 |
About Woodstock | Programs | Publications | Search |
By Patricia M. Markun
[Woodstock Report, May 1990, no. 22]
Copyright © 1990 Woodstock Theological Center
All rights reserved
See also The Woodstock Library: A Research Jewel, Woodstock Report, October 1994, no. 39.
Friends of the Woodstock Theological Center can rest easy knowing that the Woodstock Library, one of the leading Catholic theological libraries in the Western world, will wander no more.
Under an agreement signed on May 24, 1989, between the Maryland and New York Provinces of the Society of Jesus and Georgetown University, the Woodstock Theological Center Library is now permanently, yet independently, housed in its previously temporary place in Joseph Mark Lauinger Library. The University has agreed to assume full responsibility to fund library acquisitions, up to $100,000 annually by the academic year 1992-1993, with future annual increases for inflation. The University has, since the library's arrival here in 1974, contributed the space, equipment, supplies and staff for the library.
This new arrangement will benefit both the University and the Woodstock Theological Center, which is sponsored by the Jesuit provinces of Maryland and New York. Its advantage to the Woodstock Center is obvious, namely, guaranteed preservation, support and expansion of this invaluable resource for its academic research and publication. The University, for its part, has guaranteed the continuing presence of this highly specialized theological library and can plan academic developments accordingly. If, for instance, the University were to initiate a graduate program in theology, the wealth of Woodstock's resources would be immediately and conveniently available for the graduate students' scholarly research.
This new-found stability for the Woodstock Library is especially welcome for those aware of its pilgrim existence in recent years. Though it originated and remained for 100 years at Woodstock College outside Baltimore, it traveled with the College, 17 trailer truck-loads, with nary a book lost in transit!, to its second location in New York City in 1969. There it settled on Morningside Heights and entered into a collaborative relationship with the libraries of Union Theological Seminary and the Jewish Theological School. But within five years the College was closed because of the shrinking number of candidates for Jesuit priesthood. And so the library made another journey, again without losing a book, this time to Georgetown University which had generously agreed to support the library, all but acquisitions, for a ten year period. The two Jesuit provinces bore responsibility for acquisitions.
In the course of these moves and as different needs arose for scholarly resources, the acquisitions of the library reflected those changes. A research center devoted to theological reflection on current social issues has needs different from a seminary in the countryside. And a research library that also supports the needs of a full university community will be different again.
This story of growth and change is an interesting one, especially in the early years. The expert on the early years is Father Henry Bertels, S.J., now head librarian of the Jesuits' famous Biblical Institute in Rome, and head librarian at Woodstock during its two interstate moves, from 1967 to 1979. In a recent interview Father Bertels was asked, "How did the Woodstock Library, located in a Jesuit scholasticate in the Maryland countryside, ever acquire a treasure of theological works now appraised at a little over $9 million?"
"It is important to remember," Father Bertels began, "that when Woodstock College was founded in 1869, it was not long after the suppression of the Jesuits had ended. In the years of the suppression, from 1773 to 1815, more than 600 Jesuit libraries throughout the world were abolished. Who knows where all those books went?
"Some of Woodstock's books had belonged to the Jesuits before the suppression, such as those that came from the old Bohemia Manor School in Maryland that was founded by some of the first Jesuits in America. We also got boxes of books from the libraries of the scholasticates at Fordham University and Georgetown University which closed when Woodstock College opened.
"In the late nineteenth century, Father Charles Piccirillo, S.J., an amazing scholar from Italy, became the fifth Woodstock librarian. He added many valuable books, some of them works long out of print. Letters and bills in the archives show that he was in constant touch with collectors in Europe. He made rare and valuable additions, such as the complete set of Polyglot Bibles, the only one of its kind in the United States."
Legends still circulate about the enthusiastic Father Piccirillo. In an old photograph of the Woodstock Library in Maryland, we can make out a sign over the door. It reads, "Compelle intrare." The words are those of the man in the parable of Luke's Gospel who invites his friends to a great feast. When the invited guests refuse to come, he sends out his servants into the highways and byways with the order to "compel people to enter" and enjoy his feast (Luke 14:23). We can only wonder how well those early Jesuits enjoyed their forced feast in Father P's library!
Another tale of this brilliant librarian concerns a wealthy woman from Washington, D.C., named Anna Smith, whose substantial financial contributions made possible the acquisition of a number of important books. When Miss Smith wrote Father Piccirillo that she wanted to visit the Woodstock Library to see what her money had bought, she unwittingly provoked a very awkward situation. The library was within cloistered enclosure! The wily Father Piccirillo, the story goes, simply whisked the rest of the Jesuits out of sight and, undaunted, escorted Ms. Smith on a grand tour. She left, delighted to have seen her gift of books in the library and completely unaware that her visit deep inside Woodstock had been unique for a woman.
