The 'new' New Catholic Encyclopedia: something lost--3.5 million words--something gained?

The appearance of the second edition of the New Catholic Encyclopedia (NCE2, 2003) took me back in time. For it immediately brought to mind my initial encounter with its predecessor, the first edition (NCE1, 1966). I was writing a paper on reference books for library school, which I was attending in 1976, and my topic was religious encyclopedias. I was comparing four of them, the Catholic Encyclopedia (1907-1914), the Jewish Encyclopedia (1901-1906), the Encyclopedia Judaica (1972), and the NCE1. I can still remember the respect bordering on affection the library community had (and still does) for the first edition of the New Catholic Encyclopedia. It is a broad, expansive work, including within its scope, in a gesture of extravagant generosity, not only topics that relate immediately to Catholicism, but science, education, and the liberal arts too. Separate editors for the social sciences, natural sciences, literature, music, art, and architecture, are identified in the preliminary pages. Illustrations (7,500 of them, according to the preface, many of them stunningly beautiful) pour through the pages like a stream, enriching the articles on art and iconography especially. A catholicity of this type flourished in the years of Vatican II, whose defining spirit of aggiornamento greatly influenced, according to the foreword (written by then-archbishop of Washington Patrick A. O'Boyle), the editorial style. To drive home the point, a color photo of Pope John XXIII is the frontispiece for the expertly executed Index volume.

My aim, in comparing those four reference works in 1976, was to explore their religious biases. I wondered how a religious encyclopedia's own faith stance affected its treatment of other religions. And so I contrasted them on their respective discussions in Jewish-Christian dialogue of such sensitive issues as the divinity of Jesus, Jewish involvement in his death, and anti-Semitism. My findings, unsurprisingly, were that the later encyclopedias were more sensitive than the earlier ones to the "other" religion. I especially warmed to the article on Judaism in NCE1, written by the erudite and sympathetic John Oesterreicher, an Austrian Jewish convert to Catholicism. It was as though the encyclopedia--work on which began several years before Vatican II--absorbed into itself by way of him the spirit of the Vatican declaration Nostra aetate, which, for Jewish-Christian relations, inaugurated nothing less than a new era. This is not surprising, since Msgr. Oesterreicher (according to the article on him in NCE2) served on the committee that drafted the part of Nostra aetate treating "The Church's Relationship to Non-Christian Religions."

It was like greeting an old friend, then, when on turning to NCE2, I found the same article on Judaism there, unchanged, since it first appeared thirty-eight years ago. At the same time, I could not but feel that Oesterreicher himself would have appreciated an update to his article, some words of praise for John Paul II's unprecedented efforts to affirm the Jewish community, by, for example, visiting the Synagogue of Rome in 1986, recognizing the State of Israel in 1994, and, under Israeli auspices, traveling there in March 2000. These facts are indeed cited elsewhere in the encyclopedia, in the rich article on John Paul II, but the unsuspecting reader of the entries specifically devoted to Jews and Judaism would miss them.

The reprinting, virtually unchanged, in NCE2 of many articles from the first edition has distressed theological librarians who have paid the steep purchase price ($1,200) to its publisher, the Gale Group, Inc., of Chicago, a major producer of reference books for the library market. (Catholic University of America is the co-publisher, as it was of NCE1.) The preface to the second edition explains that articles from the first edition that have "stood the test of time" have been included, often with only minor editing. In his astutely critical review of NCE2, Jan Malcheski, a librarian at the University of St. Thomas in Minnesota, cites an AP wire notice to the effect that 10 percent of the articles are wholly new and about one-third were heavily reworked (at this writing, the review appears online at http://www.atla.com/member/librarians_tools/reference_reviews/review0603.html).

It is a comfort to know that the article on Judaism was not the only one to be reprinted without an update; it has good company in the articles on "Idealism," "Natural Law in Political Thought," and "History of Church Architecture" (which all the same includes among its illustrations, a bit misleadingly, some oddly placed photos of post-1965 church buildings). This last failure to update disappointed me especially, as I would have liked some reference to the awesome new St. Mary's Cathedral in San Francisco, which I visited during a meeting of the American Academy of Religion (AAR) several years ago. But not even the bibliographies to these three articles were updated, which surprised me, since the AAR itself had merited an entry. Wouldn't the work of its scholarly members be worth noting, then, in updated bibliographies?

