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The article says his ancestors, specifically his grandfather, were Presbyterian. It does not say that he ever was.

Nor does it say that he wasn't. However, if you follow his education, the articles notes that:

by the time he entered Harvard College in 1936, after being trained in one of the "‘better’ non-sectarian boarding schools of New England," he had imbibed a thoroughgoing atheism and skepticism "of a type all too often infused into adolescent minds by well-meaning teachers of physics, history, and literature." Young Avery Dulles lamented that "skepticism, materialism, liberalism...hold almost unchallenged sway in our secular universities and thus set the tenor of our intellectual life."

Those of us with children are all too familiar with the mind games contemporary educators (and apparently those from Avery's generation) play with impressionable youth.

Our current pope addressed this problem in his Pro Eligendo homily, as Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger and in his capacity as Dean of the College of Cardinals. The homily was delivered at the Mass said for the Cardinals as they prepared to enter into the Conclave to elect the next pope. He references the reading when he says:

And what does it mean to be children in faith? St Paul answers: it means being "tossed here and there, carried about by every wind of doctrine" (Eph 4: 14). This description is very timely!
How many winds of doctrine have we known in recent decades, how many ideological currents, how many ways of thinking. The small boat of the thought of many Christians has often been tossed about by these waves - flung from one extreme to another: from Marxism to liberalism, even to libertinism; from collectivism to radical individualism; from atheism to a vague religious mysticism; from agnosticism to syncretism and so forth. Every day new sects spring up, and what St Paul says about human deception and the trickery that strives to entice people into error (cf. Eph 4: 14) comes true.

This paints a lovely picture of an academic wading through mountains of data and finally selecting the Catholic Church.

On the contrary. It paints a picture of an individual who has struggled with faith throughout his entire life, in search of the True Church. Like most Protestants, the last place he ever thought to find it was in the Catholic Church. Today, in his 90's, he continues to serve this Church that he has embraced, with filial love.

As our Lord reminds ALL of us - "Seek and you shall find; knock and it shall be opened unto you". So many of us tremble in fear of what that response will be. It is so much easier to ensconce ourselves in the shelter of our adopted faith belief that agrees with what we want, rather than what God wants for us.