Ignatius Eschmann

Ignatius Eschmann , born in Karl Theodor Eschmann (born November 13, 1898 in Düsseldorf , † April 11, 1968 in Toronto ) was a German-Canadian Dominican priest, philosopher and theologian.

Life

Eschmann was a son of the railway official Karl Eschmann († 1952) and his wife Anna, geb. Bushman († 1939). He had a brother, the musician Hans Eschmann.

After graduating from high school, which he passed in the summer of 1916 at the Royal Prussian Hohenzollern High School in Düsseldorf, Eschmann took part in the First World War, in which he was used as a machine gunner until the end. In the trenches he read the Confessions of St. Augustine .

After his discharge from the army, Eschmann entered the novitiate with the Dominicans . On May 19, 1920 he took the first name Ignatius as his religious name. At the end of the same year, Eschmann went to the papal University of St. Thomas Aquinas in Rome to take up his philosophical and theological studies. He completed this with the receipt of an ecclesiastical doctorate. He was ordained a priest on July 12, 1925. In 1928 Eschmann was granted the license to teach in the church and a little later began to teach moral philosophy at the University of St. Thomas Aquinas. He continued teaching until 1936.

In 1936 Eschmann returned to Germany, where he came into contact with resistance groups against the Nazi regime in the Rhineland: In March 1937, as a pulpit preacher in Cologne, he proclaimed the content of the papal encyclical Mit Brennender Sorge . When in 1937 a propaganda campaign by the NSDAP began against the Catholic clergy because of alleged moral offenses, which culminated in a speech by Joseph Goebbels in the Berlin Sports Palace on May 28, 1937, Eschmann consulted with his friend, a lawyer and former member of the Reichstag, Edmund Forschbach , on how one could counter this hustle and bustle. Forschbach, who was part of the secret resistance against the Nazi regime in the Rhineland, convinced Eschmann that the only way for him to effectively counteract this would be public sermons: Together with Forschbach, he then determined the content of sermons critical of the regime in which he accused the Wanted to counter Nazi propaganda. In addition, Forschbach Eschmann provided material for the legal lighting of the staged criminal proceedings against the clergy.

The sermons that Eschmann then gave in the Dominican Church in Cologne during the Sunday masses met with a strong response. Already at the second sermon it was noticed that it was being written down by a man. After the third sermon, Eschmann was arrested on July 2, 1937 in the Dominican monastery in Cologne. On the same day, Pastor Martin Niemöller was taken into custody in Berlin . Eschmann remained in custody in the Klingelpütz prison in Cologne until autumn 1938 . In his defense, Forschbach took over, in order to obtain Eschmann's release, among other things, in October 1937 he negotiated with Werner Best , the deputy head of the Secret State Police Office in Berlin, a conversation that their mutual friend Erich Müller had arranged for him.

In 1939 Eschmann emigrated to Canada. During the Second World War, while still a German citizen, he was there under constant surveillance by the Canadian police as an Enemy Alien . In 1939 he began teaching at Laval University in Quebec, which ended the following year as a result of a dispute with Cardinal Villeneuve and Charles de Koninck . He also worked in Ottawa with Canadian Dominicans on the critical new edition of the Editio Piana of the Summa theologica of Thomas Aquinas (1941).

In 1942 Eschmann became an employee of the philosophical faculty of the University of St. Michael's College and the ecclesiastical institute for medieval studies (Pontifical institute of Mediaeval Studies) in Toronto. Until the end of his life, he taught graduate students at the latter institution knowledge of the works and thoughts of Thomas Aquinas and the ability to study moral philosophy in a critical and historically conscious manner. In December 1945 he was naturalized in Canada .

After his death in Wellesley Hospital, Toronto , Eschmann was buried in the Holy Cross Cemetery in Toronto.

Fonts

• IT Eschmann: The Ethics of Saint Thomas Aquinas. Two Courses , edited by EA Synan, Toronto 1997.

literature

• LK Shook: Ignatius Eschmann, OP, 1898-1968 , in Mediaeval Studies 30 (1968, v-ix).
• JA Weisheipl: Eschmann, Ignatius , in: New Catholic Encyclopedia , Vol. Xy (Ead-Fre), Catholic University of America, 2003, p. 352.
• Who's Who in Germany , Part 1, 1990, p. 343.

Web links

• Entry on Eschmann in the New Catholic Encyclopedia