Jorge Cervós-Navarro

Jorge Cervós-Navarro

Jorge Cervós-Navarro (also Jordi Cervós i Navarro ; born January 9, 1930 in Barcelona ) is a Spanish neuropathologist . For many years he was director of the Institute for Neuropathology at the Free University of Berlin and from 1974 to 1977 Vice President of the Free University. He is one of the founders of the German section of Opus Dei .

Life

Career and academic career

Jordi Cervós spent the war with relatives of his mother in Pallars Sobirà in the Pyrenees and was separated from his parents, who had stayed in Barcelona. After the fall of the city in early 1939, he returned and from the spring of 1939 attended the Piarist School in Barcelona. In 1946 he began studying medicine at the University of Barcelona , where he joined Opus Dei and obtained his first doctor of medicine . 1950 to 1952 he spent in a study house of the organization in Aragon and studied at the University of Zaragoza . Then went to Innsbruck to the Psychiatric University Clinic. In 1953 he moved to the University of Bonn . From 1954 to 1961 he was an assistant doctor at the Bonn Institute for Neuropathology, and in 1956 he was awarded a doctorate under German law at the university there. med. did his doctorate and habilitation in 1961, also in Bonn. The then head of the Institute for Neuropathology at the University of Bonn, the brain researcher Günter Kersting, actively promoted him and helped him to find his way in the German scientific community. In 1964 he was appointed private lecturer and in 1965 associate professor. The students who were trained by Kersting and Cervós in Bonn also included other Opus Dei members sent from Spain such as Gonzalo Herranz , who later set up the medical faculty at the Opus Dei University of Navarra in Pamplona and a well-known Spanish pathologist and ecclesiastically and politically influential life rights activist .

As only 38-year-old cervos-Navarro 1968 was offered on the C4 - Department of Neuropathology at the University of Berlin . From 1974 to 1977 he was Vice President and from 1979 to 1982 Dean of the Medical Faculty of the Free University of Berlin. In 1976/77 and 1992/93 he was President of the German Society for Neuropathology and Neuroanatomy and a member of many other specialist societies. Cervós-Navarro hosted numerous scientific congresses in Berlin , including the European Congress for Neuropathology in 1992. In 1995, at the suggestion of the then university president Johann Wilhelm Gerlach, he was awarded the Federal Cross of Merit, which led to critical inquiries due to his already known Opus Dei connections led. In 1997 he was appointed founding rector of the Universitat Internacional de Catalunya (UIC) in Barcelona, ​​a university supervised by Opus Dei for around 6,000 students, which he headed until 2001.

Multiplier of Opus Dei

Together with the Catalan priest Alfons Par , first consiliarius (regional director) of Opus Dei in Germany, the philosopher Fernando Inciarte and the lawyer Fernando Echeverría (1924-2015), Cervós-Navarro was among the first sent to Germany by Josemaría Escrivá in the early 1950s Opus Dei members . He has been known as one of the founders of the organization in Germany since the 1960s. The Spaniards founded the sponsoring association Studentische Kulturgemeinschaft , which ran student residences in Bonn , Cologne and later Berlin, among others , and promoted the work to the first German-speaking members and sponsors such as Kurt Malangré and the brothers Rolf and Hans Thomas from Aachen , the Cologne doctor Peter Berglar and the newspaper scientist Otto B. Roegele . They established contacts with church and political influencers and decision-makers in Germany such as the CSU politician and former JU functionary Fritz Pirkl , who remained president of the Munich Rhine-Danube Foundation until his death in 1993 , which was responsible for financial transfers with Spain and Latin America . His Spanish nationality enabled Cervós-Navarro, during his time in West Berlin , to establish contacts across the inner-German border with East Berlin's Roman Catholic church districts, including the Berlin bishops Alfred Bengsch and Joachim Meisner , the administrative lawyer Hubert Bengsch , a younger brother of the cardinal, and the East Berlin lawyer Hans Rust . Cervós built the Berlin Opus Dei Center on Kurfürstendamm , which in 1992 moved to a villa on Möckernstrasse in the eastern part of the city. After the turnaround and reunification of Germany , Cervós-Navarro, who had good contacts to Russia , was responsible for the planned expansion of Opus Dei to the new federal states , Eastern Europe and the Baltic States and was in charge of the contact group set up in Dresden . In retrospect, however, Hans Thomas, the head of Opus Dei's own Lindenthal Institute , described the strategic concepts of Opus Dei for Eastern Europe presented in the press as unrealistic.

