His vocation to study theology was profoundly encouraged by the Second Vatican Council taking place at that time.
Tracy received his Licentiate of Sacred Theology from the Gregorianum in 1964, after which he spent one year at a parish in Stamford, Connecticut.
[6] Tracy's first academic teaching appointment was a lectureship at the Catholic University of America in Washington, DC, where he began in 1967.
In 1968, Tracy joined with Bernard McGinn and twenty other professors at CUA in rejecting Pope Paul VI's encyclical Humanae vitae.
They sued the university, were represented by American Civil Liberties Union lawyers, and ultimately won their case.
In 2018, Tracy contributed an essay to the catalog of the Metropolitan Museum of Art exhibition Heavenly Bodies: Fashion and the Catholic Imagination.