Le Bestseller

Frail, dark-haired Henri Petiot returned from Rome to Paris last week with a new papal award, and just in time to launch the most prodigious project of his prodigious career--a brand-new, 150-volume encyclopedia of the Roman Catholic faith. Few have heard of Henri Petiot, ex-schoolteacher. But under his pen name of Daniel-Rops, who in France has not? "Le Bestseller," they call him, and they read his books into record-breaking editions, go to his lectures by the hundreds, buy his magazines by the thousands.

Broken into small (average: 128 pages), low-priced (less than $1) segments, the first four volumes of The Encyclopedia of Catholicism in the Twentieth Century came off the presses last week. The rest will appear at the rate of two volumes a month for the next six years, and will contain "everything a Catholic could want to know on any subject in which his religion is involved." Daniel-Rops split up this "everything" into 14 categories--part one deals with faith and knowledge, part six (13 volumes) treats the Bible, part nine (19 volumes) handles "Problems of the World and the Church," such as Communism, psychiatry, the state. A category is devoted to other Christian religions and one non-Christian religion. Daniel-Rops wrote one volume on the Bible section himself, farmed out the rest to some 150 experts, about half of them Catholic priests.

Fan Letter. Daniel-Rops had the idea for his encyclopedia last year, when he noticed how questions about matters of faith were crowding his mail. "I became conscious that the public wanted spiritual culture," he explains. "I had to find a way to answer them."

In addition, he directs four book collections for three different publishers, runs a quarterly magazine for a Catholic intellectual center, edits a monthly religious digest called Ecclesia (circ. 100,000), lectures about every other week, writes four or five newspaper or magazine articles a month, and answers 18 to 20 letters a day, mostly from people with problems.

In the 30 years since his first essay appeared in print, Daniel-Rops has produced some 70 books, the most important of them religious histories, and they have broken all French records for sales. Estimated sales: 1,500,000 copies, not counting translations. Estimated income from books alone: $400,000 in ten years.

The Vatican recently congratulated him for putting "your science and your zeal at the service of the Catholic cause." In 1949 Pope Pius XII made him a Commander in the Order of Saint Gregory the Great (he promoted him to the order's Grand Croix last fortnight), and frequently sends him a fan letter.

Daniel-Rops's popularity is not limited to churchmen. On his election to the French Academy last year, he won the votes of traditionally anticlerical members. And when a small group of friends began a fund to buy him the academician's customarily ornate sword, they were swamped by almost 2,000 contributors--including five cardinals, twelve foreign ambassadors, former Premier Pierre Mendes-France, Movie Actress Claude Nollier, Dressmaker Pierre Balmain, the entire staff of the women's magazine, Marie-Claire, and a boy scout troop.

A Tiny Pin? His grandparents were peasants, his father was an artillery officer, and Henri Petiot began life as a bright young man with an academic future. He majored simultaneously in law, geography and history at the University of Grenoble, took the equivalent of an M.A. in each, won his agregation (slightly higher than Ph.D.) at 21. He became a lycee professor in Neuilly, continued teaching until 1945. His first book, a volume of essays called Notre Inquietude, was published in 1926. He signed it Daniel-Rops--the name he had invented for a character in an un published short story.

Part of the inquietude he wrote about was disillusion with the church. But ten years later Daniel-Rops had found in Catholicism "a conception of the world . . . a system of thinking . . . a basis for civilization." The church-centered histories, biographies and novels that have poured from him since have contributed much to the new stirrings of religion in anticlerical France, where, he feels, "there is a new kind of Catholic movement afoot. It's not organized, but deep."

"The coming two or three generations are decisive," he says, "because there is real danger ahead. On the one hand is anarchy. Humanity can't survive looking at television screens. On the other there is technocracy, in which man becomes a tiny pin in a gigantic mechanism. How can man be preserved? The answer seems so fragile, so hypothetical, that people understandably mock it. It is simply that we need an act of faith in man--faith in his profound worth and in the divine spark he contains." For faith is the bridge to the future. "This is Rome at the time of the barbarians. It is falling apart. But that doesn't mean the light won't shine eventually."

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