Squidward Engert

Thaddäus Hyazinth Engert (born August 10, 1875 in Ochsenfurt , † January 26, 1945 in Graefenroda ) was a German theologian and publicist.

As the second son of the master rope maker and Ochsenfurt city treasurer Bartholomäus Engert (1839–1910) and his first wife Agnes Dorothea E., nee. Schenk (1838–1880), he studied Catholic theology at the University of Würzburg a . a. with Herman Schell and Albert Ehrhard and received his doctorate in 1900 . He was ordained a priest in 1899. In 1908 he was excommunicated by the Würzburg bishop Ferdinand von Schlör for having made heretical statements as a Catholic modernist . The main accusation related to his criticism of the Bible that the Old Testament was not a revelation from God. In the reform Catholic magazine Das Zwanzigst Jahrhundert he had attacked religious education as being too callous.

Engert was briefly editor of this magazine and moved to Weimar to work for Friedrich Naumann's National Social Association as the party's manager. In 1910 he converted to the Lutheran denomination and in 1913 was pastor for 30 years in Gräfenroda, Thuringia (where he did not work with the well-known anti-Semite Artur Dinter ). In the First World War he supported the patriotic "Burgfrieden", he blamed the defeat on Catholic circles (e.g. Matthias Erzberger ). He rejected the Weimar Republic and increasingly believed in a "native Christianity". Therefore, he joined the German Christians . While he was still positive about the rise of the National Socialists to power in 1933 , he mistrusted Adolf Hitler's conclusion of the Reich Concordat with the Vatican and rejected the anti-Christian turn of the Nazi movement.

His half-brother was Josef Engert (1882–1964), priest of the diocese of Würzburg and philosopher at the Lyzeum Dillingen and at the Philosophical-Theological University of Regensburg .

Fonts (selection)

• German modernism , Würzburg 1910
• Jesus under the spell of the modernist oath , Berlin 1912
• Paths to the German Church: Simple Thoughts on Catholicism and Protestantism . Tubingen 1919

literature

• Karl Hausberger : Thaddäus Engert. 1875-1945. Life and striving of a German “modernist” (= sources and studies on the recent history of theology, edited by Karl Hausberger, Volume 1). Verlag Friedrich Pustet, Regensburg 1996.

Web links

• Literature by and about Thaddäus Engert in the catalog of the German National Library