Ludwig Ott (24 October 1906 – 25 October 1985) was a
Roman Catholic
The Catholic Church (), also known as the Roman Catholic Church, is the largest Christian church, with 1.27 to 1.41 billion baptized Catholics worldwide as of 2025. It is among the world's oldest and largest international institut ...
theologian and
medievalist
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from
Bavaria
Bavaria, officially the Free State of Bavaria, is a States of Germany, state in the southeast of Germany. With an area of , it is the list of German states by area, largest German state by land area, comprising approximately 1/5 of the total l ...
, Germany.
Biography
After training at the
Catholic University of Eichstätt-Ingolstadt, Ott was ordained a
Catholic priest
The priesthood is the office of the ministers of religion, who have been commissioned ("ordained") with the holy orders of the Catholic Church. Technically, bishops are a priestly order as well; however, in common English usage ''priest'' refe ...
in 1930. He received his doctorate in Munich (1931-1936) under
Martin Grabmann and was mentored by him in studying the development of medieval theology. In 1936 he was , and in 1941 an of dogmatics at the episcopal philosophical and theological college in Eichstätt. From 1960 to 1962 he was the rector of this Catholic university.
His research centered mostly in the area of
dogmatics. With his ''Fundamentals of Catholic Dogma'' he produced a standard reference work on dogmatics. The work, popular with both clergy and laity, has been translated into more than ten languages. The "Foreword to the Second English Edition" (p. vii) says, "This second English edition embodies the many changes made in the second and third German editions."
Works
* Ott, Ludwig. ''Fundamentals of Catholic Dogma''. 1955. Ed. James Bastible. Trans. Patrick Lynch. 2nd ed. St. Louis: B. Herder, 1957. Rpt. Rockford, IL: TAN Books, 1974 (most recently, 2009). Rpt. Fort Collins, CO: Roman Catholic Books, 2012 (hardback). (German: ''Grundriß der Katholischen Dogmatik''. Freiburg: Herder, 1952.) (1952 original: .)
References
External links
Biography of Ludwig Ott(German; archived)
1906 births
1985 deaths
20th-century German Catholic theologians
20th-century German historians
German male non-fiction writers
German medievalists
20th-century Roman Catholic theologians
German Roman Catholic writers
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