KAAD mourns the death of its President Eberhard Schockenhoff

07/20/2020 | Aktuelles

Last Saturday, Professor Dr Eberhard Schockenhoff died after suffering a serious accident. Together with the worldwide KAAD community, we mourn the death of our President. Since October 2016, from the top of our organisation he actively supported our work enriching it with his ideas. He looked forward to joining us for a second term starting next year. Together with the German Catholic Church and the community of theologians, KAAD loses an outstanding intellectual who approached our scholarship holders open-heartedly, as their messages of condolences testify. As late as in March 2020, only days before the lockdown, his sharp contributions enriched the international KAAD convention in Lima, Peru. The highlight of his time in office was the 60th anniversary of KAAD in 2018 which he shaped at the central events in Bonn, Berlin and Manila.

Schockenhoff was an enthusiastic and inspiring academic lecturer and his work covers the entire range of Catholic moral theology, most recently his comprehensive essay on peace ethics (“No end to violence?”). Born in Stuttgart in 1953, he studied theology in Tübingen and Rome where he was ordained a priest in 1978. He worked together with Alfons Auer and Walter Kasper and after holding a professorship in Regensburg, he accepted the chair of Moral Theology at the University of Freiburg in 1994. From 2001 to 2006, he was a member and since 2008 also Deputy Chairman of the German Ethics Council. In his letter of appointment as President of KAAD, Cardinal Marx stressed in the name of the German Bishops’ Conference that “we consider KAAD to be of great importance for its successful support of young researchers and academics from many different churches worldwide.”

The statutes of KAAD provide that General Secretary Dr Hermann Weber temporarily represents the deceased president. The board of directors, of which Eberhard Schockenhoff was a member, is headed by Canon Dr Heinz Detlef Stäps (Rottenburg) and his deputy Burkhard Haneke (Renovabis).

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