“Bare ruin’d choirs where late the sweet birds sang”:
The dissolution of Catholic libraries during the period 1967 to 1996 -
a personal and anecdotal account
[An informal talk
given at the 1997 National Conference of
the Catholic Library
Association of America]
Thomas Michael Loome
Some day there will have to be written a detailed and
scrupulously forthright account of the vicissitudes of the institutional church
in the last third of the twentieth century.
No doubt there will be many truly positive achievements to be
recorded. And yet there will be a dark
side of the history also: the sad and disheartening, even shameful history of
the dissolution of Catholic institutions, especially in Western
Europe and in North America, from
the Second Vatican Council to the beginning of the Third Millennium.
The title of my talk this morning is “ ‘Bare ruin’d choirs
where late the sweet birds sang’: The dissolution of Catholic libraries during
the period 1967 to 1996.” The question
of the destruction of Catholic libraries in our lifetime is but one part of the
larger history about which I have just spoken.
Similar accounts will have to deal, for example, with the demise of
Catholic publishing houses in the English-speaking world, with the dismantling
of the Catholic hospital system in so many dioceses, with the closing of
thousands of Catholic elementary and high schools, with the virtual extinction
of countless religious congregations of both men and women.
Many Catholics will of course know well the history to which
I advert. Many will know it painfully
well: members of religious congregations, former librarians whose libraries no
longer exist, former teachers in the Catholic educational system whose schools
have long since closed, former owners and employees of Catholic publishing
houses whose businesses have gone bankrupt.
In this talk, however, I am concerned only with Catholic libraries and
librarians, both in Western Europe and in the United States
and Canada.
The subtitle of my remarks today is “a personal and
anecdotal account”, and with these words I want to make it clear that this does
not purport to be a scholarly history of these past 30 years of Catholic library
history. To make clear the limitations,
but perhaps the strengths also of my remarks, permit me to recount briefly my
own personal history of the years in question: the last third of the twentieth
century.
Born in 1935, I am now 62 years old. The first half of my life was shaped by the
pre-Vatican II church and by those heady years of the Council itself (the
fourth and last session of the Council, as you will recall, ended in December
1965). The second half of my life embraces
that period in the history of the Church that concerns me today, the period
from 1967 to 1996.
The
years from 1966 to 1973 I spent as a doctoral student in Catholic theology at
the University of
Tübingen in Germany, where
I was studied under such teachers as Joseph Ratzinger, Hans Küng, and the
present Bishop of Rottenburg, Walter Kasper.
During this seven-year period I spent about half of my time in Germany, the
other half in Great Britain. In Britain I was engaged in archival research
for a study of the modernist controversy in Catholic thought at the turn of the
century (a study which was published by Grünewald-Verlag in Mainz in 1979) and,
during all the time I could spare from that research, in learning the
antiquarian book trade as an employee of one of the great booksellers in the
U.K., Richard Booth Booksellers in Hay-on-Wye, on the English-Welsh border. During these student years I was always
fairly destitute, and I was fortunate in managing to secure employment in
antiquarian books at a time when the money was useful and when those books
which interested me personally were readily available on the secondhand market. The handling of these books professionally provided
me with a splendid apprenticeship in the antiquarian book business.
I had
been working as a cataloguer of antiquarian books with Richard Booth for a year
or two when I had an extraordinary experience, in 1969 or 1970 as I recall.
One
of my regular research stops in the U.K. (in addition to the British Museum, the Bodleian at Oxford, the university libraries at Cambridge and at St.
Andrew’s) was the English theologate of the Society of Jesus, located at the
time in Heythrop, on a lovely estate some 20 minutes north of Oxford.
This was the most important Jesuit house in the British
Isles and, as the Jesuit theologate, housed a splendid library of,
I would guess, 150 thousand volumes, many of which dated back to early Recusant
times and to Jesuit foundations on the continent from the late 16th
century up to Catholic emancipation in the 1820’s.
On
one occasion when I turned up at Heythrop to do research I discovered that the
property was for sale, that the library was being prepared for shipment to
Cavendish Square in London, and that Heythrop College was to become a
constituent college of the University of London. I discovered, however, that a large portion
of the library was being left behind and was for sale: 30,000 volumes deemed unnecessary for the new
Heythrop College in London.
After a cursory look at the books I immediately got in contact with
Richard Booth, told him of the books that were being disposed of, and we
quickly negotiated a price for the lot.
Then, for the next months, between semesters at the University of Tübingen,
I had the wonderful experience of going through these books one by one and
pricing them for sale.
