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Uta Ranke-Heinemann (archive picture from 2007)
Photo: Horst Ossinger / dpa
The Catholic theologian Uta Ranke-Heinemann is dead. She fell asleep peacefully on Thursday morning in the presence of family members, her son Andreas Ranke told the dpa news agency.
The church-critical scientist from Essen and daughter of the former Federal President Gustav Heinemann was 93 years old.
In 1945 she was the only girl who attended the Burggymnasium in Essen, where she graduated from high school.
She studied Protestant theology.
In 1953, in search of more religious tolerance, she converted to Catholicism, received her doctorate and became the world's first female Catholic theology professor.
"But with the Catholics I went from bad to worse," she said later.
Break with the Church
The peace activist soon encountered conflicts with the official church in the dispute over the papal ban on contraception.
Ranke-Heinemann called the fact that women on the African continent were threatened with hell because they used a condom to have sex with their HIV-infected husband as a "fatal deception of mankind".
In 1999 the pacifist was persuaded by Gregor Gysi in the kitchen of her house to run for the left-wing predecessor party PDS in the federal presidential election, which was hopeless from the start.
Johannes Rau (SPD) won the election.
The break with the church came in 1987 after Ranke-Heinemann had contradicted the church dogma of the virgin birth.
She did not want the virginity of Mary to be understood literally, but rather as "models of thought at the time".
The then Essen Bishop Franz Hengsbach withdrew her teaching license.
She lost her chair in Essen, but got a church-independent chair for the history of religion.
"Disappointed" with Benedict XVI.
At the same time Ranke-Heinemann wrote about religion and the church.
Above all, "Eunuchs for the Kingdom of Heaven" on church sexual morality landed at the top of the bestseller lists in several countries.
Her main theological work is “No and Amen”, to which she later gave the subtitle “My farewell to traditional Christianity”.
The only positive thing about Christianity was the "hope of a reunion with the beloved dead," she wrote in it.
Ranke-Heinemann did not deviate from her positions critical of the church later either.
The election of her former student colleague Joseph Ratzinger as Pope did nothing to change this.
"I am disappointed," she said a good year after Benedict XVI took office.
"I was hoping he would finally get rid of celibacy."
bbr / dpa