Traudl Wallbrecher

Gertraud “Traudl” Wallbrecher (née Weiß; 18 May 1923 in Munich - 29 July 2016 in Munich), a representative of the Catholic avant-garde of the 20th century, was the initiator of the Catholic Integrated Community, which she established with her husband Herbert Wallbrecher (1922-1997) after the Second World War.
Work and Life.
Gertraud Weiß grew up in Munich-Schwabing. From age 13, she belonged to the Catholic Heliand League. After auxiliary service in the war, she began studying psychology at the University of Munich, and from 1943 onwards she attended the Social Women's School. As a nurse, she was obligated to work in the service in 1945 and experienced the dissolution of the Dachau concentration camp first hand.
From 1945, she was the leader of Heliand.
At the nationwide meeting in Telgte near Münster in 1947, she unsettled the assembled people with the question of what the Shoah catastrophe meant for the church and its mission. As a consequence, she left the Heliand in 1948 and started the group "Junger Bund". Among others, she was encouraged to do so by theologian professor Michael Schmaus. The priest Dr. Aloys Goergen supported the group until 1968.
In 1949, Traudl Weiß married the lawyer Herbert Wallbrecher from Hagen in Westphalia, who belonged to the Catholic "Bund Neudeutschland". They had four children. With him and his friend Johannes Joachim Degenhardt, the later Cardinal and archbishop of Paderborn, she found two allies. The Integrated Community was formed by the people who gathered around Traudl Wallbrecher, her husband and Aloys Goergen.
As editor of the magazine "Die Integrierte Gemeinde", Wallbrecher aroused the interest of agnostics like Gerhard Szczesny and theologians like Joseph Ratzinger, who supported the path of the KIG within the Catholic Church since then. She gained ideas for the "community" experiment in 1965 on a trip to kibbutzim in Israel. Through the friendship with Chaim Seeligmann, this resulted in an intensive exchange, which eventually led to the founding of the "Urfelder Kreis" in 1995. American Hutterites and German Bruderhofers were also drawn to attention. In the USA, Wallbrecher won religious Jews as friends, such as the writer Zvi Kolitz and the director of the New York Yeshiva University, Norman Lamm.
Together with her husband, she founded the private Günter-Stöhr-Gymnasium in 1977, now one of the schools of the St. Anna school network. Since 1978, an Integrated Community in Africa has developed from her encounter with Bishop Christopher Mwoleka, Tanzania.
One of her greatest concerns was the theology, which had grown from the new experience of the Church. In order to work on this, two exegetes of the New Testament, Rudolf Pesch and Gerhard Lohfink gave up their professorships in the 1980s and joined the Integrated Community. A chair called "Cattedra per la Teologia del Popolo di Dio", was set up at the Lateran University in Rome in 2008 after Wallbrecher's initiative of the "Academy for the Theology of the People of God" in the Villa Cavalletti near Frascati; since September 2016 the chair offers the post-graduate distance learning module "The Profile of the Jewish Christian", from September 2017 on also in English.
On July 29, 2016, Gertraud Wallbrecher died in Munich at the age of 93 after a long illness. The Italian newspaper "Avennire" (August 9, 2016) captioned its obituary "Addio a Gertrude Wallbrecher, 'teologa' del popolo di Dio".