Gregory Baum was a legendary and iconoclastic figure in Catholic circles in Canada and internationally. A former priest, he was open to the ordination of women and gay marriage, and continued to develop his work on the intersection of society and theology until the very end of his life.

Born in 1923, in Berlin to a Jewish mother and a Protestant father, he came to Canada at the age of 17 as a refugee, and was interned as a possible enemy alien.

Baum entered into Catholic Church in the 1940s and became an Augustinian priest in 1954. He studied theology at the University of Fribourg in Switzerland and published That They May Be One, an influential book about Catholic ecumenism in 1958. Over the course of his career he published 20 books, including his most recent published in 2016, a memoir entitled The Oil Has Not Run Dry about his ground breaking work with Vatican II, the Second Vatican Council (1962-65).

Books by Gregory Baum

The Oil Has Not Run Dry

Amazing Church

Nationalism, Religion, and Ethics

Karl Polanyi on Ethics and Economics