In the encyclopedia review I wrote for library school, I noted what had seemed to me revealing differences between the analyses of anti-Semitism that NCE1 and its Jewish analog, the Encyclopedia Judaica, offered. They did not see eye to eye. The seven-page NCE1 article, by E. H. Flannery, then editor of the Providence Visitor and author of a respected history of anti-Semitism (The Anguish of the Jews), suggested, I think quite innocently, that the Jewish people were in part accountable for it. I wondered if this note continued to sound in the second edition, but on turning to see, was chagrined to find no article there on anti-Semitism at all, though the index guides readers to mentions of the topic in other articles. Substantial cuts and omissions from the earlier edition turn out to be another feature of NCE2. These are duly acknowledged in a news article about the NCE2 from November 5, 2002, that, at this writing, was still online (http://www.ofmconv.org/English/NewsArchives/2002CathEncyc.htm). The editor, Berard Marthaler, OFM Conv., observes that 3.5 million words were cut from NCE1. The second edition's twelve thousand articles are five thousand fewer than NCE1's reported seventeen thousand. So anti-Semitism, too, was not alone; it is in good company with "Catholic Libraries," "Abstract Art and the Church," and "French Literature," all of which were dropped.

The volumes of NCE2 are on the whole slimmer than those of the earlier edition. The typeface is larger and the paper whiter. These changes reflect Gale's recognizable publication style. (The co-publisher of the first edition was McGraw-Hill.) But the responsibility for the cutbacks and omissions cannot reside with Gale alone. Gale itself, now a subsidiary of Thomson Learning, Inc., is enmeshed in the dramatic changes within publishing over the past few years. It is easy to believe that the expansive inclusiveness of the earlier edition is simply no longer affordable. Libraries have come to accept that no source of information, whether a person, organization, book, or database, can supply on its own all that we need to know. If there is no article on anti-Semitism in NCE2, there is now an Encyclopedia of the Holocaust, which did not exist in 1966, published by Facts on File.

Perhaps more hurried production schedules also distinguish publishing today from what it was forty years ago. The second edition was produced over three years, in contrast to the seven that were invested in NCE1. Deadline pressures could account for the failure to update all the articles and bibliographies, and for another distinctive feature of NCE2: the placement of pictures. Pictures illustrating articles sometimes appear on the verso of the page that has the article, in conjunction with whatever topic happens to fall next in the alphabet. The larger typeface may also have contributed to this feature, which makes for some startling juxtapositions. For example, the article on charnel houses is illustrated by a haunting photo of bones resting in the Monastery of St. Catherine in Sinai, Egypt, but it falls just above the article on the French baroque composer, Marc Antoine Charpentier. A connection as postmodern as that points invitingly to a contrast between the endurance of art and the mortality of life, but it takes the reader by surprise.

None of these peculiarities of NCE2 detracts from its great accomplishment in updating NCE1 in matters distinctly Catholic and ecclesiastical. Readers will find significant updates to both content and bibliography in the articles on the "Holy Trinity," "Eschatology," and the "Papacy." Geographic entries for countries and dioceses consistently trace the history of the Catholic Church up to the present. In addition, there are many entirely new articles. Especially welcome among these are the numerous new biographies of figures who died since the publication of NCE1, including Thomas Merton, Cardinal Joseph Bernardin, Dorothy Day, and Edward Skillin. (With few exceptions, living figures do not receive entries in either encyclopedia.) There is a new article on "Ecumenical Dialogues" among churches, reflecting the enormous strides in ecumenism since 1966. Articles on contemporary philosophical movements that have influenced Catholic thought, such as "Hermeneutics" and "Deconstruction," are new additions. And I was delighted to find a new article on Commonweal magazine, written by its managing editor, Patrick Jordan.

Encyclopedias discuss controversies, but can hardly hope to rekindle the heat of them as they flared. For that, the more fruitful reference source is a periodical or newspaper index. Readers of NCE2 interested in the Catholic prospects for women priests will find the authorized view dispassionately defended (see "Women and Papal Teaching"). Still, signs of dramatic conflict in the church do peep through. Some of us remember the controversy surrounding theological ethicist Charles Curran. Curran taught at the Catholic University of America (CUA, co-publisher of NCE) from 1965 to 1986, when he was dismissed under Vatican pressure for contesting the prohibition on contraceptives. The encyclopedia coolly presents the arguments for his dismissal in its articles on "Academic Freedom," "The Catholic University of America," and "Pope John Paul II." For all that, Curran contributed several articles to both editions of the NCE, though none on sexual ethics. He writes very appropriately for NCE2 on another controversial moral theologian, Richard McCormick, who died in 2000. In that article, something rebellious happens. Keep in mind that in the online news article cited above, the encyclopedia's editor, Berard Marthaler, confessed to having asked that writers avoid using the words reactionary and progressive. In the midst of Curran's article, we find this sentence portion, quoted here verbatim: "McCormick insisted on the [progressive?] processive nature of the search for moral truth." It is as though a tiny volcano erupted in the middle of that sentence. The three s's in "progressive" reflect the damage. But who inserted that bracketed, interrogated word, a clear affront to editorial style, in the first place? Curran himself? A copy editor distressed by the word "processive"? We may never know, but whatever happened to produce that sentence suggests a well of controversy running deep.