Modernization of the collection and good cataloging began much later with the arrival of Father Edmond Ivers, S.J., a trained librarian, in 1945. His long term continued until 1968 when Father Bertels took over. Father Ivers' chief cataloguer was a very talented layman, Mr. Fritz Samson. His knowledge of languages was of great help to visiting scholars. Like Father Piccirillo, he had a talent for selecting outstanding volumes for the library from all over the world.
Gifts continued to come from friends of Woodstock. One is the bronze bust of the Jesuit Teilhard de Chardin by the prominent sculptor, Malvina Hoffman. The library also has carbon copies of some of his correspondence, and an old motion picture film made of Teilhard during his time in China in the 1920s. These were the gift of George E. Barbour, a professor of anthropology in Cleveland, Ohio, who was a friend and great admirer of Teilhard.
The collection now stands at about 180,000 volumes in the field of theology and related disciplines. Some 650 periodicals are regularly received, with the current issues on the shelves and immediately available. A unique feature is a growing collection of old rare and valuable books which are kept in climate controlled spaces.
Father Bertels commented on the rare books. "One of our treasures is a first edition of the Spiritual Exercises of Saint Ignatius Loyola (1548). It was the only copy in the United States until the Library of Congress purchased a copy a few years ago.
"This is probably the only library in the United States that owns four Polyglot Bibles. They are very rare. We still use them at the Biblical Institute. The four Woodstock owns are the Complutensian (1514-1517), the Antwerp (1568), the Paris (1632) and the London or Waltonian (1657)," Father Bertels said.
A Polyglot Bible, true to its name, was printed in several languages in parallel columns so that the reader can compare a passage in one language with those in other tongues while reading down the page. The earliest of the set, the Complutensian, uses Hebrew, Latin, Greek and Aramaic. The Antwerp and Paris Bibles have all those and Arabic as well. The London Bible, the last published, has all those languages and adds columns in Ethiopic, Syriac and Persian.
Father Bertels continues, "We have the original edition of Dictionnaire, the dictionary by Diderot. This masterpiece of the Enlightenment is complete with all volumes of magnificent plates.
"There is an edition of a book by the Italian Jesuit Riccioli done in 1656, which contains the first printing of a map of the moon ever done. Many of the names of the craters and mountains are after Jesuits. There is a valuable edition of Isaac Newton in three volumes. Also, in a far different genre, there is a set of three elephant folio volumes of engravings of all the paintings of the Royal Dresden Collection published in about 1750, and purchased by that enterprising Father Piccirillo more than a hundred years later. This is invaluable."
Recent additions were made to the Rare Book Collection with the gift of more than 1,700 books from the Mary D. Reiss Library when Loyola Seminary in Shrub Oak, New York, closed.
Two of the rare books are from the days of the early Jesuits in China, so called "block books" because the printing was done from wooden blocks. The earlier book, Innocentia Victrix, was published in China in 1670. The other book, printed in 1700, is by Gaspar Castner, and is entitled The Burial of Francis Xavier, who died in 1552 on the island of Sancian off the coast of China near present day Hong Kong.
A number of first editions of famous writers are included. One is Pseudo-Martyr, the first book published by John Donne, printed in 1610. There are seven first editions by John Cardinal Newman.
Several Protestant writers are represented, with first editions by Martin Luther and John Wesley among them. The rarest first edition in the Shrub Oak collection must be the one that the insurance company appraised at the highest price, The Book of Mormon by Joseph Smith, printed by E. B. Grandin in Palmyra, New York, in 1830.
Because of its nature as a library of the Society of Jesus, Woodstock is strong in "Jesuitica," with some reference books that cannot be found elsewhere in the Washington area. Of particular interest to those seeking the history of the Jesuits are the catalogues of the provinces of the Society of Jesus. Woodstock Library has a complete collection of all the catalogues of all the provinces from the restoration of the Society in the early nineteenth century to the present.
There is even one printed in Russia during the suppression, when Russia under Catherine the Great still recognized the existence of the outlawed order. These are invaluable for finding out where individual Jesuits were in each year and what type of work they were doing.
In its fourteen years on the Georgetown University campus, the Woodstock Theological Center has been carrying out the mandate of the Jesuit provincials of Maryland and New York to study current social issues from the perspective of faith. Father Eugene Rooney, S.J., the present and thirtieth librarian, describes the emphasis of the library today.
"Presently the collection is being built around the needs of the Woodstock Theological Center and the projects of the members of the Center. These studies have required expanded holdings in the social sciences. However, the core collection of a scholarly research library must always be developed if the library is to have value, and so acquisitions also include many titles from Scripture, ecclesiastical history and spirituality, as well as areas of interdisciplinary topics that have more and more to do with the advances of theological reflection."
Woodstock Center staff members continue to write a variety of books, most of them researched with the resources of the library, and published by a variety of publishers. Illustrative examples would be: Human Rights and Basic Needs in the Americas; The Catholic Challenge to the American Economy: Reflections on the U.S. Bishops' Pastoral; Personal Values in Public Policy; and Episcopal Conferences: Historical Canonical and Theological Studies.
