Joseph Lortz

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The grave in Luxembourg City

Joseph (Adam) Lortz (13 December 1887 in

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 what he considered the decay of Western society.

Life

Joseph Lortz was the second youngest of seven children. Having graduated from the

Gregorian University in Rome from 1907 to 1910,[1] and at the University of Fribourg from 1911 to 1913. Here he was influenced by the 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 [de] influenced his further intellectual development.[2] In 1917 he became scholarly secretary to the editorial board of the Corpus Catholicorum
series.

Lortz completed his doctorate at the

Nazi seizure of power in 1933, he published a treatise on the "Catholic accommodation with National Socialism" (Katholischer Zugang zum Nationalsozialismus).[4] In 1935 he moved to the chair of general church history with special emphasis on the history of missions at the University of Münster. He had joined the Nazi Party in May 1933 and tried to leave in 1937. He was not permitted to leave and continued to pay membership dues until July 1944. [5]

After the war he underwent a process of de-nazification, and was allowed to return to teaching. But he lost his position at the University of Munster after the post was returned to Georg Schreiber whom Lortz had replaced by the order of the Nazi authorities.

Institute of European History in Mainz in the department of Western religious history. His successor at that department, Peter Manns [de], was the editor of a centennial volume of Lortz's writings, published in 1987, and in his preface he touches on Lortz's history with the Nazis. Manns says that Lortz attempted to find a "legitimate" way for Catholics to connect to Nazism, an attempt he calls an error with grave consequences for which Lortz should be held culpable (and Manns includes no writings from that period in the volume). However, he argues that Lortz was not a Nazi himself, and that such is proven by his friendship with avowed opponents of the Nazis, including Clemens August Graf von Galen and Max Josef Metzger.[7]

He was a member of the Catholic fraternity

CV
in Freiburg/Üechtland.

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 Manns, Erwin Iserloh [de], Karl Pellens, Armin Lindauer, and Alex Schröer.

Works

Further reading

Notes

  1. ^
    ISBN 9780826415769, p. 56
    .
  2. ^ Gabriele Lautenschläger. "Joseph Lortz". Biographisch-Bibliographisches Kirchenlexikon (BBKL) (in German).
  3. ^ Krieg, p. 57.
  4. ISBN 978-3-596-16048-8
    , p. 381.
  5. ^ Krieg, pp. 77-78.
  6. ^ Krieg, p. 78.
  7. ^ Manns, Peter (1987). "Einleitung". In Manns, Peter (ed.). Joseph Lortz: Erneuerung und Einheit; Aufsätze zur Theologie und Kirchengeschichte, aus Anlass seines 100. Geburtstages. Stuttgart: Franz Steiner. pp. vii–ix.

External links

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