Monika Hellwig in an undated photo. Credit: Wikimedia Commons

Among the saints and holy people whom Robert Ellsberg covers in his “Blessed Among Us” reflections in Liturgical Press’s Give Us This Day publication is Monika Hellwig, the noted theologian and the second woman to be elected president of the Catholic Theological Society of America. Her recent appearance in Give Us This Day was a reminder that Sept. 30 marked the 20th anniversary of her death in 2005. 

In a long and distinguished career as a theologian, Monika Hellwig made significant contributions in sacramental theology, the history of Christianity, Eucharistic theology, eschatology, ecumenism, Scripture studies, environmental theology and more. Her life story was not the typical one of an academic, but one with many twists and turns.

Hellwig was born in 1929 in Silesia, then a part of Germany. Her parents, a German Catholic father and Dutch Jewish mother who was an adult convert to Catholicism, moved the family to Berlin when she was 6. After the Nazis rose to power and her father was killed in an automobile accident, Hellwig and her family moved again, to the Netherlands to avoid Nazi persecution. Monika’s mother later sent her and her two sisters to Scotland just before the German army overran the Low Countries in World War II. 

Hellwig graduated from the University of Liverpool with a degree in law in 1949 (you finish college early when you start at 16), then earned another degree in social science two years later. After moving to the United States, she joined the Medical Mission Sisters, a fairly new congregation of women religious based in Philadelphia. She earned a master’s degree in theology from the Catholic University of America in 1956. From 1956 to 1962, she taught theology at St. Therese Junior College in Philadelphia.

Hellwig was sent to Rome in 1963 to serve as an assistant and ghostwriter for a Vatican official, and so was present in the city for almost all of the Second Vatican Council, an experience she later called “intellectually and spiritually intoxicating.” After being dispensed from her vows in the Medical Mission Sisters, she returned to Catholic U. and earned her doctorate in theology in 1968. 

The year before, she had begun teaching at Georgetown University, where she would stay for 28 years; in 1990, Georgetown named her its Landegger Distinguished Professor of Theology. In 1984, the Catholic Theological Society of America recognized Dr. Hellwig with its highest honor, the John Courtney Murray Award. Two years later, she served as president of the C.T.S.A. Among the many other honors (including 32 honorary degrees) she received over the course of her career was the Theodore M. Hesburgh, C.S.C., Award from the Association of Catholic Colleges and Universities in 1994. The College Theology Society also offers an annual award for teaching excellence in her honor. 

In a reflection for America after Hellwig’s death in 2005, Leo O’Donovan, S.J., remembered her remarkable C.T.S.A. presidential address, “The Role of the Theologian in Today’s Church”: 

Reprising an earlier theme, which she had taken up from Bernard Lonergan, S.J., she spoke of the “spiraling sequence” of doctrinal development, which moves from the experience of the Christian people and their first-order reflection, through the specialized work of theological discussion, toward the formulations of the church’s official teaching—and then back again to fresh experience of Gospel liberation. With her accustomed deft touch she also sketched the theologian’s (and her own) many roles: myth-maker; fool or court jester challenging prejudices; comforter or reconciler; builder of constructive theology; archivist treasuring the cumulative wisdom of the past; critic evaluating how the wisdom of the past serves the needs of the present; archaeologist searching the sources for new insight; and ghost no longer visible because her ideas have been assimilated.

She retired from Georgetown in 1996, and then served for nine years as president and executive director of the Association of Catholic Colleges and Universities. As she had been in the classroom, she was an outspoken advocate for theologians and others who ran afoul of church authorities or were accused of dissent during her time at the helm of the A.C.C.U.—hence her famous remark: “You can’t throw truth at people so that all they can do is duck.”

Dr. Hellwig wrote or co-wrote more than 20 books, including What Are the Theologians Saying? (1970), Christian Creeds: A Faith to Live By (1973), The Eucharist and the Hunger of the World (1976), Understanding Catholicism (1981), The Role of the Theologian in Today’s Church (1987), Jesus, the Compassion of God (1992), the Modern Catholic Encyclopedia (1994), Guests of God: Stewards of Divine Creation (1999) and Public Dimensions of a Believer’s Life: Rediscovering the Cardinal Virtues (2005).

She also wrote a number of times for America, starting in 1968 with a long reflection on her visit to a troubled Chicago neighborhood. From 1984 to 1987, she wrote America’s weekly column of Scripture reflections, “The Word.” Her last article for the magazine, “The Survival of Catholic Higher Education,” was published in 2001. She expressed little nostalgia for the Catholic intellectual world of the 1950s, which she saw as focused on external realities:

Chapel, prayer before class, crucifixes on the walls, classes on Thomistic philosophy, religion lessons located somewhere between catechism and seminary, no meat on Friday and confessions heard on Saturday—the externals were all in place, so one did not need to question what constituted the inner reality.

Though many prognosticators foresaw trouble ahead for Catholic universities—particularly in a time when the schools themselves had undergone extensive processes of secularization but the Vatican seemed to be requiring a return to an earlier model for Catholic schools in 1990’s “Ex Corde Ecclesiae”—Hellwig did not share their pessimism. “Those of us who have lived through the history of the last half century,” she wrote, “have more reason to be grateful and optimistic concerning the project of Catholic higher education than we have reason to project gloom.”

Monika Hellwig died on Sept. 30, 2005, of a cerebral hemorrhage. She was survived by her three adopted children. In an obituary for The Washington Post, her fellow theologian Chester Gillis noted her crucial role in both academia and the church’s pastoral life:

She bridged the gap between the pastoral world and the theological world. She was a superb spokeswoman and defender of intellectual freedom in the academy, and the Vatican took her very seriously and respected her. Monika was not antithetical to their ambitions, and they knew that. They also knew she was not someone who was going to back down.

In an oft-cited 1991 essay in Sojourners, “Finding God in All Things: A Spirituality for Today,” Dr. Hellwig noted that hope, not pessimism or doom-and-gloom resignation, should be the primary orientation of the Christian—an ancient message she recognized could be found in Ignatian spirituality:

What is rediscovered in the Ignatian approach to spirituality is that the traditional Christian doctrine about the sin of Adam, also called original sin, is not a message of doom but one of hope. It declares that the world as we have it is not the best we can hope for, nor the world that God intends, but a badly broken and distorted one which can be restored and can be immeasurably better and happier than it now is.

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Our poetry selection for this week is “Question,” by Dierdre Lockwood. Readers can view all of America’s published poems here.

In other news, we are excited to announce a pilgrimage to Ireland in April 2026. Led by myself and America editor in chief Sam Sawyer, S.J., the trip, “The Land of Saints & Scholars: A Journey into the Heart & Soul of Ireland,” will be from April 19 to 28, 2026. Reserve your spot!

In this space every week, America features reviews of and literary commentary on one particular writer or group of writers (both new and old; our archives span more than a century), as well as poetry and other offerings from America Media. We hope this will give us a chance to provide you with more in-depth coverage of our literary offerings. It also allows us to alert digital subscribers to some of our online content that doesn’t make it into our newsletters.

Other recent Catholic Book Club columns:

Happy reading!

James T. Keane

James T. Keane is a Senior Editor at America.