This is a far cry from the purposes outlined by the founders of Woodstock when it was a simple theological library serving Jesuit priests and scholastics during their period of formation. But this broadening of scope has provided Woodstock with the opportunity to serve and to share with others its tradition of serious theological reflection.
A very revealing, as well as enjoyable, way to learn a library is to browse it with one of its long and loving friends. To have done so one afternoon with Father James Walsh, S.J., associate professor of Biblical Studies at Georgetown University, was just such an experience.
In a "walk through" he pointed out features of particular interest to him in his field, and his special interest in the Dead Sea Scrolls and writings of the earliest Christian times.
In the Rare Book Room is one of the books he used in his doctoral dissertation at Harvard, an edition of the Old Latin translation of the Bible (the version the Latin Church used for the 300 or so years before Jerome produced his Vulgate). It was edited by Pierre Sabatier in 1751, and is very rare, he said.
Moving through the library, he first indicated the shelves of hundreds of scholarly periodicals. A virtue is that almost every scholarly theological journal is received in the library. Even better, the bound volumes of some journals go back to 1869, when Woodstock opened. He moved to the bound volumes of periodicals, and at random pulled out The Month, a British Jesuit magazine. The first volume had the date 1864, the year the periodical began publication. He moved on and indicated the bound volumes of the Revue de Qumran, which has come out regularly since about ten years after the discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls. The library has them all.
He indicated the Elenchus Biblicus, which is published annually, a bibliography of articles and books on the Bible. "This is your basic, indispensable bibliographic tool," Father Walsh said. The set is complete.
He moved on to other shelves. "The first meeting of the Catholic Biblical Association was in 1938, and the complete annual publications have come out since then," he said. We looked, and sure enough, the long line of volumes of the Catholic Biblical Quarterly started with volume zero, issued after the meeting in 1938, and the complete annual publications from volume one (1939) on, neatly bound, stood in a long row.
Another series, Christian Writers of the East (to translate from the Latin), published in Louvain, had volume one dated 1903. Following that, in long rows, were lined up the succeeding volumes published since then, ending with volume 485.
"See, they're all here," Father Walsh said. "The wonderful thing about this library is that it's not spotty. It has anything you need."
The library uses the Dewey Decimal System, so bibliographical works are in the lower numbers. From there he went on to other basic reference works, section dictionaries and directories. He passed the Jewish Encyclopedia and the Talmud.
"Nice to have for ready reference," he said.
He moved on to the New Testament and commentaries in various languages. He pointed out a theological dictionary, a standard work. He went on to shelves holding church history and the fathers of the church. After that he came to newer writers on the fathers of the church, in German.
He moved on to several halfleatherbound volumes stretching out across a shelf. "If you want to look up a word used by Saint Thomas Aquinas in any of his writings," Father Walsh indicated, "here you are." The books were the Index Thomisticus, compiled by computer, and obviously containing everything a scholar might seek out about Aquinas. (Each volume cost more than $400, and there were about 39 of them, which gives a small idea of the cost of a library of this kind.)
At random Father Walsh pulled out a book in Ethiopic, The Acts of Saint Alexis, and studied the strange script. He opened another, a book entitled Isaiah and Twelve Minor Prophets, in Syriac and coming from Mesopotamia in the fifth century A.D.
Other frequent users of the Woodstock Library are theology professors John Haught, Monika Hellwig and Anthony Tambasco. They credited Father Joseph A. Fitzmyer, S.J., internationally renowned New Testament scholar, for taking particular care to see that the Woodstock Library acquires appropriate books in the biblical area. "And credit goes largely to Father Eugene Rooney, the current librarian," Dr. Tambasco observed, "for collecting a wealth of material on liberation theology. His knowledge of the writers working in liberation theology is outstanding, partly because of his long years of service in Chile."
With closer University affiliation hopes are high that the Woodstock Library will become ever better known and used by the scholarly community on the campus and beyond. In many ways, this library has been Woodstock's "best kept secret." To expand usefulness, the agreement calls for computerization of the catalog of the Woodstock library, making its holdings more accessible within the Washington area Consortium of Universities and beyond. Woodstock and the University are planning now how to raise funds for this important project. If only the indomitable Father Piccirillo were here to help!
Patricia Maloney Markun, a professional author and editor, very graciously researched and wrote this story on the Woodstock Library "as a labor of love." It is one of several pieces which Pat has contributed to the Woodstock Report and other Woodstock publications on a voluntary basis. Married to an attorney and mother of four, Pat has throughout her life combined family responsibilities with a rich and varied career. Radio announcer, TV interviewer, author of five children's books, managing editor of a trade journal, speech writing, advertising and public relations consultant, all are roles Pat has played for major business corporations and in her political activities. She is, and she is happy to be, a role model for younger, "post-liberation" women. And Woodstock is happy for her generous friendship.