.”
An early book of Mr. Tracy’s, from 1975, “Blessed Rage for Order” (its title is from a line in a Wallace Stevens poem), embraced the pluralism of religions rather than claim that there was one true faith.
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.”
“It’s not the case,” he added, “that Jews and Muslims and Buddhists do not have a way either of salvation in monotheistic traditions, or of enlightenment in the more mystically inclined religions like Buddhism and Daoism.”
To critics, Mr. Tracy and other progressive Catholics who rejected the authority of Rome had lost their faith.
“Tracy isn’t developing doctrine, he’s denying it,” Msgr. George A. Kelly, president of the Fellowship of Catholic Scholars, told The Times 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 on Jan. 6, 1939, in Yonkers, N.Y., one of three sons of John and Eileen (Rossell) Tracy. His father was a union organizer. No immediate family members survive.
At age 13, David felt “a very intense call” to the priesthood, he later said, and entered Cathedral College, on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, the high school seminary of the Archdiocese of New York.
He went on to the Pontifical Gregorian University in Rome in 1960, where the Second Vatican Council, which began in 1962, had a profound and lasting impact on his views. Ordained a priest in 1963, he was appointed to a parish in Stamford, Conn., where he recruited his parishioner William F. Buckley Jr., the founder of the conservative magazine National Review, to be a lay lector at Mass.
Mr. Tracy spent only a year as a parish priest before returning to Rome, where he earned a licentiate of sacred theology in 1964 and a doctorate of theology from the Gregorian, as it is known.
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.
“Over several years, I’d ask him how it’s going, and he’d say, ‘At least another year,’” said Stephen Okey, a theology professor at Saint Leo University in Florida, who wrote a book about Mr. Tracy. “The project was growing like an avalanche. It got too big.”
