Riches from Rome

Two Jesuit priests on the faculty of St. Louis University sat down one summer day in 1950 and composed an unprecedented letter to the Vatican. "Reverende Pater, pax Christi," they wrote in their best Latin to the prefect of the library. Then they asked permission to carry out as ambitious a project as their university had ever undertaken. They wanted to microfilm the Vatican Library and bring it back to St. Louis. Neither Historian Lowrie Daly nor Librarian Joseph Donnelly knew "whether the project was possible, or even whether the Vatican would consider it. But we thought it was worth a try, so we shoved it into channels to see what would happen." In December, "much to our amazement," the Vatican granted permission. Since then, the project has achieved proportions that Fathers Daly and Donnelly never dreamed of. At first they thought the cost of filming would be about $50,000, soon found that the figure would come to at least five times that amount. By last week the sum was up into the millions: St. Louis was not only going to have copies of the Vatican's treasures; it would also have a $4,500,000 Pope Pius XII Memorial Library to house them. Treasure Hunt. When Daly and Donnelly first settled down to work in 1951, they faced a staggering task. Since they could not film all the volumes in the Vatican, they had to select the books and manuscripts most valuable to scholars. The Vatican's indexes, however, often gave only sketchy descriptions of the various books, and it was necessary to consult scores of experts in all sorts of fields from medicine to mathematics, astrology to astronomy, Roman civil to medieval canon law. Meanwhile, there was the problem of equipment. In 1951 the U.S. Air Force was buying up most of the film available in Europe, and the only company that could produce the proper developer ("We were developing small rolls by hand, but you can't make any speed that way") was already way behind in filling its orders. Father Donnelly took his problems to Remington Rand and the Graphic Microfilm Corp. of New York, gradually got an adequate supply of film, and the promise of a developer from another company. But when the machine arrived at Idlewild, it was too big for the hatch of the freight airplane. Finally, after many months, the developer reached its destination. By that time it was March 1952. Don't Skip. In selecting their material, Daly and Donnelly tried to avoid duplication. "But just when we were ready to skip something," says Father Daly, "up would pop something important." In a 12th century Bible, they found the musical notations of a choir master, "all of great value to students of musical history." In one of the many copies of Galen's works, they found that marginal notes of a 13th century physician offered innumerable clues to the medical practice of his day. It soon became obvious that precious little could be skipped without first being thoroughly examined. Now, with funds from the Knights of Columbus, Daly and Donnelly have eight electric cameras going at the Vatican, as well as two big developers, a printer and an electric splicer. Meanwhile, in St. Louis, a committee of 62 businessmen, including Roman Catholics. Protestants and Jews, is raising the millions necessary for the big Pope Pius XII library. And a national committee, headed by Houston Oilman George Strake, is trying to raise $1,900,000 more for a permanent endowment. Thus, because of the dream of two of its priests, St. Louis is now well on the way to becoming an outstanding world center for the study of Western thought. Among the filmed treasures it will have: the 4th century Codex Vaticanus, one of the oldest and most important copies of the Bible; the 6th century Codex Marchalianus, containing the complete Old Testament prophets; the original manuscript of St. Thomas Aquinas' Summa Contra Gentiles.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.