The academic work at the Chair of Pastoral Theology and Homiletics at the University of Regensburg is committed to the pastoral concept of the Second Vatican Council.
The Council understands pastoral care as the practice by which the Church, on the basis of the Gospel, allows itself to be involved in the relationship between God and his creation and between people in a life-affirming way and is particularly active in those places where this life, peace in human society and the integrity of the created world are endangered (LG 1 in conjunction with GS 1-4).
In other words, pastoral care is the entirety of the Church's actions, insofar as it contrasts the concrete reality of experience and action in the world today with the Gospel. The reality of our time and the people living in it is a constitutive element in the self-understanding of the Church. Pastoral theology is therefore responsible for two factors: people's lives with their ups and downs and everything in between, and the Gospel of Jesus Christ, the living tradition of the Church.
It is the task of pastoral theology and at the same time its potential to bring doctrine and life, the gospel and people's practice into resonance with each other in solidarity and to accompany church and society transformation processes in a critical and constructive way.
Requirements for this are that it enrolls its theological constitutional characteristics as well as societal realities in its academic reflection, i.e. that it determines and communicates both the pastorality according to the Gospel (diaconal, political, healing...) as well as the plural realities of life as the basis of its work. What the Gospel means for the humane shaping of life or how the Church can act in a way that is in line with the Gospel and promotes life in a fragile, hyper-complex and increasingly overburdening time are central questions of pastoral theological science.