The Catholic Encyclopedia: An International Work of Reference on the Constitution, Doctrine, Discipline, and History of the Catholic Church[1] (also referred to as the Old Catholic Encyclopedia and the Original Catholic Encyclopedia)[2] is an English-language encyclopedia published in the United States and designed to serve the Catholic Church. The first volume appeared in March 1907 and the last three volumes appeared in 1912, followed by a master index volume in 1914 and later supplementary volumes. It was designed "to give its readers full and authoritative information on the entire cycle of Catholic interests, action and doctrine".[3][4]
The Catholic Encyclopedia was published by the Robert Appleton Company (RAC), a publishing company incorporated at New York in February 1905 for the express purpose of publishing the encyclopedia. The five members of the encyclopedia's Editorial Board also served as the directors of the company. In 1912 the company's name was changed to The Encyclopedia Press. Publication of the encyclopedia's volumes was the sole business conducted by the company during the project's lifetime.[5]
Purpose
The encyclopedia was designed to serve the Catholic Church, concentrating on information related to the Church and explaining matters from the Catholic point of view. It records the accomplishments of Catholics and others in nearly all intellectual and professional pursuits, including artists, educators, poets and scientists. While more limited in focus than other general encyclopedias, it was far broader in scope than previous efforts at comprehensive Catholic encyclopedias, which covered only internal Church affairs.
It offers in-depth portrayals of historical and philosophical ideas, persons and events, from a Catholic perspective, including issues that divide Catholicism from Protestantism and other faith communities. Since the encyclopedia was first published starting in 1907 and has never been updated (versus the New Catholic Encyclopedia), many of its entries may be out of date either with respect to the wider culture or to the Catholic ecclesiastical world. In particular, it predates the creation of the Vatican City State (1929) and the Second Vatican Council (1962–1965), which introduced many significant changes in Catholic practice: For example, the online version of the entries on Judaism and Islam at newadvent.org states in an editorial note: "To complement this article, which was taken from the 1910 Catholic Encyclopedia, New Advent recommends a prayerful reading of 'Nostra Aetate' from the Second Vatican Council."[6]
History
The writing of the encyclopedia began on January 11, 1905, under the supervision of five editors:
The first edition was initially printed by Robert Appleton Company. The volumes came out sequentially, the first two in 1907 and the last three in 1912:[7]
The editors had their first editorial meeting at the office of The Messenger, on West 16th Street, New York City. The text received a nihil obstat from an official censor, Remy Lafort, on November 1, 1908, and an imprimatur from John Murphy Farley, Archbishop of New York. This review process was presumably accelerated by the reuse of older authorized publications. In addition to frequent informal conferences and constant communication by letters, the editors subsequently held 134 formal meetings to consider the plan, scope and progress of the work, culminating in publication on April 19, 1913. A first supplement was published in 1922; a second supplement in nine loose-leaf sections was published by The Gilmary Society between 1950 and 1958.
In 1912, a special completely illustrated, commemorative volume was awarded to those patrons who contributed to the start of the enterprise by buying multiple encyclopedia sets early on.[8]
The encyclopedia was later updated under the auspices of The Catholic University of America and a 17-volume New Catholic Encyclopedia was first published in 1967, and then in 2002.
Authors and sources
The Catholic Encyclopedia and Its Makers states that:
The work is entirely new, and not merely a translation or a compilation from other encyclopedic sources. The editors have insisted that the articles should contain the latest and most accurate information to be obtained from the standard works on each subject.
However, "from standard works" allows that some of the articles from European contributors such as Pierre Batiffol (French) and Johann Peter Kirsch (German) had previously been published in whole or in part in Europe and were translated and edited for the Encyclopedia.[10] Those who wrote new articles in English include Anthony Maas and Herbert Thurston.
Online versions
Under copyright law of the United States, all works published in the United States before 1923 are in the public domain. In 1993, Kevin Knight, then a 26-year-old resident of Denver, Colorado, decided, during the visit of Pope John Paul II to that city for World Youth Day, to launch a project to publish the 1913 edition of the encyclopedia on the Internet. Knight founded the Web site New Advent to host the undertaking. Volunteers from the United States, Canada, France, and Brazil helped in the transcription of the original material. The site went online in 1995, and transcription work ended in 1997.[Volumes 1]
In 2007, Catholic Answers published a watermarked version derived from page scans. This version has since been replaced with a transcription of the Encyclopedia similar to that found at the New Advent site.[Volumes 2] The Catholic Answers transcription, however, is an exact transcription of the original text, whereas the New Advent version at times modernizes certain words (e.g., using the names of Old Testament books found in modern Bibles, such as "1 & 2 Chronicles" and "Obadiah", in place of the Vulgate/Douay–Rheims titles, such as "1 & 2 Paralipomenon" and "Abdias") and Biblical citation formatting (i.e., the Catholic Answers version retains the original's usage of Roman numerals for chapter numbers [e.g., Genesis I,1], while the New Advent version uses Arabic numerals throughout [e.g., Genesis 1:1]).
The 1922 supplement to the Encyclopedia is also in the public domain and is available online. The New Catholic Encyclopedia also is available online at some libraries.