What
the English Jesuits disposed of so casually shocks me even now. Included in the 30,000 or so volumes were,
for example, well over 500 titles representing publications on Jesuit
missionary activity in the Far East. These included incredibly rare 16th
century imprints as well as later monographs into the late 19th century. It was one of the most extraordinary and
valuable collections I have myself ever handled. This collection was immediately sold to the
National Library of Australia in Canberra,
at a price I know now to have been far too modest.
Another
category of books included in this collection were some 150 Recusant books
dating from the early 16th century to the late 17th
century. These are perhaps the rarest of
all English-language books, published and disseminated as they were under
threat of the death penalty. At least
two of those Recusant titles, I was soon to discover, were unique copies, never
recorded bibliographically. These, and
the scores of other Recusant books, had apparently been deemed unworthy of the
new Heythrop College library in London.
One
further example of the dissolution of Catholic libraries will suffice for now. Some time around 1972 I received an urgent
call from Richard Booth to meet him in Québec City
to examine another large Catholic library.
This time it turned out to be the library of the Franciscan house of
studies in French Canada, a collection housed just as it had been when still in
use, perhaps 100,000 volumes. The whole
library was for sale, as is. It was the
finest fully intact theological collection I have ever seen offered for
sale. There were certainly tens of
thousands of antiquarian volumes (and by “antiquarian” I mean publications
prior to the year 1800), in elegant bindings stunning just to behold. “Vellum city!” gasped Richard Booth. And so it was: “Vellum city” available for purchase – make
us an offer.
Why
was this library in Québec for sale? For
that matter, why had the English Jesuits so blithely disposed of so much of
their patrimony? Contrary to what one
might now imagine, it was not because of a shortage of vocations. It was rather a shortage of courage and
common sense, of elemental responsibility for the church’s patrimony. What possessed the religious superiors in question,
both in Oxfordshire and in Québec, was a theory or an ideology, muddled and
somewhat incoherent, in retrospect bordering on sheer foolishness.
The
theory, as far as I have ever been able to understand it, went something like
this. The way in which the Church had
educated its priests for centuries was altogether out-of-date. It had to be abandoned. The Jesuits, for their part, set an example
by rejecting their ratio studiorum;
the Franciscans followed by repudiating their own unique tradition of
theological education.
But
if the old ways were to be abandoned, how then to start afresh? One driving force was to imitate, or best to
enter directly into, existing (usually secular) universities. The English Jesuits gave up their independent
theologate in Oxfordshire and betook themselves to the University of London. The Jesuits in North
America did something similar.
One by one, within a matter of only a few years, their existing houses
of study were closed: Alma College
at Los Gatos in
California, Woodstock in Maryland, St. Mary’s in Kansas, Weston outside
of Boston.
What
caused all this? Lack of financial
resources? Certainly not. Dearth of vocations? Again, no.
The entire project of dissolution was driven by a theory, in the words
of one senior Jesuit who lived through this period, “Mr. Loome, it’s ‘the green
grass / asphalt theory.’ You can’t do
theology nowadays out in the country surrounded by green grass and silence; oh
no, you’ve got to do theology in a large urban area, with as much asphalt and
as little green grass as possible.” So
this older (and rather embittered) Jesuit.
And what the Jesuits did, freely and under no external compulsion, was
aped by other congregations and orders throughout the land.
One
after another, therefore, most of the houses of theological studies in North
America closed their doors; and how forgetful we now are of the hundreds of
such houses that had existed up to the end of Vatican II: the Claretians, the Passionists, The
Pallotine Fathers, the Divine Word Fathers, Stigmatines, Trinitarians,
Carmelites, Franciscans (Regular, Capuchin, Conventual), Servites, La Salette
Fathers, Oblates of Mary Immaculate, Marists and Marianists, Redemptorists and
Resurrectionists, Maryknollers and Mill Hill Fathers. Now, in 1997, as I write these lines, there
is left hardly a physical trace of this vast educational system dedicated to
the education of priests and religious.
Most of the properties have been sold and their libraries
dispersed. Where the original properties
still exist they have become old age homes pretending to be retreat houses.
It is
quite impossible, within the confines of this brief paper, to do justice to
this theory or ideology, not least because it was a confused concatenation of
many often mutually contradictory impulses and ideas. It was a theory about the modern world, about
the Church, about the relation of the one to the other. It was a theory about institutional life,
about the priesthood and the religious life, about the formation of future
priests and religious, about the very nature and end of both the ordained priesthood
and the consecrated life.
