Elisabeth Schüssler Fiorenza (born 17 April 1938, Cenad) is a Romanian-born German, Roman Catholicfeminist theologian, who is currently the Krister Stendahl Professor of Divinity at Harvard Divinity School.
She was born Elisabeth Schüssler in Cenad, in the Banat region of the Kingdom of Romania, where she belonged to the Banat Swabian German-speaking Catholic population of an ethnically mixed community. As the Russian army advanced through Romania in late 1944, her parents fled with her to southern Germany. They subsequently moved to Frankfurt. where she attended local schools. She then received her Theologicum (Licentiate of Theology) from the University of Würzburg in 1963, the thesis for which was published in German as Der vergessene Partner (The Forgotten Partner) in 1964. She subsequently earned the degree of Doctor of Theology from the University of Münster. In 1967 she married Francis Schüssler Fiorenza, an American theologian who was studying in Germany. In 1970, they both secured teaching appointments at the Catholic University of Notre Dame, where they had their daughter, Christina. She then taught at the Episcopal Divinity School in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
In 1984 Schüssler Fiorenza was one of 97 theologians and religious persons who signed A Catholic Statement on Pluralism and Abortion, calling for religious pluralism and discussion within the Catholic Church regarding the Church's position on abortion. In 1995 Schüssler Fiorenza received an honorary doctorate from the Faculty of Theology at Uppsala University.