Gertraud “Traudl” Wallbrecher (née Weiß; 18 May 1923 in Munich - 29 July 2016 in Munich), a representative of the Catholic avant-garde of the 20th century, was the initiator of the Catholic Integrated Community, which she established with her husband Herbert Wallbrecher (1922-1997) after the

Second World War World War II or the Second World War, often abbreviated as WWII or WW2, was a world war that lasted from 1939 to 1945. It involved the vast majority of the world's countries—including all of the great powers—forming two opposi ...

Work and Life

Gertraud Weiß grew up in

Munich Munich ( ; german: München ; bar, Minga ) is the capital and most populous city of the German state of Bavaria. With a population of 1,558,395 inhabitants as of 31 July 2020, it is the third-largest city in Germany, after Berlin and Ha ...

-Schwabing. From age 13, she belonged to the Catholic

Heliand The ''Heliand'' () is an epic poem in Old Saxon, written in the first half of the 9th century. The title means ''saviour'' in Old Saxon (cf. German and Dutch ''Heiland'' meaning "saviour"), and the poem is a Biblical paraphrase that recounts the ...

League. After auxiliary service in the war, she began studying psychology at the University of Munich, and from 1943 onwards she attended the Social Women's School. As a nurse, she was obligated to work in the service in 1945 and experienced the dissolution of the Dachau concentration camp first hand. From 1945, she was the leader of Heliand. At the nationwide meeting in Telgte near Münster in 1947, she unsettled the assembled people with the question of what the

Shoah The Holocaust, also known as the Shoah, was the genocide of European Jews during World War II. Between 1941 and 1945, Nazi Germany and its collaborators systematically murdered some six million Jews across German-occupied Europe; ar ...

catastrophe meant for the church and its mission. As a consequence, she left the Heliand in 1948 and started the group "Junger Bund". Among others, she was encouraged to do so by theologian professor Michael Schmaus. The priest Dr. Aloys Goergen supported the group until 1968. In 1949, Traudl Weiß married the lawyer Herbert Wallbrecher from Hagen in Westphalia, who belonged to the Catholic " Bund Neudeutschland". They had four children. With him and his friend Johannes Joachim Degenhardt, the later Cardinal and archbishop of

Paderborn Paderborn (; Westphalian: ''Patterbuorn'', also ''Paterboärn'') is a city in eastern North Rhine-Westphalia, Germany, capital of the Paderborn district. The name of the city derives from the river Pader and ''Born'', an old German term for t ...

, she found two allies. The Integrated Community was formed by the people who gathered around Traudl Wallbrecher, her husband and Aloys Goergen. As editor of the magazine "Die Integrierte Gemeinde", Wallbrecher aroused the interest of agnostics like Gerhard Szczesny and theologians like

Joseph Ratzinger Pope Benedict XVI ( la, Benedictus XVI; it, Benedetto XVI; german: link=no, Benedikt XVI.; born Joseph Aloisius Ratzinger, , on 16 April 1927) is a retired prelate of the Catholic church who served as the head of the Church and the soverei ...

, who supported the path of the KIG within the Catholic Church since then. She gained ideas for the "community" experiment in 1965 on a trip to kibbutzim in Israel. Through the friendship with Chaim Seeligmann, this resulted in an intensive exchange, which eventually led to the founding of the "Urfelder Kreis" in 1995. American Hutterites and German Bruderhofers were also drawn to attention. In the US, Wallbrecher won religious Jews as friends, such as the writer

Zvi Kolitz Zvi Kolitz ( he, צבי קוליץ; December 14, 1912 – September 29, 2002) was a Lithuanian-born Jewish film and theatrical producer and a writer whose short story '' Yosl Rakover Talks to God'' became a classic of Holocaust literature. Life Z ...

and the director of the New York

Yeshiva A yeshiva (; he, ישיבה, , sitting; pl. , or ) is a traditional Jewish educational institution focused on the study of Rabbinic literature, primarily the Talmud and halacha (Jewish law), while Torah and Jewish philosophy are st ...

