Read Old Books!

A passage in an essay by John Dunlap struck me:

Down in the stacks at the main library on campus [at Santa Clara University], I pulled a copy of Jacques Maritain's memoir The Peasant of the Garonne, a book I hadn't read in years. ... Paging through the book, I noticed that the due slip in the back recorded a steady stream of check-out dates until 1971. Apparently, no one in the university had looked at this famous book for 32 years.

On a hunch, I looked up a few other Maritain titles. Then I got into it, and spent the next hour combing the stacks and pawing through the library's huge collection of, to me, familiar Catholic writers: Knox, Guardini, Newman, Chesterton, Belloc, Gilson, Pieper, Benson, Dawson, Lunn, Dimnet. With few exceptions (often as not, a date when I myself had checked out the book), the due slips told the same story, again and again: a long series of check-out dates stopping, suddenly, in the late 1960s and early 1970s.

Isn't that appalling!  The treasures of piety unopened!  One could add to this list several notable Dominicans, such as Vann, or McNabb.  There were so many great writers in the cause of Catholicism in the first half of the twentieth century, whether clerical or lay: to think they now lie forgotten.

There has been too much forgetting in the Church of Christ: too much of that pernicious hermeneutic of rupture, too much of a tendency to work toward achieving what Pol Pot planned for Cambodia: Year Zero.  Too many Catholics reject everything in the Church between the first century and Vatican II.  They are too stupid to see that that invalidates all the claims of the Church; then again, they may not believe any such claims, and prefer a therapeutic, subjective religion making no great demands.

Now, I've always been the eccentric who borrows the books that no one else has for years... and my own books at home feature treasures old as well as new.  Certainly, I've read some Newman, some Belloc, though not as much as I should. 

Just to list a few older (let's be honest and say pre-Conciliar) authors I have to hand:

• Knox (2 books);
• Chesterton (5 books);
• Bl Columba Marmion (5 books);
• Abbot Anscar Vonier (9 books, incl. his Collected Works).

Other authors of importance in my reading, overlapping into the time after the Council, would include Louis Bouyer, Pius Parsch, Joseph Jungmann (though I have read them critically).

It reminds me that just about the first work on the Mass that I read was Daniel Rock's Hierurgia (1833), published in 1830; and the other was Fortescue's The Mass: A Study of the Roman Liturgy (1912).

I tend to trust older works of theology, published before about 1960, or better still, even earlier; whereas I do check the bona fides of modern writers.

Of course, I am very glad to read good solid reliable modern authors, such as Aidan Nichols, or Paul Haffner, or John Saward – indeed, I've just ordered several books by the two last-named theologians.

Quaintly, I even like Catholic books to bear both imprimatur and nihil obstat.

In my opinion, too many "Catholic" books to-day are full of psycho-babble.

Do readers have any thoughts to add?