And
yet, however muddled the theory, it was abruptly and unhesitatingly acted
upon. The results we live with even
now. Somehow life itself, the life of
the institutional Church, was perceived as being in a state of acute crisis, a
crisis to be addressed, a crisis to be met by fundamental changes in the
institutional Church, from the ground up.
In this context I might mention a now long forgotten volume published in
1965, while the Council was still in session, and entitled The Seminary in Crisis.
Written by a young Vincentian priest, then perhaps 30 years old and only
recently ordained, it stands now as a symptom of the problem, the real problem,
facing the Church thirty years ago. The
seminary was not in a crisis, but it was perceived as being so. The crisis was not in the seminary, but in
the heads of those responsible for seminary life. And a crisis in the head, even if it has
little existence in external reality, is nonetheless a major crisis.
And
in the light of this perceived crisis, or of a whole series of crises touching
upon every conceivable aspect of the Church’s institutional life, changes were
set in motion. It was not just the
Jesuits in Great Britain
and the Franciscans in Québec who were on the move; it was all the Catholic
world.
What
proved decisive for my own personal life, however, what tipped the scales and
led me to abandon the teaching of theology and commit myself to the Catholic
secondhand book trade, was an experience I had in 1981. My wife and I were traveling by car from Minnesota to Massachusetts, and,
since I had heard that the diocesan seminary in Rochester, New York
was closing, we stopped off in Rochester
to visit St. Bernard’s Seminary, a magnificent property with a stunning library
collection. The present Bishop of
Rochester, Matthew Clark, had been installed in 1979, and one of his first
decisions was to close St. Bernard’s Seminary and to move the seminarians to a
residence near the Colgate-Rochester
Divinity School. It was the usual story: the faculty was
dispersed, the property and buildings put on the market, the library offered
for sale. And once again it was a
marvelous library. I remember still my astonishment
at seeing heaped up on the floor of the library what I had never seen before
and have never seen since: a complete
set, in 127 folio volumes, of the critical Weimar edition of the works of Luther.
The
sight of it led me to become a full-time antiquarian bookseller. It was all too clear that seminaries and
other Catholic institutions were being closed down fast and furious, and that
this was the chance of a lifetime: books and yet more books, more books dumped
on the market than at any time since the French Revolution and the wars of the
Napoleonic era. It was not just the
English Jesuits or the French Canadian Franciscans. It was not just one diocesan bishop in
up-state New York. There was an ecclesiastical revolution going
on, a revolution with one consequence that concerned me: books.
Do I
exaggerate? Were Catholic institutions
being closed down fast and furious? Let
me give you some statistics. In 1966
there were 309 Catholic colleges and universities in the United States. There are now only 237, and several of these,
small liberal arts colleges, have been founded during the past 30 years. You can do the mathematics as well as I:
something between 70 and 75 Catholic colleges have been closed down in the last
thirty years.
I was
myself involved in the sale of many of these Catholic college libraries. In some cases I purchased them outright. In several cases I acted on behalf of a
religious congregation or a diocese in conducting a formal auction of the
library. In many cases I was able to
purchase, if not the entire library, large portions of it, as often as not the
best and most significant books. How
many books have been dispersed from this closing of 70 or more colleges? I can only hazard a guess, but I would think
the total something like four to five
million volumes.
And
then there are the high school libraries.
In 1966 there were 2,388 Catholic high schools in the United States:
diocesan, parochial and private. Of
these high schools over 1,000 have been closed.
Only 1,359 still exist. Here
again there has been the dispersal of an astonishing number of books, certainly
well over a million volumes, perhaps many more than that. And here I can speak again from personal
experience: many of these Catholic high schools had extraordinarily good
academic libraries.
And
then there were the convent libraries, thousands of them, as well as the
libraries of the Motherhouses of congregations of sisters and nuns. There were also the parish libraries,
painstakingly created over generations, and even the extraordinary libraries in
the “Catholic Information Centers” in major cities, usually under the care of
the Paulists. I remember still two of
these libraries and my sense of dismay at their dispersal (as well as my keen
satisfaction at being able to purchase them intact): the Paulist centers on Boston Commons and at
Old St. Mary’s in San Francisco,
both with superb Catholic Information libraries available to the laity and to
other inquirers.
Finally,
however, and here the great tragedy to the Church: diocesan seminaries and the seminaries,
theologates, and scholasticates of religious orders and congregations. In 1966 there were 607 such institutions in
the United States
alone. Only a third of these still
exist: more precisely, only 198 of the original 607. 409 such institutions have therefore been
closed down, and with them went their libraries; 54 of these were diocesan (or
archdiocesan) institutions, 355 belonged to orders and congregations.
