Michael Schmaus (17 July 1897 – 8 December 1993) was a German Roman Catholic theologian specializing in dogmatics.
Schmaus was born in Oberbaar, Bavaria.
He was ordained a priest in 1922 and got his doctorate in Catholic Dogmatic Theology under Martin Grabmann in 1924.
After teaching at the Philosophisch-Theologische Hochschule Freising, at the local seminary and at the University of Munich, he was a professor of dogmatic theology at the German-speaking part of the Charles University in Prague (1928–1933) and from 1933 on at the Westfälischen Wilhelms-Universität Münster.
German philosopher Kurt Flasch considers Schmaus and his fellow faculty members Josef Pieper and Joseph Lortz to be the three theologian "pro-Nazi authors" who felt called to make the Catholic population familiar with the compatibility of Catholicism and National Socialism, in an academic way.[1] In 1934, in his Encounters between Catholic Christianity and National Socialist Weltanschauung (Begegnungen zwischen katholischem Christentum und nationalsozialistischer Weltanschauung), Schmaus commented on the connection between Catholicism and National Socialist ideology as follows: "The tablets of National Socialist standards and those of Catholic imperatives point in the same direction." („Die Tafeln des nationalsozialistischen Sollens und die der katholischen Imperative weisen in dieselbe Wegrichtung.“) In his 1941 work Catholic Dogma (Katholische Dogmatik), he referred to "the Jews" as "servants of sin," for which they had "no feeling whatsoever," and as "children, servants of the devil."[2]
From 1946 until his retirement in 1965 he was professor of Catholic dogmatic theology at the Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich. Among his students were Joseph Ratzinger - the future Pope Benedict XVI - with whom he associated with his habilitation for Fundamental Theology, also Gerhard Boß, Josef Finkenzeller, Elisabeth Gössmann, Richard Heinzmann, Stephan Otto, Uta Ranke-Heinemann and Leo Scheffczyk.
In 1951 to 1952 Schmaus was rektor of the LMU München.
He was peritus (theological expert) for part of the Second Vatican Council.
In 1954 he founded the Martin-Grabmann-Institute for Rescue in Medieval Theology and Philosophy,[3] in 1955 the scientific journal Münchner Theologische Zeitschrift[4] [5]
His two works on Catholic dogma are still standard works.
He died in Gauting, Upper Bavaria in 1993 and buried in Munich Waldfriedhof.
All those cited here are in German.