José Morales Marín, priest and Professor Emeritus of the School of Theology and one of its pioneers, died today in Pamplona at the age of 88. A native of Madrid, he joined high school Theology in 1967. Two years later (1969) the center was established at School and he was part of the group of young professors who started it. He was also secretary of the first management team of the journal Scripta Theologica, which began to be published that same year, and director of the department of Fundamental and Dogmatic Theology.

Professor César Izquierdo recalls that he was a man of sharp and direct wit, which allowed him to get to the core of the issues early and to express synthetically both his judgments on the issues he addressed and his own thinking: "He was not a friend of prolonged and excessively analytical reasoning, but tried to arrive early at the synthesis with great openness to the thinking of others. He knew how to welcome the intuitions of others and complete them with his own".

graduate He graduated in Law at the Central University of Madrid (1956) and doctorate at the University of Barcelona (1960), and was ordained a priest on August 13, 1961, after having received his formation in Rome at the high school Romano de la Santa Cruz. He later received his doctorate in Theology from the Pontifical Lateran University (1962), where he spent the last year of his studies with a scholarship grant from the Fundación Juan March.

A man concerned with helping people in need who were close to him

Between 1964 and 1967 José Morales lived in the Philippines, where he had moved to work in the apostolic tasks of Opus Dei. There he became a consiliary. In 1967 he returned to Spain and began his dedication to theology at the University of Navarra. In 1972 he took a break from teaching and moved to Bilbao where he focused exclusively on his pastoral work for ten years.

"One facet of Jose Morales' priestly spirit was his concern for people in need, not in general, but in a concrete way with some people he came across. We still remember him accompanying a person with a mental illness, to whom he dedicated a lot of time and support, or when he invested extra hours in helping a priest with difficulties in learning Spanish, so that he could overcome the difficulties of the language", says Professor Izquierdo.

In 1982, Morales returned to Pamplona to work again at the School of Theology where he remained until his retirement in 2005. During these years he was director of the department of Fundamental and Dogmatic Theology, and carried out an intense activity professor and research in various fields. He directed 16 doctoral thesis , published about twenty books, as well as a great variety of scientific articles.

There are two areas in which the professor was deeply involved. Firstly, the figure and thought of John Henry Newman; and secondly, the theology of religions and everything related to interreligious dialogue, especially with Islam.