on July 3.
Walter was born in Wiesbaden in 1948. After his Abitur at the Oraniengymnasium in 1968 he joined the Dominican Order in Warburg, where he spent his noviciate year. The following year he moved to Walberberg on the Rhine where he studied philosophy and theology. Walter was ordained a priest in 1974.
In 2006 he was appointed professor of philosophy at the University of St Tomas in Rome, where he taught until last year.
Walter in his life received many academic awards, including that of Master of Sacred Theology, which is the highest academic honour of the Dominican Order. The Master of the Order at the time, Bruno Cadorè conferred Walter with the degree in 2014.
In 1989 he received a doctorate of philosophy from the University of Louvain.
Between 1982 and 1989 Walter was chaplain to the student community at the universities in West Berlin.
I worked with Walter during some of that time in Berlin. We both lived at the Dominican Priory in Oldenburger Straße in Moabit.
Walter gave of himself totally to the job as chaplain, while at the same time he was preparing for his doctorate in philosophy.
He was a kind man, who would always go out of his way to listen to the students and help them in whatever way he could.
He was renowned for holding long meetings, well into the night. He wanted to make sure that everything within the student community was done democratically. But the meetings went on so late into the night that most of the students would have left before a vote was taken. And regularly the vote would go in Walter's favour.
He was a learned man with a wide interest in contemporary world events. But philosophy and history were his great loves.
As university chaplain in West Berlin he was in close contact with his counterpart in East Berlin's Humboldt University. On one occasion he asked me to take a number of Bibles across to the chaplain in East Berlin.
At the then border crossing at Friedrichstraße I was asked to open my bag. When the Bibles were discovered I was brought to a cabin where I was strip-searched and the Bibles were taken from me. They were sealed with official stamps and I was told I could collect them on my departure from the GDR later that day.
Walter had a great interest in German railways and knew off-by-heart the timetable of the German Railway network. The 1988/89 DB Kursbuch (German Railway Timetable) consisted of approximately 1,732 pages. And Walter knew what was on every one of those pages.
Students were forever asking Walter the times of trains from Berlin to their home destinations. Walter would immediately supply them with the times and the stations where they would have to change. And he would also know from what platform the train was departing at Berlin Zoologischer Garten.
I'm wondering what he must have thought of Berlin's new main station built on the site of the former Lehrter Bahnhof.
Walter Senner was a noble person, a man of great Christian faith. He was man of integrity and honesty.
May he rest in peace.
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