If this is the extent to which the heat of the Curran controversy from the 1980s shows in NCE2, we can expect to find nothing about the sex scandals that have plagued the church in recent years. As Jan Malcheski notes in his review, an article on pedophilia that appeared in one of the interim, updating yearbooks of the NCE (1996) was not reprinted in NCE2. Pedophilia in the church is indeed mentioned, for example, in the article on the Diocese of Santa Fe, in the context of discussion of a treatment center there called Via Coeli, but there is no index entry for it. I could find no mention of gay priests anywhere, as an either acknowledged or purportedly imagined reality. On the other hand, to its great credit, NCE2 includes an article on homosexuality that thoroughly updates the one in NCE1.

As David O'Connell, president of the CUA notes in his preface, Catholic encyclopedias no longer require the imprimatur. Part of the charm of a religious encyclopedia, distinguishing it from a catechism, is the vulnerability it assumes by presenting religious content in what has become the secular genre of the reference book. The absence of an imprimatur places more burdens on editors and contributors to carefully monitor their writing so as to faithfully reflect Catholic teaching. Accordingly, NCE2 is not the place for a gay teenager just coming out to go for reassurance. My hopes that the encyclopedia might have covertly slipped a more affirming attitude toward gay sexuality into an article on a different but related topic were dashed when I turned to the entry for an idea from the monastic world that has always intrigued me: "Particular Friendship." This polite term for exclusive friendships among members of religious orders has always seemed to me an entree for acceptance of at least a Platonized, nonphysical eroticism. Alas, the article there is not updated from NCE1, and reflects all the harsh judgment of its 1966 forebear. Still, the association for gay and lesbian Catholics, Dignity, does receive an entry that fairly presents its views.

"O accumulation of information!" laments Martin Buber in his theological classic, I and Thou, which is duly noted in the biographic entry that newly appears on him in NCE2. Reference books are the tugboats of the book world, hauling their cargo of factual bits to whoever needs them. They do their work at the cost of immense editorial and authorial effort, more than most users of them ever suspect. For all that, in beauty, inspiration, and depth they are always surpassable. Designed for brief and focused consultation, they supply more mere information than memorable insight. When, for instance, while reading the article "American Nativism," I came across a reflection from historian Richard Hofstadter that American Catholicism lacks "the impressive scholarship of German Catholicism or the questioning intellectualism of the French church," I wanted follow-up articles on the specific characters of German, French, and American Catholicism. I wanted an article on the allure of certain kinds of Catholicism: why, for example, the broadcast of the British dramatization of Catholic novelist Evelyn Waugh's Brideshead Revisited on American TV in the 1980s was so astonishingly successful, or what part Catholicism plays in American fascination with the Kennedy family. Perhaps it is enough for encyclopedias to raise the longing for such insights, which only further searches in the library can finally satisfy.

And so it would have been too much to hope for an article on the medieval patron of learning, Archbishop Raymond of Toledo, who is mentioned but receives no entry of his own in either edition of the NCE. I came across his name in the course of reading Aristotle's Children: How Christians, Muslims, and Jews Rediscovered Ancient Wisdom and Illuminated the Dark Ages by Richard Rubenstein. Raymond was instrumental in the process of translating Arabic renditions of Greek thought into Latin, and thus in transmitting the wisdom of the ancients to the medieval world. Rubenstein calls Raymond "one of the unrecognized heroes of Western culture." He is right about the lack of recognition. After reading Rubenstein's book, I searched reference works for articles on Raymond, but found none that gave him anything more than passing mention. Would NCE2 be the first American encyclopedia to give him his due? Evidently not. But the omission may be apt. Raymond stands for a time when it was possible to view all learning as integrated. Encyclopedias cannot presume to recover that view. The Encyclopaedia Britannica tried to do so when, with its fifteenth edition (1974), it introduced its one-volume Propaedia, which aimed to outline all knowledge. It is an ungainly work, as unfriendly to the layperson as the multivolume Library of Congress classification scheme for categorizing books is to anyone who is not a professional cataloger. NCE2 attempts the beginnings of an encompassing outline of Catholic learning. There are several entries for "Articles on" different topics, which map the terrain of such broad areas as theology, God, and church. These articles serve as extended cross-references from very general topics in Catholic life and thought to subtopics within them. For example, "Theology, Articles on," alerts readers to the articles in the encyclopedia on dogmatic, moral, biblical, and patristic theology. Nowhere, though, does an article appear that lists all the occurrences of "Articles on," as if to suggest that this longing for a bird's eye (God's eye?) view of all knowledge has become an act of hubris (for which, see Pride). And no religious encyclopedia of any kind would lend its weight to that.

Ernest H. Rubinstein is the librarian of the Ecumenical Library at the Interchurch Center in New York City.