The First Vatican Council was convoked by Pope Pius IX on 29 June 1868, after a period of planning and preparation that began on 6 December 1864. This, the twentieth ecumenical council of the Catholic Church, held three centuries after the Council of Trent, opened on 8 December 1869 and adjourned on 20 October 1870 after the revolutionary Capture of Rome. Unlike the five earlier general councils held in Rome, which met in the Lateran Basilica and are known as Lateran councils, it met in the Vatican Basilica, hence its name. Its best-known decision is its definition of papal infallibility.
Nicholas Patrick Stephen Wiseman was a Cardinal of the Catholic Church who became the first Archbishop of Westminster upon the re-establishment of the Catholic hierarchy in England and Wales in 1850.
Beatification is a recognition accorded by the Catholic Church of a deceased person's entrance into Heaven and capacity to intercede on behalf of individuals who pray in their name. Beati is the plural form, referring to those who have undergone the process of beatification; they possess the title of "Blessed" before their names and are often referred to in English as "a Blessed" or, plurally, "Blesseds".
The Syllabus of Errors is a document issued by the Holy See under Pope Pius IX on 8 December 1864, the Feast of the Immaculate Conception, as an appendix to the Quanta cura encyclical. It condemns a total of 80 errors or heresies, articulating Catholic Church teaching on a number of philosophical and political questions.
A cathedra is the raised throne of a bishop in the early Christian basilica. When used with this meaning, it may also be called the bishop's throne. With time, the related term cathedral became synonymous with the "seat", or principal church, of a bishopric.
In Christian theology, the beatific vision is the ultimate direct self-communication of God to the individual person. A person possessing the beatific vision reaches, as a member of redeemed humanity in the communion of saints, perfect salvation in its entirety, i.e. heaven. The notion of vision stresses the intellectual component of salvation, though it encompasses the whole of human experience of joy, happiness coming from seeing God finally face to face and not imperfectly through faith..
In the Catholic Church, the seal of confession is the absolute duty of priests or anyone who happens to hear a confession not to disclose anything that they learn from penitents during the course of the Sacrament of Penance (confession). Even where the seal of confession does not strictly apply – where there is no specific serious sin confessed for the purpose of receiving absolution – priests have a serious obligation not to cause scandal by the way they speak.
The Audians or Anthropomorphites were a sect of Christians in the fourth century in Syria and Scythia, named after their founder Audius, who took literally the text of Genesis, i, 27 — that God created mankind in his own image.
Indifferentism, in the Catholic faith, is the belief held by some that no one religion or philosophy is superior to another. The Catholic Church ascribes indifferentism to many atheistic, materialistic, pantheistic, and agnostic philosophies. There are three basic types of indifferentism described by Catholic apologetics: absolute, restricted, and liberal or latitudinarian indifferentism. Indifferentism was first explicitly identified and opposed by Pope Gregory XVI, in his encyclical Mirari vos.
The New Catholic Encyclopedia (NCE) is a multi-volume reference work on Roman Catholic history and belief edited by the faculty of The Catholic University of America. The NCE was originally published by McGraw-Hill in 1967. A second edition, which gave up the articles more reminiscent of a general encyclopedia, was published in 2002.
New Advent is a website that provides online versions of various works connected with the Catholic Church.
The Preacher of the Papal Household, also known as the Apostolic Preacher, is an office in the Roman Curia. This individual provides meditation to the pope as well as other senior officials of the Catholic Church while being the only cleric allowed to preach to the Pope. Since 1980, the position has been held by Raniero Cantalamessa, of the Order of Friars Minor Capuchin.
Catholic moral theology is a major category of doctrine in the Catholic Church, equivalent to a religious ethics. Moral theology encompasses Catholic social teaching, Catholic medical ethics, sexual ethics, and various doctrines on individual moral virtue and moral theory. It can be distinguished as dealing with "how one is to act", in contrast to dogmatic theology which proposes "what one is to believe".
Lexikon für Theologie und Kirche is a German-language Catholic theological encyclopedia. Three editions have appeared so far, all published by Herder-Verlag in Freiburg im Breisgau.
The 12-volume Universal Cyclopaedia was edited by Charles Kendall Adams, and was published by D. Appleton & Company in 1900. The name was changed to Universal Cyclopaedia and Atlas in 1902, with editor.
Der Wahrheitsfreund or Der Wahrheits-Freund was the first German language Catholic newspaper in the United States and one of many German-language newspapers in Cincinnati, Ohio during the nineteenth century. It was published by the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Cincinnati, and proceeds went to the St. Aloysius Orphan Society.
A religious sister in the Catholic Church is a woman who has taken public vows in a religious institute dedicated to apostolic works, as distinguished from a nun who lives a cloistered monastic life dedicated to prayer. Both nuns and sisters use the term "sister" as a form of address.
The Benedictine Vulgate, Vatican Vulgate or Roman Vulgate is a critical edition of the Vulgate version of the Old Testament, Catholic deuterocanonical books included; the edition was supported by and begun at the instigation of the Catholic Church; it was done by the Benedictine monks of the pontifical Abbey of St Jerome-in-the-City, and was published progressively from 1926 to 1995 in 18 volumes.
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