THE 'NEW' NEW CATHOLIC ENCYCLOPEDIA

...My aim, in comparing those four reference works in 1976, was to explore their religious biases...

...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...

...It is easy to believe that the expansive inclusiveness of the earlier edition is simply no longer affordable...

...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...

...Ernest H, Rubinstein The appearance of the second edition of the New Catholic Encyclopedia (NCE2,2003) took me back in time...

...The typeface is larger and the paper whiter...

...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...

...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...

...Rubenstein calls Raymond "one of the unrecognized heroes of Western culture...

...For example, the article on charnel houses is illustrated by a haunting photo of bones resting in the Monastery of St...

...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...

...Encyclopedias cannot presume to recover that view...

...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...

...In his astutely critical review of NCE2, Jan Malcheski, a librarian at the University of St...

...This is not surprising, since Msgr...

...Evidently not...

...Would NCE2 be the first American encyclopedia to give him his due...

...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 mislead-ingly, some oddly placed photos of post-1965 church buildings...

...I wondered how a religious encyclopedia's own faith stance affected its treatment of other religions...

...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...

...They did not see eye to eye...

...There are several entries for "Articles on" different topics, which map the terrain of such broad areas as theology, God, and church...

...it is in good company with "Catholic Libraries," "Abstract Art and the Church," and "French Literature," all of which were dropped...

...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...

...These changes reflect Gale's recognizable publication style...

...When, for instance, while reading the article "American Na-tivism," I came across a reflection from historian Richard Hofstadter that American Catholicism lacks "the impressive scholarship of German Catholicism or the questioning in-tellectualism of the French church," I wanted follow-up articles on the specific characters of German, French, and American Catholicism...

...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...

...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/2002Ca-thEncyc.htm...

...I was writing a paper on reference books for library school, which I was attending in 1976, and my topic was religious encyclopedias...

...The larger typeface may also have contributed to this feature, which makes for some startling juxtapositions...

...Mary's Cathedral in San Francisco, which I visited during a meeting of the American Academy of Religion (AAR) several years ago...

...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...

...It was like greeting an old friend, then, when on turning to NCE2,1 found the same article on Judaism there, unchanged, since it first appeared thirty-eight years ago...

...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...

...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 a comfort to know that the article on Judaism was not the only one to be reprinted without an update...

...Perhaps it is enough for encyclopedias to raise the longing for such insights, which only further searches in the library can finally satisfy...

...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...

...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/li-brarians_tools/reference_reviews/review0603.html...

...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...

...But the responsibility for the cutbacks and omissions cannot reside with Gale alone...

...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...

...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...

...Gale itself, now a subsidiary of Thomson Learning, Inc., is enmeshed in the dramatic changes within publishing over the past few years...

...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...

...For example, "Theology, Articles on," alerts readers to the articles in the encyclopedia on dogmatic, moral, biblical, and patristic theology...

...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...

...The editor, Berard Marthaler, OFM Conv., observes that 3.5 million words were cut from NCE1...

...The co-publisher of the first edition was McGraw-Hill...

...He is right about the lack of recognition...

...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...

...But not even the bibliographies to these three articles were updated, which surprised me, since the AAR itself had merited an entry...

...For it immediately brought to mind my initial encounter with its predecessor, the first edition (NCE1,1966...

...After reading Rubenstein's book, I searched reference works for articles on Raymond, but found none that gave him anything more than passing mention...

...NCE2 attempts the beginnings of an encompassing outline of Catholic learning...

...Catherine in Sinai, Egypt, but it falls just above the article on the French baroque composer, Marc An-toine Charpentier...

...So anti-Semitism, too, was not alone...

...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...

...My findings, unsurprisingly, were that the later encyclopedias were more sensitive than the earlier ones to the "other" religion...

...Separate editors for the social sciences, natural sciences, literature, music, art, and architecture, are identified in the preliminary pages...

...Raymond stands for a time when it was possible to view all learning as integrated...

...I especially warmed to the article on Judaism in NCE1, written by the erudite and sympathetic John Oesterreicher, an Austrian Jewish convert to Catholicism...

...The second edition was produced over three years, in contrast to the seven that were invested in NCE1...

...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...

...This last failure to update disappointed me especially, as I would have liked some reference to the awesome new St...

...The volumes of NCE2 are on the whole slimmer than those of the earlier edition...

...To drive home the point, a color photo of Pope John XXIII is the frontispiece for the expertly executed Index volume...

...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...

...These articles serve as extended cross-references from very general topics in Catholic life and thought to subtopics within them...

...Wouldn't the work of its scholarly members be worth noting, then, in updated bibliographies...

...I was comparing four of them, the Catholic Encyclopedia (1907-1914), the Jewish Encyclopedia (1901-1906), the Encyclopedia Judaica (1972), and the NCE1.1 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 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...

...Catholic University of America is the co-publisher, as it was of NCE1...

...And no religious encyclopedia of any kind would lend its weight to that...

...But the omission may be apt...

...The second edition's twelve thousand articles are five thousand fewer than NCEl's reported seventeen thousand...

...Perhaps more hurried production schedules also distinguish publishing today from what it was forty years ago...

...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...

...Substantial cuts and omissions from the earlier edition turn out to be another feature of NCE2...

...view of all knowledge has become an act of hubris (for which, see Pride...

...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...