Vatican City, 02 October, 2020 / 10:00 am (ACI Africa).
An Australian professor and a French philosopher were named the winners of this year’s Ratzinger Prize Oct. 1.
Former Vatican spokesman Fr. Federico Lombardi, president of the Joseph Ratzinger-Benedict XVI Foundation, announced Thursday that the 2020 award would be shared by Tracey Rowland and Jean-Luc Marion.
Rowland holds the St. John Paul II Chair of Theology at the University of Notre Dame Australia. A member of the International Theological Commission, her books include “Ratzinger’s Faith: The Theology of Pope Benedict XVI” and “Benedict XVI: A Guide for the Perplexed.”
Rowland told Australia’s Catholic Weekly that she was “surprised but not totally shocked” to receive the award “because I have published quite a lot about the theology of Joseph Ratzinger, including two books that have been translated into other languages.”
Marion, a former student of the major 20th-century philosopher Jacques Derrida, is a member of the Académie française, the exclusive group of 40 French intellectuals known as “immortals.” He is a professor at the University of Chicago Divinity School and a member of the Pontifical Council for Culture. He is associated with the idea of “saturated phenomena,” and is regarded as one of the world’s leading Catholic thinkers.
