The first three winners of the inaugural Ratzinger Prize for Theology were announced June 14.
The prize was established last year to promote theological study on
the writings of Pope Benedict XVI and has been referred to as “the Nobel
Prize for Theology.”
“We chose to reward two scholars already well established, and one
who is relatively young but very promising,” Cardinal Camillo Ruini
remarked at a Vatican press conference.
The two scholars chosen for the prize are Professor Manlio Simonetti,
an 85-year-old expert on the Church Fathers who used to teach at Rome’s
La Sapienza University, and Professor Olegario González de Cardedal, a
77-year-old specialist in dogmatic theology at the Pontifical University
of Salamanca, Spain.
The youngest of the three winners is Professor Maximilian Heim, a 50
year old Cistercian who teaches dogmatic and fundamental theology at the
University of Heiligenkreuz in Austria.
He has a particular focus on
the theology of Joseph Ratzinger, who is the current Pope.
The Ratzinger Prize is the initiative of the Joseph
Ratzinger-Benedict XVI Vatican Foundation. It’s funded by the royalties
accrued from Pope Benedict’s writings.
“Modernity has brought with it a dramatic divorce between secular
knowledge and religious knowledge,” explained the Italian academic
Professor Giuseppe Dalla Torre, who is also one of the prize judges.
“This division has gone through society from the top of the social
pyramid,” he said, pointing to universities as the starting point
because they are the place where “people, environments and ... cultural
paradigms and ways of life are forged.”
Dalla Torre said that since universities sit at the top of the social
pyramid, it’s necessary to respond by directly and seriously engaging
the intellectual elite.
The president of the foundation, Monsignor Giuseppe Scotti, said he
wanted to thank the Pope for having “risked an adventure of this kind”
in the hope it can “invest in the future of man.”
“A future where God is present and where the man can speak, even
shout, “I seek ... for you my soul is thirsting, my flesh pines for you
like dry, weary land without water.”
Cardinal Ruini noted that while this year’s awards covered the areas
of dogmatic and fundamental theology as well as patristics, he hoped
future awards would also recognize work in the study of Sacred
Scripture.
The prizes will be given to the winners by Pope Benedict XVI in Rome on June 30.