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Books and Religious Devotion. Allan F. Westphall
Читать онлайн.Название Books and Religious Devotion
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isbn 9780271065120
Автор произведения Allan F. Westphall
Серия Penn State Series in the History of the Book
Издательство Ingram
The vast majority of Donahoe’s publications can be classed as devotional and catechetic. Most of these were offered in inexpensive octavo or twelvemo cloth-bound volumes, with a few titles—chiefly standard Catholic prayer books likely to be valued as aids to personal and public devotion—offered in a wide range of bindings. One example of the latter is St. Joseph’s Manual, Containing a Selection of Prayers for Private and Public Devotion, published by Donahoe in 1853 in a small, sturdy eighteenmo volume (16.5 × 10 cm) of 696 pages, and offered for sale in seventeen different binding options, ranging from “strongly bound in sheep” priced at fifty cents to the de luxe “velvet, mountings with morocco case” at ten dollars.15
In 1856, Patrick Donahoe published Travels in England, France, Italy, and Ireland, by the Rev. George Foxcroft Haskins (1806–1872), in a 292-page octavo volume.16 Haskins, who converted to Catholicism in 1840 and was ordained a priest in 1844, was founder and rector of the House of the Angel Guardian in Boston, a school for orphan and destitute Catholic boys aged nine to sixteen. He obtained considerable state funds and donations for his welfare initiatives, with many donations coming from the non-Catholic community and demonstrating his function as a “liaison between Catholics and secular leaders.”17 On more than one occasion, Haskins toured England, Ireland, France, Italy, and Belgium with a view to visiting orphanages, reform schools, and other charitable institutions, and these tours provided the material for his two travel books.18
In the Boston of Haskins’s day, as Peter Holloran has shown, social welfare and charity for children had become determined by the sectarian divide between Protestants and Catholics and the formation of a dual institutional system. It is this background of sectarianism, and a common rhetoric of overt indignation, which set the theme for Haskins’s Travels. In fact, as Haskins asserts in his introduction, the very rationale for the publication is to offset the Protestant travel descriptions that dominated the market:
The Catholics of this country, though for the most part poor, are fond of reading. Many religious works, and some few histories, and tales, and political essays are the principal books within their reach. Books of travels they have none. With regard to the customs and doings of other nations they have little means of obtaining information except from Protestant tourists. But their productions, even the best of them, are so well seasoned with sneers and misrepresentations, perhaps unintentional, of the practices, ceremonies, customs, &c., of Catholic countries, that, instead of being instructive, they are pernicious and dangerous.19
The descriptions that follow predictably laud the superior virtue, philanthropy, and religious observance of the Catholics whom Haskins encounters on his tours, while what is diagnosed as Protestant ignorance and decadence is described in a manner aloof and patronizing. An anecdote relates an encounter in the Church of the Annunciation in Florence with an American artist who dismisses a group of monks as “a set of rascals,” and this provides Haskins with
one among many facts that have convinced me of how little value are the opinions and judgments of Protestants, though otherwise intelligent and agreeable men, on all questions touching the faith of Catholics. Is it that, with all their pains and money expended in the attainment of a collegiate education, they have, after all, only acquired a vast amount of IGNORANCE? Is it that all their intelligence, and refinement, and polite accomplishments, are a mere external whitening? Is it that, though adopting Christian names, they are, in fact, no better at heart than the equally polished and accomplished gentlemen of the age of Cæsar Augustus?20
As a counterweight to Protestant worldliness and spiritual laxity, Haskins notes that any “reflecting and unprejudiced tourist in Ireland” cannot help but admire the people’s “shining virtue” and firm and inflexible attachment to the Catholic faith.21 Haskins represents a widespread understanding among many contemporary Irish Catholic clergy in America of a natural convergence of an Irish identity and genuine American ideals, rather than a collision of disparate cultures. Indeed, at the center of his American teleology is the incorporation of Irish ethnicity—of these “apostles of Christianity,” “destined to be the pioneers and heralds of the true faith.”22 When it comes to ensuring the inviolable conservation of the American Constitution, Haskins insists that the Irish are the “essential auxiliaries,” having “abjured and cast away the constitution of England”: “Fuse them into the American character, and I know of no people on the Earth that would stand forth on the pages of history at once so dignified, so virtuous, so brave, so illustrious.”23
There is little if any evidence that Connary thought along the lines of the opinionated Haskins, or sympathized much with his rhetoric of sectarianism and indignation. As the next chapters will show, Connary’s interests lay elsewhere, especially in silent, pragmatic assimilation into New Hampshire village life and its institutions, in local church life, and in the day-to-day management, practical and spiritual, of a sizeable family homestead.
Connary’s copy of Haskins’s Travels is an octavo volume in quarter leather and maroon cloth binding, with blind-stamped border design to the boards and gilt lettering on the spine. It is evident that Connary accorded no special value to the thirteen pages of advertisements at the rear of the volume, because copious newspaper and magazine clippings have been pasted across advertised titles (the subject of some discussion in the next chapter). The annotation and leaves inserted by Connary are much less extensive than in, for instance, Balmes’s Fundamental Philosophy or Kinane’s Dove of the Tabernacle. They consist mostly of his routine prayers, religious assertions, and some diary recordings, with no direct association to, or commentary on, Haskins’s text.
A note by Thomas Connary in The Sinner’s Guide (and found in several other volumes) states that “I had the same work in my native home, Old Ireland,” and it provides some insight into the tandem nature of European and North American Catholic print enterprises. Donahoe’s declared aim, as we saw, was to “reproduce many of the very valuable works issued from time to time in Europe.” For Connary, the reacquisition of Catholic literature was motivated in part by nostalgia, by a desire to be once again with the books available in “Old Ireland” that helped structure early religious education, and in part by a perceived need for spiritual guidance and catechetical instruction in the new setting of his New Hampshire family homestead.
We need to recognize, too, the central importance of newspapers and magazines, from which Connary pasted innumerable clippings—on a wide range of subjects—into his books wherever blank space allowed. The key publication here is the Boston Pilot, which was to become the official newspaper for the Archdiocese of Boston, published weekly since 1829 and an important organ for Catholic opinion, particularly with the Irish in New England.24 From 1838 until his death in 1901, Patrick Donahoe was the editor and proprietor of the Pilot, which remains in print to this day as one of America’s oldest Catholic newspapers. An advertisement at the back of Haskins’s Travels of 1856 offers a subscription to the newspaper “at the low price of $2.50 a year” and advertises the Pilot as “a journal devoted to the welfare of the Irish race in America. It contains news from all parts of Ireland, and other countries, and is a faithful guide to the emigrant in his new home.” Also represented in Connary’s compendium of newspaper and magazine items are clippings from the Boston Weekly Globe (published from 1873 until 1892, when it was absorbed by the Boston Daily Globe), as well as the more local Coös Republican (published 1855–81, from Lancaster, New Hampshire), and the People and Patriot (1883–92, from Concord, New Hampshire). In the copy of Julian of Norwich’s Revelations, we find inserted correspondence to and from the Pilot and the Coös County Democrat pertaining to Connary’s settlement of subscription fees and the purchase of almanacs.25 In the same volume is found Connary’s own duplicate copy of a letter dated November 24, 1884, that was sent to the publishers of the New England Homestead, opening thus: “Though I have now much more papers