chapter 5 The Catholic Encyclopedia
No one who is interested in human history, past and present, can ignore the Catholic Church […]1 —Preface to the Catholic Encyclopedia, 1907 ∵
Before proceeding, it will be helpful to review what has been discussed so far. The introduction presented the thesis that Wynne’s life and work, particularly his founding of the Catholic Encyclopedia and America, represented attempts at American Catholic inculturation. The argument employed an incarnational model of theological inculturation developed by Schineller, and was based on Portier’s assertion that the two-step process of accommodation and transfor- mation implicit in Schineller’s model was “more adequate for talking, both theologically and historically, about the life and thought of Catholics in the United States.”2 The first four chapters of the book explored what Schineller calls the three poles of inculturation. Chapter 1 corresponded to the first pole of inculturation, “The Situation.” It surveyed the progressive worldview in order to understand the cultural context within which us Catholicism operated in the late nine- teenth and early twentieth century. Chapter 2 corresponded to the second pole of inculturation, “The Message.” It explored the ways in which us Catholics used the Catholic tradition to respond to the progressive worldview as part of their effort to present an alternate plan for social regeneration. Chapters 3 and 4 corresponded to the third pole of inculturation, “The Agent.” These chapters presented an overview of the life and thought of Wynne, who dedicated himself to creating resources that facilitated American Catholic incultura- tion. Throughout the first four chapters, an attempt was made to stress the
1 Preface to The Catholic Encyclopedia (New York: Appleton, 1907), New Advent, http://home .newadvent.org/cathen/ (accessed July 31, 2016). 2 Portier, “Americanism and Inculturation,” 140.
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dialectical process of accommodation–transformation inherent in Progressive Era America Catholicism. The final two chapters will present historically and theologically contextual- ized overviews of the Catholic Encyclopedia and America, respectively, in order to demonstrate the validity of the argument that the two works represent attempts at theological inculturation, and consequentially that us Catholic intellectual life was not dormant in the first decades of the twentieth century. Instead, Wynne and his contemporaries engaged progressivism on its own terms in an attempt to prove a providential fit between Catholic theology and us culture.
Confronting Nativism and Anti-catholicism
At the dawn of the twentieth century, American Catholics shared the collec- tive understanding that an authoritative reference source was needed to rep- resent topics related to Roman Catholicism.3 “The market was flooded with general and special encyclopedias, but all of them fell short in presenting the Catholic story with committed integrity.”4 The need for accurate representa- tion was particularly acute in the golden age of print media because Catholics were increasingly becoming the victims of nativist fears and misrepresenta- tion in the secular press. As a young scholastic wandering the stacks of Woodstock’s library, Wynne dreamed as early as the 1880s of systematically compiling an authoritative Catholic reference work for the English-speaking world. Wynne’s vision of a Catholic Encyclopedia in English would likely have remained a dream had he not providentially penned an article critical of Appletons’ Universal Cyclopae- dia and Atlas in the June 1902 edition of the Messenger. If the ultimate cause of the Catholic Encyclopedia lay in Wynne’s Woodstock experience, the errors and misrepresentation Wynne found in Appletons’ Cyclopedia were the proximate causes for action.
3 The following chapter draws upon a piece the author published in American Catholic Studies in 2009. For the original essay, see Michael Lombardo, “A Voice of Our Own: America and the Encyclopaedia Britannica Controversy, 1911–1936,” American Catholic Studies 120, no. 4 (2009): 1–31. 4 The Encyclopedia of American Catholic History (Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press, 1997), s.v. “Catholic Encyclopedia,” 261.