By JAMES MONTI
Undoubtedly many of you have known what it is to have your life changed by at least one good book. Catholic books have been doing this for centuries. And they can even make men into saints. Who can forget how the ambitious young soldier Ignatius of Loyola (1491-1556) was transformed after he was given as reading material Ludolph of Saxony’s Life of Christ and the collection of saints’ lives known as The Golden Legend?
Rather than merely occupying us for just a matter of minutes or at best a few hours as movies and television and Internet presentations do, a book can engage our minds for many days and often for weeks, and thus a book has the potential of changing us in a deeper and more lasting way than these other media can.
The invention of movable type in the mid-fifteenth century that opened the way to the mass production of books is so often tied to the “success” of the Protestant Reformation that one would almost think that printing and the Gutenberg Bible were Protestant achievements. But in reality the first half century of printing was almost all about disseminating Catholic literature, a late medieval wave of “new evangelization” exploiting what was then state-of-the-art media technology.
Recently I have had the privilege of working firsthand with quite a few of these early printed Catholic books, including two sets of folio-sized “glossed” Bibles dating from 1498-1502 and 1506-1508 respectively. These Bibles have the Scripture text in the middle of the page, with explanations (“glosses”) of the biblical passage by one or more patristic or medieval exegetes running along all four sides of the text.
To touch such books from five centuries ago is to hold in one’s hands the “hermeneutic of continuity.” They are testaments to a faith that has not changed any of its doctrines for two thousand years. They are likewise silent but eloquent witnesses against anyone who would dare to deny these irreformable truths.
Another treasure I recently discovered was an early edition of a book compiled by St. Ignatius of Loyola’s assistant Fr. Jerome Nadal (+1580) entitled Evangelicae historiae imagines, a folio volume comprising 153 full-page woodcuts depicting the Gospel scenes for all the Gospels read at Mass on Sundays and the major feast days of the liturgical year.
Before his own death in 1556, Ignatius had asked Fr. Nadal to prepare such a book to assist Jesuit novices in meditating upon the life of Christ according to his method of “composition of place.” First published in 1593, with a companion volume of annotations and textual meditations appearing in 1594, this work became a priceless instrument of evangelization in the hands of Jesuit missionaries, who took it with them to the New World and the Far East, where native artists executed new works of religious art based upon these woodcut images.
And because the woodcuts are among the earliest examples of “perspective drawing” (the realistic depiction of three-dimensional perspectives of objects in a two-dimensional image), this work is likewise a milestone in both the history of Western art and the history of science.
Catholic books can even serve as something akin to sacramentals, holy objects that can function as instruments of grace. It was my thought in examining not long ago a Missale Romanum from 1583 that this book is not only a precious repository of our Catholic patrimony as the other Catholic books from this period are, but that in all probability it had been used by one or more priests to celebrate the Mass, making it a sacred object directly employed in the confection of the Holy Eucharist and the public worship of the Church.
What a dreadful thing it would be if in our convenience-obsessed age our printed missals were to be supplanted by computer touch screens on the altar!
Most of us have had the sorry experience of encountering books of that other sort, books that expound a “hermeneutic of rupture,” from the printed propaganda of the Protestant Reformation to the latest overweight pseudo-theological tomes of dissenting academics. Such works claim to offer something new, but as G.K. Chesterton aptly observed, “Nine out of ten of what we call new ideas are simply old mistakes” (Chesterton, “Why I Am a Catholic,” in The Collected Works of G.K. Chesterton, volume 3, ed. George Marlin et al., San Francisco, Ignatius Press, 1990, p. 129).
It is rather amusing to find that so many of the “trendy” books of the 1960s and 1970s bear titles boasting of their erstwhile modernity, touting that they offer the Gospel for “today,” that they have been written for “today’s Catholics,” and that they tell what “modern Catholics” believe. Did those who wrote these books ever pause to consider that half a century later their “modern” books might be lazily gathering dust as vestiges of an era that has long since faded away?
So what price can we rightly place on a Catholic book that, as it were, saves one’s soul, or sets one’s heart on fire with the love of God and our Lady?
In Elizabethan England one courageous layman paid the ultimate price for having done his best to put such books in his countrymen’s hands. James Duckett was a young Puritan who was changed forever after a Catholic acquaintance gave him a book entitled The Firm Foundation of Catholic Religion Against the Bottomless Pit of Heresies.
Duckett would read the book furtively, venturing to conceal it from his Puritan employer by hiding it under the cushion of his seat. But his secret was soon discovered and he was sent to prison twice for it, and twice was freed, surprisingly enough, by his employer’s benevolence. In two months Duckett became a Catholic and began a life of piety.
Duckett married a Catholic widow named Anne Hart; of the two of them it was said, “The riches and only treasure they made account of was that they were both members of God’s Church” (John Hungerford Pollen, Acts of English Martyrs Hitherto Unpublished, Burns and Oates, London, 1891, p. 241).
Earning his living as a tailor, Duckett at first employed his talents to support underground Catholic priests by sewing and mending vestments for them. But he soon undertook the further task of promulgating that very tool of evangelization that had been his own gateway to the faith, the printed book.
In Elizabethan England, entering the Catholic book trade was a foray into daily danger, as Duckett quickly learned. It was not long before Duckett’s home was raided, and incriminating evidence discovered, namely “a whole impression of Our Lady’s Psalter with pictures of the Rosary, together with the press” (ibid., p. 242). For this Duckett spent two years in prison.
But no sooner had Duckett regained his liberty than he was back in the Catholic book apostolate. The agents of the regime anticipated this, and soon sent a plant in the form of a stranger seeking lodging for the night in Duckett’s home. By this pretense a supply of Jesus Psalters and other “little books of devotion” was discovered, and Duckett was sent back to prison.
His distraught pregnant wife Anne went about in search of the magistrate responsible for her husband’s detention, hoping to plead for his release. When at length she fainted and went into labor, two Protestant women who witnessed this went to the magistrate and forcefully persuaded him to release Duckett.
For Duckett, freedom, as always, meant resuming his mission of disseminating Catholic literature. Some Latin and English Primers were sent by him to a bindery. When this and several freshly minted Catholic books came to light, he was apprehended yet again and this time consigned to a dungeon.
Through the intervention of two friends he was again reprieved, but in March of 1602 he was apprehended for the final time, on this occasion the evidence taken from his house being a complete printing of a book about the Passion of Christ.
Prior to his arrest, Duckett had also sent to a bookbinder named Peter Bullock a printing of the apologetic work, A Brief Treatise of Diverse, Plain and Sure Ways to Find Out the Truth in this Doubtful and Dangerous Time of Heresy containing Sundry Worthy Motives unto the Catholic Faith, by Fr. Richard Bristow.
In a futile attempt to save himself, Bullock testified against Duckett, and it was on the charge of having printed this book that Duckett was condemned to death together with Bullock.
Beatification
On the morning of his execution, April 19, 1602, Duckett told his inconsolable wife, “Do but keep yourself God’s servant, and in the unity of God’s Church, and I shall be able to do you more good, being now to go to the King of kings” (Pollen, p. 247).
He urged her to forgive his accuser Bullock, who was about to die with him, and he himself made his peace with Bullock before the two of them were hung. In 1929 James Duckett was beatified.
For all its versatility, computer technology will never fully take the place of a printed book. And in the all-important context of our faith, the physicality of real Catholic books communicates to our senses that the doctrines we profess are very real and unchanging.
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