Woodstock Report | Father Rosato at Woodstock

Father Philip J. Rosato, S.J., who taught for over 20 years as a professor of dogmatic theology at Pontifical Gregorian University in Rome, has been named a Senior Fellow of the Woodstock Theological Center.

Most recently, Father Rosato taught theology at St. Joseph's University in Philadelphia. He is the author of several books, among them The Spirit as Lord: The Pneumatology of Karl Barth (T. & T. Clark, Edinburgh, 1981), which examines the thinking of the Swiss-born Protestant neo-orthodox theologian and in particular his views on the relationship between the Holy Spirit and Christ.

He has written two books in Italian: Introduzione alla teologia dei sacramenti (Introduction to the Theology of the Sacraments, Edizioni Piemme, 1992), which has been translated into three languages, and Cena del Signore e amore sociale (The Lord's Supper and Social Love, Edizioni Centro Eucaristico, 1994). He has also authored many articles, both scholarly and popular, in Spanish as well as English and Italian.

Father Rosato entered the Society of Jesus at age eighteen in 1959, and was ordained a priest in 1971, having witnessed the transition of Woodstock College from Maryland to New York. He then earned a doctorate in systematic theology in 1975 at the University of Tübingen, by having defended his dissertation, under the direction of now-cardinal Walter Kasper, on Barth's pneumatology, an ancient field of study that deals especially with the relationship between the divine and human worlds. In Christian theology, it refers to studies of the Holy Spirit.

In 1989, Father Rosato became a full professor of systematic theology at the Gregorian. He left Rome in 2004 and returned for two years to the Department of Theology at St. Joseph's, where he had taught between 1975 and 1979.

At Woodstock, Father Rosato is working with Father John Haughey, S.J., on a project that explores the nature of "catholicity" in an academic setting. He is also working on an article about collaboration between Jesuits and lay people, as well as one that looks at the sacraments "as rooted in the specific symbolic and prophetic gestures of Jesus of Nazareth," Father Rosato said.