Ferdinand Strobel

Ferdinand Strobel SJ (born October 3, 1908 in Unterschefflenz , † November 23, 1999 in Feldkirch ) was a Swiss Jesuit and church historian .

Life

Ferdinand Strobel was the son of his father Ferdinand Strobel and his wife Sophie, born. Lehmann. He grew up with three younger siblings in Weinfelden and attended the Sarnen grammar school from 1923 to 1927. In 1928 he received his Matura at the canton school in Frauenfeld ; He then entered the Society of Jesus on September 20, 1928 in Tisis near Feldkirch and began his two-year novitiate .

From 1930 to 1933 he studied philosophy with a subsequent licentiate at the Berchmanskolleg in Pullach im Isar valley , which he continued with a history degree at the University of Munich , with the intention of working as a historian in the scientific journal Voices of the Time ; he received his doctorate there in 1936. phil. I magna cum laude. His dissertation on Catholicism and the liberal currents in Baden before 1848 was published in 1938.

As a theology student he was from 1936 to 1940 at the Philosophical-Theological College Sankt Georgen in Frankfurt am Main , at the University of Innsbruck , in Rome and in Florence .

In 1939 he was ordained a priest in Munich and from 1941 to 1944 he was a religious teacher for the upper classes of the grammar school in Basel and from 1945 to 1952 at the Apologetic Institute in Zurich in the field of Jesuit issues and was commissioned to compile documents on church resistance during the time of Publish National Socialism . The work was published in 1946 under the title Christian Probation .

In 1947 and 1948, the 100-year anniversaries of the Sonderbund War , the expulsion of the Jesuits from Switzerland and the new federal constitution with the Jesuit ban were imminent. In 1946, Strobel was commissioned as a historian to investigate the background to these events with detailed archival research. In addition to many lectures and articles on the Jesuit question, the publication On the Jesuit Question in Switzerland appeared in 1948 . In 1954 he published his 1,100-page work The Jesuits and Switzerland in the 19th Century , which his confreres also referred to as the Great Strobel .

Karl Thüer (1907–1982), Provincial of the Swiss Jesuits, was involved in the expansion of the Stella Matutina Jesuit College in Feldkirch and appointed the historian Strobel as a history teacher at the grammar school. To do this, Ferdinand Strobel had to present the teaching examination for secondary schools required by the Austrian state, and in order to receive it, he studied history again at the University of Vienna from 1953 to 1955 . He then worked from 1955 to 1979 as a history teacher at the Stella Matutina Jesuit College. During this time he worked on the multi-volume edition Helvetia Sacra under the direction of Albert Bruckner , so that he used the time of the Christmas, Easter and summer holidays to do the necessary research at home and abroad, especially in the religious archives in Rome , Munich, Vienna and Cologne and many state archives , so that in 1976 the series Helvetia Sacra, Department VII: The Regular Clergy of the volume Die Gesellschaft Jesu in der Schweiz could appear.

After retiring from school, he moved from Feldkirch to Zurich in 1981 to set up the newly organized archive of the Swiss Jesuit Province, in which he was active as a provincial archivist until 1989 . In 1986 he published the 660-page Swiss Jesuit Lexicon as a manuscript . Ferdinand Strobel contributed significantly to the coming to terms with the history of the Jesuits in Switzerland in the 19th century.

Fonts (selection)

• Catherine of Siena: political letters . v, Einsiedeln 1933.
• Catholicism and the liberal currents in Baden before 1848. Munich 1938.
• Christian probation. Documents of the resistance of the Catholic Church in Germany 1933-1945 . Otto Walter publishing house, Olten 1946.
• The Jesuit question at the time of the Sonderbund . Benziger, Einsiedeln 1947.
• On the Jesuit question in Switzerland . NZN Verlag, Zurich 1948.
• The Jesuits and Switzerland in the 19th century. A contribution to the creation of the Swiss federal state. Olten 1954.
• Swiss Jesuit Lexicon. Zurich 1986.

literature

• Willi Schnetzer: P. Ferdinand Strobel SJ (1908–1999). In: Journal for Swiss Church History, Volume 94. 2000. pp. 189–191.

Web links

• Hansruedi Kleiber: Strobel, Ferdinand. In: Historical Lexicon of Switzerland .
• Anti-clerical caricatures and satires IX: Switzerland , compiled and edited by Alois Payer. Dedicated to the memory of my history teacher, the Jesuit Father Dr. Ferdinand Strobel SJ (1908-1999).