Johann Sebastian von Drey (16 October 1777 – 19 February 1853) was a German Catholic professor of theology at the University of Tübingen. With Johann Adam Möhler, Drey was the founder of the so-called Catholic School of Tübingen. Life He was born in Killingen, in the parish of Röhlingen, in the then ecclesiastical principality of Ellwangen. The parish priest of Röhlingen, an ex-Jesuit, noting the boy's talents, instructed him in the elements of Latin, and persuaded his parents to send him, in 1787, in spite of their extreme poverty, to the gymnasium of Ellwangen. There he lived partly on the charity of the townspeople and partly by tutoring, especially in Latin, mathematics, and physics. He studied theology, 1797–1799, at Augsburg; after 1799 he lived in the diocesan seminary at Pfaffenhausen and was ordained in the summer of 1801. During his five years as assistant in his native place, Drey studied the then paramount philosophy of Kant, Fichte, and Schelling, as appears clearly in his works. His position, from 1806, as professor of philosophy of religion, mathematics, and physics in the Catholic academy of Rottweil, formed a good preparation for his subsequent academical career. When in 1812 King Frederick I of Württemberg founded the University of Ellwangen as a Catholic national university for his recently acquired Catholic territory, Drey was called to lecture there on dogmatics, history of dogma, apologetics, and introduction to theology. There he published two Latin dissertations: "Observata quædam ad illustrandam Justini M. de regno millenario sententiam" (1814), and "Dissertatio historico-theologica originem et vicissitudinem exomologeseos in ecclesiâ. catholicâ ex documentis ecclesiasticis illustrans" (1815), the latter of which was denounced to Rome, but without serious consequences for its author, at least for the time being. When King William I (1817) incorporated the University of Ellwangen with the old national University of Tübingen as its Catholic faculty of theology, Drey with his colleagues, Peter Aloys Gratz and Johann Georg Herbst, joined the staff of the new school and founded (1819), together with them and his new colleague, Johann Baptist von Hirscher, the "Theologische Quartalschrift" of Tübingen; he took a prominent part in its publication and wrote for it a number of essays and reviews. In the same year he published: "Kurze Einleitung in das Studium der Theologie mit Rücksicht auf den wissenschaftlichen Standpunkt und das katholische System". An effort to make Drey first bishop of the newly founded diocese of