Friedrich Kempf

Friedrich Kempf (born June 25, 1908 in Wiesbaden ; † May 29, 2002 in Cologne ) was a German Roman Catholic priest , Jesuit , historian and church historian .

Life

Friedrich Kempf was the second of four sons of a middle school teacher. He grew up in Wiesbaden. After graduating from high school in 1927, he studied history, German and philosophy in Marburg and Berlin . In Marburg he became a member of the Thuringia Catholic Student Association in the Cartel Association of Catholic German Student Associations (KV). After ten semesters, he earned his doctorate on 20 April 1932 in Marburg Dr. phil. with a study of the "Rommersdorfer Briefbuch des 13th Century".

Even as a high school student he was toying with entering the order. But only three weeks after the Rigorosum did he enter the Jesuit novitiate on May 10, 1932 in 's-Heerenberg . It was his older brother Wilhelm Kempf (who later became Bishop of Limburg ) who persuaded him to go to the Jesuits. From 1933 to 1935 Friedrich Kempf studied philosophy at the Jesuit School in Pullach / Munich , and from 1935 to 1939 theology in Valkenburg ( Netherlands ), where he was ordained a priest on August 27, 1938.

As early as 1936, the superiors of the order appointed him to teach at the Pontifical Gregorian University in Rome . That is why he did the third degree in Florence in 1939/40. In 1940 Kempf came to Rome. For two years he worked in the Vatican Secret Archives on relevant sources on the history of the papacy in the investiture controversy and at the same time attended the School of Paleography attached to the Vatican Archives . Since 1942 he has given lectures at the Gregoriana, initially until 1955 on palaeography and document theory. Appointed full professor in 1946, he held lectures on medieval church history from 1946 until his retirement in 1978.

Community grave of the Jesuits

During the Roman years he had a closer friendship with the German church historians Engelbert Kirschbaum , Hubert Jedin and Hermann Hoberg, who also lived in Rome .

For health reasons, he moved to the Jesuit college of the Philosophical-Theological University of Sankt Georgen in Frankfurt am Main in 1981 . Almost blind, he moved in October 1997 to the Jesuit retirement home, "Haus Sentmaring" in Münster . In April 2002 the house was given up by the order, which is why Kempf, meanwhile seriously ill, moved to Cologne, where he died of heart failure on May 29, 2002 at the age of 93 . He was buried in the Melaten cemetery in Cologne in the community grave of the Jesuits (corridor 30e).

Kempf was a proven scientist who, as a Medievalist, devoted himself to researching the entire Church of the Middle Ages, but especially an international name as an explorer of the papacy under Pope Innocent III. and the political history of ideas of the Middle Ages. His research on the Dictatus papae of Pope Gregory VII , on the genesis of the papal primacy as well as on the hierarchy of offices and the episcopal-synodal structure of the late antique-early medieval church were also fundamental . He was instrumental in the work on the Jedin Handbook of Church History - in it he wrote most of the account of the High Middle Ages - and the founding of the Archivum Historiae Pontificiae , the Gregorian journal on papal history. In 1973, Kempf received the First Class Cross of Merit from the Federal Republic of Germany . His students and academic companions dedicated a commemorative publication to him in 1983 .

Fonts (selection)

• The Rommersdorfer Briefbuch des 13th Century (phil. Diss. Marburg) (= communications from the Institute for Austrian Historical Research, Supplementary Volume 12, 1933), pp. 502-571.
• The Innocenz III registers. A palaeographic-diplomatic investigation (= Miscellanea Historiae Pontificiae IX, n. 18), Rome 1945.
• (Ed. :) Regestum Innocentii III papae super negotio Romani imperii (= Miscellanea Historiae Pontificiae XII, n.21 ), Rome 1945.
• Papacy and Empire under Innocent III. The intellectual and legal foundations of his policy of dispute over the throne (= Miscellanea Historiae Pontificiae XIX, n. 58) Rome 1954.
• (Ed. :) Handbuch der Kirchengeschichte , edited by Hubert Jedin , Vol. 3, Freiburg im Breisgau, Basel, Vienna 1966, (3rd edition 1973).

Essays and extensive book reviews etc. a. in: Voices of the Times , Gregorianum, Sources and Research from Italian Archives and Libraries , Lexicon for Theology and Church (2nd edition), Revue d'histoire ecclésiastique, Historical Journal , Catholica. Quarterly journal for controversial theology, Roman quarterly for Christian antiquity and church history, Historical Yearbook of the Görres Society , Savigny Foundation journal for legal history , Archivum Historiae Pontificiae , Studi medievali , Sacramentum mundi. Theological lexicon for practice, Archivio della Società romana di Storia patria, Credo. Katolsk tidskrift.

Contributions to conference volumes and anthologies as well as to the Festschriften for Edmund E. Stengel (1952), Johannes Spörl (1965), Hermann Heimpel (1971) and Eugenio Duprè Theseider (1974).

literature

• Heinrich Pfeiffer, RP Friedrich Kempf, SI , in: Archivum Historiae Pontificiae 40 (2002) p. 9
• Klaus Schatz, P. Friedrich Kempf (GSE) , in: Jesuiten obituaries 2002, pp. 23–28.
• Klaus Schatz : Memories of the church historian Friedrich Kempf (1908-2002) . In: Michael Matheus , Stefan Heid (Ed.): Places of Refuge and Personal Networks. The Campo Santo Teutonico and the Vatican 1933–1955 . Freiburg: Herder, 2015, pp. 449–456
• Dopo 30 anni , in: Archivum Historiae Pontificiae 31 (1993) p. 9ff.
• Jürgen Petersohn , Friedrich Kempf , in: From Church and Empire. Studies on theology, politics and law in the Middle Ages . Festschrift for Friedrich Kempf on his 75th birthday and 50th anniversary of his doctorate, edited by Hubert Mordek , Sigmaringen 1983, pp. XV – XXII.

Web links

• Literature by and about Friedrich Kempf in the catalog of the German National Library