The Joseph Ratzinger Foundation, also known as the Pope Benedict XVI Foundation in the Vatican, has announced that in addition to outstanding theologians the winners of this year’s Ratzinger Prize also include the composer Arvo Pärt.
The Ratzinger Prize is designed to honour outstanding individuals for their research in theology and adjacent sciences, or for their religious artwork.
Besides Arvo Pärt the respectable prize was awarded to professor Theodor Dieter, Lutheran theologian and the Director of the Strasbourg Institute of Ecumenical Research, and Karl-Heinz Menke, Catholic theologian and German Catholic priest.
The Foundation instigated by Pope Benedict XVI, born Joseph Ratzinger, has been awarding the Ratzinger Prize since 2011, and its laureates have included outstanding theologians from all over the world.
The Prize has previously been awarded to professor Richard A. Burridge, the Dean of King’s College London and Anglican Biblicist; Ioannis Kourempeles, Professor of History of Dogmas and Dogmatic and Symbolic Theology at the Faculty of Theology of the “Aristotle” University of Thessaloniki; Nabil el-Khoury, Professor of Philosophy and Comparative Literature at the Lebanese University of Beirut and the University of Tübingen and Mario de França Miranda, Brazilian Jesuit priest, full professor of Theology at the Pontifical University of Rio de Janeiro, among several others.
The Ratzinger Prize award ceremony will take place on 18 November at the Vatican.
Further information about the Joseph Ratzinger Foundation and the Ratzinger Prize.
Arvo Pärt’s awards and merits.