Joseph Lortz

Joseph (Adam) Lortz (13 December 1887 in Grevenmacher, Luxembourg – 21 February 1975 in Luxembourg) was a Roman Catholic Church Historian. He was a highly regarded Reformation historian and ecumenist. Beginning in the 1940s, Lortz made his ecumenical views available to general readers as well as to scholars in order to promote reconciliation between Catholics and Protestants. His writings played a role in the thinking that manifested itself in the Second Vatican Council's Decree on Ecumenism, Unitatis Redintegratio (21 November 1964). What was not widely known, however, was Lortz's involvement with Nazism from 1933 until 1937.[1] His Geschichte der Kirche (1932) (History of the Church) portrayed the church of the 1800s and the 1900s as the bastion of divine truth and moral values amid the decay of Western society.

Life

Joseph Lortz was the second youngest of seven children. Having graduated from the Gymnasium of the Benedictine abbey of Echternach, he studied philosophy and theology at the Gregorian University in Rome from 1907 to 1910,[2] and at the University of Fribourg from 1911 to 1913. Here he was influenced by the Dominican professor and patristics scholar Johann Peter Kirsch who advised him to study the patristic apologist Tertullian, and the church historian Pierre Mandonnet. He was ordained to the priesthood in 1913 at the Notre-Dame Cathedral, Luxembourg. From 1913 to 1923 he lived in Bonn, where the church and Reformation historians Heinrich Schrörs and Joseph Greving influenced his further intellectual development.[3] In 1917 he became the scholarly secretary of the editorial board Corpus Catholicorum series.

He completed his doctorate at the University of Bonn in 1920. he had intended to write his Habilitation Schrift at Bonn under the direction of the patristic scholar Albert Ehrhard. Erhard however judged that the church had nothing to fear from modernism, whilst Lortz was a critic of modernity, an admirer of Pius X for his condemnation of modernism in 1907.[4] So, for his further studies, Lortz went to the University of Würzburg in 1923. He then worked as a Privatdozent under w:de:Sebastian Merkle, simultaneously serving as a chaplain in Würzburg. In 1929 he received a post as a professor at the Collegium Hosianum in East Prussia at Braunsberg. After the Nazi seizure of power in 1933, he published a treatise on the “Catholic Accommodation with National Socialism" (Katholischer Zugang zum Nationalsozialismus).[5] In 1935 he moved to the chair of general church history with special emphasis on the history of missions at the University of Münster. Lortz, who had been a member of the Nazi Party, left the party in 1938.[5]

After the war he taught at the University of Mainz from 1950 until his death in 1975. He was also director of the Institute of European History in Mainz in the department of Western religious history.

He was a member of the Catholic fraternity K.D.St.V. Teutonia in Freiburg/Üechtland of the CV.

Many of Lortz’s works engaged the issue of the relation between the Roman Catholic Church and the Reformation. His best known work remains The Reformation in Germany.

Among Lortz's better known students are Erwin Iserloh, Peter Manns Karl Pellens, Armin Lindauer, and Alex Schröer.

Works

Further reading

External links

Notes

  1. ↑ Robert Krieg, Catholic theologians in Nazi Germany, p. 56
  2. ↑ Krieg, p.56
  3. ↑ Gabriele Lautenschläger (1993). "Lortz, Joseph Adam". In Bautz, Traugott. Biographisch-Bibliographisches Kirchenlexikon (BBKL) (in German) 5. Herzberg: Bautz. cols. 241–244. ISBN 3-88309-043-3.
  4. ↑ Krieg, p.57
  5. 1 2 Ernst Klee: Das Personenlexikon zum Dritten Reich. Wer war was vor und nach 1945. Fischer Taschenbuch Verlag, Zweite aktualisierte Auflage, Frankfurt am Main 2005, ISBN 978-3-596-16048-8, S. 381.
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