If I
used the term “tragedy” a moment ago, it is because with the demise of these
409 institutions of serious ecclesiastical learning and scholarship an
incalculable loss has been experienced by the Church in America: the loss of as many as another 15 million
books, a great many of them rare and scholarly and, needless to say, most of
them forever irreplaceable.
And
what happened to these millions of books?
Where in the world did they go?
Many of course ended up at one or another of those then fashionable
“theological unions” - the GTU in Berkeley,
the CTU in Chicago,
the WTU in Washington, DC.
The theory here must have seemed attractive at the time: let the various orders and congregations
abandon their independent houses of study and instead amalgamate – one
property, one faculty, one library.
Whatever was distinctive in the theological training of any one
congregation, however, was lost forever.
Where a wonderful diversity had existed there was now uniformity – and,
needless to say, in an urban setting, with asphalt on all sides.
It
was in this way that many great libraries were destroyed. In California,
for example, up to about the year 1966, there were three great theological
collections: the Dominicans’ at St. Albert’s Priory in Oakland; the Franciscans’
in Santa Barbara;
the Jesuits’ in Los Gatos.
In the creation of the GTU in Berkeley all three libraries
were savaged. What was left was a
miserable reminder of what had once been.
How
have all these millions upon millions of books been disposed of? My experience dictates a blunt answer: by and
large irresponsibly, by and large carelessly.
Here, let it be said, I can claim some authority. I am without doubt the person now alive who
knows best, from personal experience, of the disposal of these libraries and
these millions of books. It all makes
for a sad and lamentable history.
And
so here we are in 1997. The one loss is
clear: countless, once marvelous Catholic institutions gone forever, and with
them their often superb library collections.
If there is any other loss it is this, and I say this with all due
respect to you, my auditors. The second
loss, as I see it, is the marked decline in the quality and competence of
Catholic librarians. No doubt there are
many exceptions to this admittedly bald generalization, but I think it’s nonetheless
true. How few today are the great
learned and scholarly librarians of the recent past: those who may not have had
a degree in library science (or, perish the thought, in information services),
but who knew books, specifically Catholic books, books of all ages and in all
languages. By and large such great Catholic
librarians are no longer to be found. I
have known many of them. Only a few are
still active, with their libraries intact.
They have been replaced by a new breed of librarian, no doubt armed with
library credentials, but usually lacking in much knowledge of (or even interest
in) the Catholic literary and theological traditions. They are now in charge. They maintain in some fashion the libraries entrusted
to them, but as to library development, they don’t know a good book from a bad
one. And of course this new breed of
librarian is devoted to “weeding” the books that remain, keeping the collection
up-to-date, culling any defenseless book that has not been checked out recently
or (often the unforgivable sin) is not in English If this is too harsh, forgive me. It is certainly the conviction I have
acquired over the past decades when dealing personally with scores of such
librarians, most of them, I suppose, members of your Catholic Library
Association of America.
What finally
are the lessons to be learned from what seems to me a sad and often shameful
history? It was Thomas Hobbes who
memorably wrote that human existence is “nasty, brutish and short”. The same, it would appear, applies to
Catholic libraries, certainly when viewed from the perspective of the long
history of the Catholic Church.
The only
other lesson that occurs to me is this: as believing Catholics we have a
responsibility to preserve the patrimony of the Church, certainly in so far as
it has been entrusted to us as librarians and as professionally interested
parties. Much has been destroyed
forever. Those who wreaked the damage
have mostly passed from the scene (although one would like to think that in the
end they acknowledged their wrongdoings and perhaps clothed themselves in
sackcloth and ashes). And so only we,
presiding over the wreckage, are left to tell the tale.
What
is the lesson for us? To start
afresh. Slowly to recreate, in some
small measure, what is gone forever. We
shall do this, however, only if we are both Catholic and bookish: committed to the Church, passionately devoted
to books, and, as a consequence, deeply rooted in the Church’s literary and
theological tradition. This is the
indispensable condition for an even tolerable future for Catholic libraries. Absent this profound commitment to
Catholicism and to books, I frankly see virtually no hope at all for Catholic
libraries.
Postscript
(January 2005)
Eight
years have passed since I wrote this paper, and I now ask myself, have things
improved? The answer, alas, is no, not
much has changed; the dissolution of Catholic libraries carries on apace. Here are just a few instances from recent
years, almost all in fact falling within the Third Millennium.
