Günther Wassilowsky

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Günther Wassilowsky (born March 29, 1968 in Hechingen ) is a German church historian and professor of historical theology at the Humboldt University in Berlin .

Life

Günther Wassilowsky studied from 1990 to 1996 theology, history and German at the Albert-Ludwigs-Universität Freiburg and at the Pontifical Gregorian University in Rome. In 1996 he graduated with a degree in Catholic theology. He then worked from 1997 to 1999 as a religion teacher at the grammar school at Romäusring in Villingen and at the Kepler grammar school in Freiburg. It was founded in 2001 with a thesis on the contribution of Karl Rahner to the Second Vatican Council in the dogmatic Peter Walter to Dr. theol. PhD. From 1993 to 2000 he was a scholarship holder in the basic and doctoral funding of the Cusanuswerk Episcopal Study Fund .

At the Erbacher Hof , the Academy of the Diocese of Mainz, he was director of studies from 2001 to 2003. As a research assistant and head of the sub-project “Papal Ceremonies in the Early Modern Era”, he conducted research from 2004 to 2007 in the Münster Collaborative Research Center “Symbolic Communication and Social Value Systems”. In 2007 he completed his habilitation at the Westphalian Wilhelms University in Münster with Hubert Wolf . He received the Venia legendi for the subject Middle and Modern Church History and was an academic senior councilor at the Catholic-Theological Faculty of Münster in 2007/08.

Wassilowsky held professorships for church history at the Catholic Private University Linz (2008–2014), the Leopold Franzens University Innsbruck (2014–2016) and the Goethe University Frankfurt am Main (2016–2020). In March 2020 he took over the chair for historical theology at the newly founded Institute for Catholic Theology at the Humboldt University in Berlin .

Act

One of the main teaching and research areas of Wassilowsky is the Second Vatican Council. In the context of a hermeneutic of the council, he largely agrees with Giuseppe Alberigo , who coined the term council as an "event". Accordingly, in order to understand Vatican II, it is necessary not only to take note of the adopted Council documents, but to reconstruct the entire event before the final texts and to use it for the interpretation. Wassilowsky, who also published the last two volumes of the “History of the Second Vatican Council” by Alberigo in German translation, has expanded this approach by including all symbolic communications of the Second Vatican Council. He calls the council a 'symbolic event'.

In his research on church history, Wassilowsky pursues a cultural studies approach. This can be guided by the question of how “people in the various epochs of church history expressed their religious interpretations of God and the world in acts of signs”.

Wassilowsky applies this decidedly cultural-scientific approach in particular in his second major field of research, the early modern history of Catholicism, Pope and Rome. That is why many of the works focus on the symbolic practices, rituals, stagings and myths of historical actors. But not only obvious symbolic acts are examined with regard to their meaning, interpretation and historical power. Based on the thesis that every human action always also has a symbolic dimension and that such symbolic action has a fundamental structure-forming effect, a new form of church institutional history is to be written and classical church-historical objects are to be dealt with in a new way with the analytical instruments of cultural history.

So far, Wassilowsky has tested this type of "Church history as a symbolic history" in the following four fields of research:

  • History of the papacy and Rome in the Renaissance and early modern times - stagings, ceremonies, rituals, pictorial practices, theological norms
  • History of events and impacts of the Council of Trent (1545–63) and the Second Vatican Council (1962–65) - Councils as performative spaces of action
  • Church personnel and material decisions - symbolism of technical processes
  • Catholic confessional culture - understanding of symbols and ritual practices

In the academic year 2018/19 Günther Wassilowsky was appointed as a Fellow at the Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin , where he conducted research on the subject of "City of Grace. Theology and Culture in Early Modern Rome". He explored the extent to which administrative and social grace practices in connection with contemporary grace theology played a role in the culture of the city of Rome as a "symbol of a specific theological anthropology".

In September 2019 he was elected chairman of the "Society for the Publication of the Corpus Catholicorum ". Wassilowsky is a member of numerous scientific associations and advisory boards. He gives u. a. publishes the scientific series “Popes and Papacy” and “Reformation History Studies and Texts” and is one of the editors of renowned magazines such as the “ Roman Quarterly for Christian Antiquity and Church History ” or the “ Journal for Church History ”.

Awards

Fonts

Monographs

  • Universal Sacrament of Salvation Church. Karl Rahner's contribution to the ecclesiology of Vatican II (= Innsbruck Theological Studies. 59). Innsbruck 2001.
  • The Conclave Reform of Gregory XV. (1621/22). Conflicts of values, symbolic staging and procedural change in the post-Tridentine papacy (= popes and papacy. Volume 38). Stuttgart 2010.

Editorships

  • Second Vatican Council - forgotten impulses, current updates (= Quaestiones Disputatae. Volume 207). Freiburg 2004.
  • with Hubert Wolf : Values ​​and symbols in early modern Rome (= symbolic communication and social value systems. Series of publications of the Collaborative Research Center 496. Volume 11). Munster 2005.
  • with Giuseppe Alberigo : History of the Second Vatican Council (1959–1965). Volume IV: The Church as a Community. Third session and session (September 1964 - September 1965). Ostfildern, Leuven 2006.
  • with Giuseppe Alberigo: History of the Second Vatican Council (1959–1965). Volume V: Council of Transition. Fourth session and conclusion of the council (September - December 1965). Ostfildern, Leuven 2008.
  • with Hubert Wolf: Papal ceremony in the early modern period. The diary of the master of ceremonies Paolo Alaleone de Branca during the pontificate of Gregory XV. (1621–1623) (= symbolic communication and social value systems. Series of publications of the Collaborative Research Center 496, Volume 20). Munster 2007.
  • with Christoph Dartmann , Thomas Weller: Technology and symbolism of premodern voting procedures (= historical magazine. Supplements. Volume 52). Munich 2010.
  • Karl Rahner, The Second Vatican Council. Contributions to the council and its interpretation. Edited by Günther Wassilowsky (= Complete Works, Volumes 21/1 and 21/2). Freiburg 2013.
  • with Andreas Merkt / Gregor Wurst : Reforms in the Church. Historical perspectives (= Quaestiones Disputatae Volume 260). Freiburg 2014.
  • with Peter Walter : The Council of Trento and the Catholic confessional culture (1563–2013). Scientific symposium on the occasion of the 450th anniversary of the conclusion of the Council of Trento, Freiburg i. Br. 18. – 21. September 2013 (= Reformation History Studies and Texts Volume 163). Münster 2016.

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Christ in the Present. No. 41/2012, p. 456.
  2. ^ Goethe University - Church History. Retrieved February 12, 2020 .
  3. ↑ G. Wassilowsky: The Second Vatican Council - Continuity or Discontinuity? In: International Catholic Journal Communio . 2005 (34th volume) / issue 6, pp. 630–640 ( communio.de ).
  4. ↑ Christ in the Present. No. 41/2012, p. 456.
  5. ↑ http://www.uni-frankfurt.de/63080804/Fachprofil
  6. ^ Project at the Wissenschaftskolleg. Retrieved March 16, 2019 .
  7. ↑ www.corpus-catholicorum.de (viewed January 29, 2017)
  8. ↑ https://web.archive.org/web/20130209030517/http://www.karl-rahner-archiv.de/index.php?id=81&rubrik=17
personal data
SURNAME Wassilowsky, Günther
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German Roman Catholic theologian
DATE OF BIRTH March 29, 1968
PLACE OF BIRTH Hechingen