Florian Herrmann, Head of the State Chancellery, will present the award on Tuesday afternoon in the Fürstengang on the Domberg in Freising.
The Freising Cathedral Rector Marc-Aeilko Aris is awarded the Federal Cross of Merit with Ribbon. Florian Herrmann, Head of the State Chancellery, will present Aris with the award on Tuesday afternoon in the Fürstengang on the Domberg in Freising. Marc-Aeilko Aris was baptized as a child and converted to the Catholic faith at the age of 18 after visiting a monastery. He has been cathedral rector in Freising since 2016. At that time he took over the office of Monsignor Reinhard Boeck.
Aris, a German-born Dutchman, grew up in Wiesbaden in a blended family, as he revealed in an earlier conversation with the SZ told. He only found faith later, at the age of 18, in the library of the Benedictine monastery in Engelberg in Switzerland. There he discovered old manuscripts, including letters from Cicero. A monk had copied the Latin texts for months in the 9th century. A monk who had dedicated his life to religion copied texts without any reference to God. This experience made a lasting impression on Aris: he converted to Catholicism and studied Catholic theology. In 1985 he was ordained a priest in Fulda.
Aris is a literary scholar. Since 2005 he has been teaching Latin philology of the Middle Ages at Munich’s Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität, since 2013 he has been a university preacher there. Aris lives in a house on the Domberg in Freising, surrounded by wall-to-ceiling bookshelves containing a good 40,000 volumes.