This event has been canceled and will hopefully be rescheduled in an online format at a later date. Registered participants have been emailed. Thank you for your understanding!

For all great leaders and scholars there is usually a backstory, some cultural milieu in which they were nurtured that explains how they came to be such a significant figure on the stage of the world. This lecture takes us backstage to the Catholic scholars of inter-war Germany who were the mentors and intellectual heroes of Joseph Ratzinger/Benedict XVI’s youth.

Professor Tracey Rowland holds the St. John Paul II Chair of Theology at the University of Notre Dame (Australia). She has a civil doctorate in divinity from Cambridge University and a pontifical doctorate in sacred theology from the Lateran University. From 2014–2019 she was a member of the IXth International Theological Commission and she is currently a member of the Pontifical Academy of the Social Sciences. In 2020 she was awarded the Ratzinger Prize for Theology. She has published eight books, and edited another four, and has written over two hundred articles in journals. She is also the series editor of Joseph Ratzinger’s Collected Works in English to be published by Word on Fire Press and a member of the editorial board of the English-language edition of the Communio journal that was founded by Joseph Ratzinger, among others, in 1972. Her work intersects the fields of political philosophy, theories of culture, theological anthropology, and fundamental theology. Her most recent book is titled Unconformed to the World: Essays in Ecclesiology (Emmaus Academic, 2024).