University,

Norman Lamm Norman Lamm (December 19, 1927 – May 31, 2020) was an American Modern Orthodox rabbi, scholar, academic administrator, author, and Jewish community leader. He was the Chancellor of Yeshiva University until he announced his retirement on July ...

. Together with her husband, she founded the private Günter-Stöhr-Gymnasium in 1977, now one of the schools of the St. Anna school network. Since 1978, an Integrated Community in Africa has developed from her encounter with Bishop Christopher Mwoleka, Tanzania. One of her greatest concerns was the theology, which had grown from the new experience of the Church. In order to work on this, two exegetes of the New Testament, Rudolf Pesch and Gerhard Lohfink gave up their professorships in the 1980s and joined the Integrated Community. A chair called "Cattedra per la Teologia del Popolo di Dio", was set up at the

Lateran University The Pontifical Lateran University ( it, Pontificia Università Lateranense; la, Pontificia Universitas Lateranensis), also known as Lateranum, is a pontifical university based in Rome. The university also hosts the central session of the Ponti ...

in Rome in 2008 after Wallbrecher's initiative of the "Academy for the Theology of the People of God" in the Villa Cavalletti near

Frascati Frascati () is a city and ''comune'' in the Metropolitan City of Rome Capital in the Lazio region of central Italy. It is located south-east of Rome, on the Alban Hills close to the ancient city of Tusculum. Frascati is closely associated wit ...

; since September 2016 the chair offers the post-graduate distance learning module "The Profile of the Jewish Christian", from September 2017 on also in English. On July 29, 2016, Gertraud Wallbrecher died in Munich at the age of 93 after a long illness. The Italian newspaper "Avennire" (August 9, 2016) captioned its obituary "Addio a Gertrude Wallbrecher, 'teologa' del popolo di Dio".

Writings

*Traudl Wallbrecher (Hrsg.): Monatszeitschrift HEUTE in Kirche und Welt. (2000–2008) ISSN 1616-2293. *Traudl Wallbrecher (Ed.), TODAY pro ecclesia viva, (English edition of HEUTE pro ecclesia viva ISSN 0946-6401),Bad Tölz 1996 *Traudl Wallbrecher, Ludwig Weimer, Arnold Stötzel (Hrsg.): 30 Jahre Wegbegleitung – Joseph Ratzinger/Papst Benedikt XVI. und die Katholische Integrierte Gemeinde. Verlag Urfeld, Bad Tölz 2006, . *Traudl Wallbrecher, Ludwig Weimer (Hrsg.): Katholische Integrierte Gemeinde. Eine Kurzdarstellung. Verlag Urfeld, Bad Tölz 2005, . *Traudl Wallbrecher (Hrsg.): Die Integrierte Gemeinde. Beiträge zur Reform der Kirche. 18 Bände, Verlag Urfeld, München (1969–1976). *Joseph Kardinal Ratzinger: Skandalöser Realismus? – Gott handelt in der Geschichte. Verlag Urfeld 2005, Preface from Traudl Wallbrecher, . *Traudl Wallbrecher (Hrsg.): Ecclesiae Solamen – Gedanken zur Theologie Johann Adam Möhlers. Verlag Urfeld 1982. *Traudl Wallbrecher: Das Vaterunser und die Weitergabe des Glaubens. In: Heute in Kirche und Welt Heft 5/2008, ISSN 1616-2293, S. 13. *Catholic Integrated Community (Hrsg.) Theologica No. 3 – Englisch Edition: 'Teologa' del popolo di Dio. Gertraud Wallbrecher (1923–2016), Baierbrunn 2016,

References

External links

Pontifical Council for the laity, International Associations of the faithful, Directory

{{DEFAULTSORT:Wallbrecher, Traudl 20th-century German Catholic theologians Women Christian theologians 1923 births 2016 deaths