Several
more diocesan seminaries have closed their doors, including Saint Thomas
Seminary in Hannibal, MO (diocese of Jefferson City) and Wadhams Hall
Seminary- College
(diocese of Ogdensburg, NY), the latter with exceptionally fine
library holdings in philosophy and the humanities.
At
least four more theologate libraries have been dispersed: Friars of the
Atonement (Washington, D.C.), Society of the Precious Blood (St.
Charles Seminary, Carthagena,
OH), Conventual Franciscans (St.
Anthony-on-the-Hudson, Rensselaer,
NY), Conventual Franciscans (St. Hyacinth
Seminary, Granby, MA).
I personally examined all four of these libraries: altogether no more
perhaps than 300-325,000 volumes, but each a truly outstanding library.
Finally
there has been the unrelenting dispersal of the remnants of once great theological
collections: the Jesuit theologate in Weston, MA (30-35,000 volumes left behind
decades ago when the Jesuits moved to Cambridge and merged with Episcopal
Divinity School); the Franciscans’ theologate in Edmonton, Alberta (12-15,000
volumes remaining after most of the library was given to Newman Theological
College, the seminary of the Archdiocese of Edmonton).
In my
younger and more optimistic days I had imagined that I would live to see the
renaissance of Catholic institutions of higher learning in North America, and
hence of Catholic libraries and librarianship.
I am no longer very hopeful.
Eventually perhaps, but not in my lifetime.
For
now the dissolution of once great Catholic libraries carries on unabated, often
fueled, I fear, by the financial straits of so many dioceses and religious
congregations, not least because of “the scandals” that have beset the
institutional Church.
It
was probably too much to hope for that “The Estelle Doheny Collection” (owned
by the Archdiocese of Los Angeles and housed at St. John’s Seminary in
Camarillo) would escape the attention of those desperate to raise funds: for the new cathedral? to settle legal claims against the Archdiocese? Whatever the reason, “The Doheny Library,”
the greatest rare book collection ever owned by the Church in America, was
sold, book by book (2300 lots), at a series of widely publicized auctions at
Christie’s in New York – for a total of $37,800,000. Of this truly extraordinary collection there
now remains not a trace, scattered as it is throughout the world. [The Doheny sale, on behalf of the
Archdiocese of Los Angeles, included a copy of the 1454/5 Gutenberg Bible, one
of only 48 known to exist and the only copy ever owned by a Catholic
institution in North America. The Doheny Gutenberg fetched $4,900,000 and
was purchased by a Japanese corporation for investment purposes.]
Writing
from the vantage point of 2005, this Catholic, this professional bookseller,
knows merely to carry on as best he can:
rescuing books from the depredations of an uncultured age.
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There's a little joke here at the store that Thomas Merton is sort of like Elvis or Jerry Garcia, i.e. he's not really dead. On occasion one may catch a glimpse of him. You can never be absolutely certain you saw him, but over time the evidence builds up.
(A shot of the center of the ceiling - rather high up there.)
For safety and health reasons, we do not currently offer tours of the attic. 
This time it took two. Dealing with a fixture over 30 ft. above the floor is not simple, particularly when the dead bulb is detached from its base. Working from the nearby "Big Balcony", and armed with a pole, some string, duct tape (handyman's secret weapon) and some tricks I once learned in the Moscow State Circus, we got the old base removed. Getting the new bulb in was much simpler. Now the Thomistic, Liturgical Texts, Liturgical Studies, and Americana sections are much better illuminated.
On the left is the Crown of Thorns plant (which must be watered with caution). On the right is Phyllis the Amaryllis. The sun was rather bright through the window, but this silhouetted sort of shot looked better than the ones with flash. Phyllis is about to burst into flower. The Crown of Thorns will show little red flowers after some time.
Today at the store we experienced a surprise bibliographical visitation by Fr. John Berg, superior general of the Priestly Fraternity of St. Peter. Father Berg, a native of the Twin Cities, has had a long history of making pilgrimages to the store. We were pleased, as always, to be able to provide a nice stack of good books for good uses. (As is evident in the photo at right, Fr. Berg is pleased with his book selections.) May God bless Fr. Berg and the FSSP!
[The recipient's name has been covered on the image above in order to protect identity and good standing amongst men.] 
Consummatum est. 
Here (above) we have the woeful Jaws of Ice formation around the side entryway. Less woeful, nay wonderful, is the view of Wisconsin, Land of Cheese, in the distance across the river.