memoirs

In 2013, Jordi Cervós published his memoirs under the title Memòries. Berlín i Barcelona, ​​anada i retorn ("Memories. Berlin and Barcelona, ​​there and back"). The book was presented by Jordi Pujol , the former President of the Catalan state government ( Generalitat de Catalunya ), who had completed his doctorate in Barcelona together with Cervós-Navarro and who highlighted the strong-willed personality of his college friend during the book presentation. The book, which was also published in Spanish in 2016, describes, among other things, the beginnings of Opus Dei in Germany.

Honors and memberships

Jorge Cervós-Navarro is an honorary doctorate from the Universities of Madrid , Saragossa, Barcelona, Hanover , Tokushima (Japan), Saransk (Russia) and Thessaloniki (Greece) and an honorary member of seven professional societies in Europe and overseas. He is a member of the Moscow Academy of Sciences .

• Federal Cross of Merit 1st Class of the Federal Republic of Germany
• Creu de Sant Jordi Prize (2002)

Publications (selection)

The scientific work of Cervós-Navarros comprises over 500 publications, including internationally trend-setting textbooks.

• Pathology of Cerebral Microcirculation. De Gruyter, Berlin / New York 1974
• Estudio al microscopio electrónico del ganglio raquídeo normal y después de la ciaticotomía. CSIC, Madrid 1979
• Cerebral Microcirculation and Metabolism. Raven Press, New York 1981
• Metabolic and Degenerative Diseases of the Central Nervous System. Pathology, Biochemistry, and Genetics. Academic Press, San Diego 1995
• Edited by H. Berlet: Pathology of the Nervous System V. Degenerative and Metabolic Diseases. Springer Wissenschaftsverlag , Heidelberg 2013
• Memories. Berlín i Barcelona, ​​anada i retorn (memories). Pagès Editors, Barcelona 2013
• Cruzando el muro. Recuerdos sobre el inicio del Opus Dei en Alemania. Rialp, Madrid 2016

Individual evidence

1. ^ Pilar León Sanz: Semblanza. Gonzalo Herranz, un científico al servicio de la Etica Médica. In: Juan José Rodríguez Sendín u. a. (Ed.): Desde el corazón de la medicina. Homenaje a Gonzalo Herranz (Festschrift). University of Navarra, Pamplona 2013, pp. 28–45 (here: p. 29).
2. ↑ birthdays . In: Deutsches Ärzteblatt 2000, p. 97 (3) (“Personalalien”).
3. ^ Gesa Schulz: Cross of Merit for Opus Dei member . In: taz , June 21, 1995, accessed November 3, 2017.
4. ↑ Philosophy & values and Chaplaincy on the UIC homepage, accessed in November 2017.
5. ↑ ^{a b} Pujol ressalta la "voluntat" de l'exrector de la UIC Jordi Cervós a la presentació de les seves memòries. In: VilaWeb , June 3, 2013, accessed November 2017.
6. ↑ “How can we humans build a bridge to God?” Article on the 60th anniversary of Opus Dei in Germany on the organization's website, accessed in November 2017.
7. ↑ You are a sandbag. In: Der Spiegel 12/1965, p. 71 f. (72).
8. ↑ The Pope's Holy Mafia. In: Der Spiegel 2/1995, pp. 46–54 (47 f.).
9. ↑ Hans Thomas: What is Opus Dei? Article published in 2002 on the company's own platform josemariaescriva.info , accessed on November 6, 2017.
10. ↑ ^{a b} MHH awards an honorary doctorate to Professor Jorge Cervós-Navarro , in: idw , March 24, 1998, accessed on November 3, 2017.