Sebastian Merkle
Sebastian Merkle (28 August 1862 – 24 April 1945) was a Roman Catholic theologian and church historian.
Biography
Sebastian Merkle, the youngest of nine children in a family of farmers, studied at the Wilhelmsstift in Tübingen after graduating from high school in Ellwangen in 1882 and entered the seminary of the Rottenburg diocese in 1886. On July 19, 1887, he was ordained to the priesthood by the Bishop of Rottenburg, Karl Josef von Hefele. Afterwards he was active in pastoral care in Schwäbisch Gmünd and Schramberg. In 1888, he became a lecturer in philosophy at the Wilhelmsstift in Tübingen, the episcopal theological seminary of the Rottenburg diocese, where he also received his doctorate in 1892 with a thesis on Giovanni Dominici.
He was a member of the theologian society Guelfia, Tübingen. Merkle was away from 1894 to 1897 on research visits as a fellow of the Görres Society, especially on the history of the Council of Trent, to the Vatican Archives in Rome, to the National Library in Naples, and to Spain, Budapest, Vienna, and Munich. In 1898, he received his doctorate in theology from the Catholic Theological Faculty of Tübingen with a thesis on the history of the Council of Trent.
In 1898, he received an appointment to the chair of church history, Christian dogma history and Christian archaeology at the University of Würzburg. In 1904, he was elected rector of the University of Würzburg. In 1933, he became emeritus professor.
Merkle contributed significantly to the objectification of the then extremely conflictual relationship between Catholics and Protestants, for example as an expert witness in the so-called Beyhl-Berlichingen trial, where he rejected the anti-teacher clichés of the former Jesuit Gustav Adolf Freiherr von Berlichingen as superficial and false. In addition, he criticized the polemical outbursts of the Catholic church historian Heinrich Denifle in his works on Martin Luther, although he pointed out that these were also echoes of Protestant defamations against Catholic scholarship.
Merkle published numerous important works. His 1913 essay Vergangenheit und Gegenwart der katholisch-theologischen Fakultäten ("Past and Present of Catholic Theological Faculties") was placed on the index of forbidden books. One of his students in Würzburg was Julius Döpfner.
He lost his library of 25,000 volumes during the bombing of Würzburg on March 16, 1945. Merkle took shelter with a former student who was chaplain in Wargolshausen, and died shortly afterwards due to his weakened body. He was buried in the village cemetery.
External links
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