In putting together the most recent installment of The Wild Reed’s "In the Garden of Spirituality" series, I discovered that theologian Uta Ranke-Heinemann died earlier this year.
Years later I read her landmark book Eunuchs For the Kingdom of Heaven: Women, Sexuality, and the Catholic Church and its follow-up, Putting Away Childish Things: The Virgin Birth, the Empty Tomb, and Other Fairy Tales You Don’t Need to Believe to Have a Living Faith. About the latter, renowned historian of religion Karen Armstrong notes that it “skillfully disentangles the web of contradictions and improbabilities that surround the Christian story to reveal the essential underlying truth.” (For excerpts from Putting Away Childish Things, click here and here.)
Armstrong’s comment highlights the fact that Uta Ranke-Heinemann’s writings were radical in the truest sense of the word; they went to the heart or root of the Christian story, and thus of human religious experience. Her writings can rightly be described as trailblazing. Not surprisingly, they were (and remain) controversial for some. Yet for others, myself included, they were liberating. As such, they definitely influenced the expansion of my thinking on gender, sexuality, and church authority. And for that I’m grateful.
There’s not much online about Uta’s passing or the important theological contributions she made in her lifetime. Accordingly, I’ve put together the following which is drawn from Wikipedia and from this article published shortly after her death.
Rest in peace and power, Uta. And thank you for your prophetic witness through your liberating writings.
She was the world’s first female professor of Catholic theology and quickly became a vocal critic of the Roman Catholic hierachy: Uta Ranke-Heinemann, the eldest daughter of former Federal Republic of Germany President Gustav Heinemann, died at her home in Essen, Germany on Thursday, March 25, 2021. She was 93.
Her son Andreas Ranke announced her death to the German news agency Deutsche Presse-Agentur, saying his mother “fell asleep peacefully in front of relatives.”
Uta Heinemann was born on October 2, 1927 in Essen; her parents were Calvinist Protestants. Her father Gustav Heinemann was the third President of the Federal Republic of Germany from 1969 to 1974. He was the first member of the Social Democratic Party of Germany (SPD) to hold the presidency.
In 1945 Heinemann was the only female to attend the Burggymnasium in Essen, where she graduated from high school. She went on to study Protestant Theology. She converted to Roman Catholicism in 1953 when she married a Catholic religion teacher, Edmund Ranke. The couple had two sons. She was promoted to doctor in 1954 in Munich, making her the first woman to be so (together with Elisabeth Gössmann). One of her fellow students and a friend at that time was Joseph Ratzinger, later known as Pope Benedict XVI, about whom she later said, “[He] always had the aura of a cardinal, and the highest intelligence, with a total absence of the erotic.”
In 1969, Ranke-Heinemann became the first woman in the world to be habilitated in Catholic theology, at the University of Munich. She subsequently held the Essen University chair of ancient Church history and the New Testament from 1970.
About her relationship with the Catholic hierachy, Ranke-Heinemann would later remark: “But I went from bad to worse with the Catholics.” She was a vocal critic of the papal ban on contraception, describimg the fact that African women were threatened with hell for using a condom to have sex with their HIV-infected husbands as a “fatal deception on humanity.”
Ranke-Heinemann was a dedicated peace activist. During the Vietnam War she supported the ban on napalm bombs and visited Communist North Vietnam.
In 1979, she organized food for Cambodia which at the time was experiencing a famine.
She taught Catholic theology from 1980 in Duisburg, and from 1985 in Essen. In 1987 Ranke-Heinemann contradicted the church dogma of the Virgin Birth, saying that the stories of Mary’s virginity should not be taken literally but rather as “models of the imagination at the time.” The then Essen bishop, Franz Hengsbach, subsequently withdrew her education license. She lost her chair in Essen, but was given a church-independent chair for religious history. In 1988 she published her principal book dealing critically with sexuality in the Catholic Church, in English Eunuchs For the Kingdom of Heaven: Women, Sexuality, and the Catholic Church. Many editions followed, and it was translated into twelve languages.
In 1999, the renowned pacifist was a candidate for President of Germany, without party membership, but lost to Johannes Rau, the husband of her niece Christina.
Her book Nein und Amen (“No and Amen”), announcing her break with the church, was first published in 1992 and reprinted several times; the book was translated into English as Putting Away Childish Things: The Virgin Birth, the Empty Tomb, and Other Fairy Tales You Don’t Need to Believe to Have a Living Faith. Spanish and Polish translations followed. She revised it in 2002, after the death of her husband, with the new subtitle Mein Abschied vom traditionellen Christentum, "My farewell to traditional Christianity."
Ranke-Heinemann did not deviate from her criticism of the church in her later life. The election of her former fellow student Joseph Ratzinger as pope did not change this. “I am disappointed,” she said a year after Benedict XVI took office. “I was hoping he would finally get rid of celibacy.”
In another interview, she declared: “I don’t see any future for a church in which all shepherds are men, and all women are sheep. How could that be a universal church?”
In closing, here’s a TV news story about Uta Ranke-Heinemann’s passing. It’s from a German news show, and, as I don’t speak German, I just have to assume it does a good job of summarizing and honoring her life. If you’re reading this and know German, please feel free to translate the audio of this video and share it in the comments section of this post. Thanks!
See also the previous Wild Reed posts:
• In the Garden of Spirituality: Uta Ranke-Heinemann
• Uta Ranke-Heinemann on the Future of the Catholic Church
• Uta Ranke-Heinemann on the Burial of Jesus: “No Splendor and Glory”
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