1��1@������Nineteenth-Century Catholic Serials
and the Interest in Them
The interest in nineteenth-century American Catholic serials began long before the end of that century. At first, the attention of Catholic authors centered around the need for such publications. Compared to other Christian denominations in the United States, the Catholic Church began rather late with the publication of serials. The primary reasons being the relatively small number of Catholics in the United States during the first decades of the nineteenth century and also the anti-Catholic atmosphere that prevailed at different times and places in this country during the previous century. Beginnings were sporadic with many brief attempts at publication. By the midpoint of the century, Catholic authors were not only writing about the need for a Catholic periodical press but were already writing about the publications themselves and also about their history. This interest in the beginnings of American Catholic journalism would continue for more than a century with librarians and historians attempting at first to identify and preserve and then later to document the nature and importance of this category of Catholic literature.
Much speculation surrounds exactly which was the first Catholic serial in the United States. Most writers who have addressed the topic of the history of these publications have had their own opinion, which varied according to the author's knowledge of the subject and of his definition of what made a publication Catholic.
Usually the credit goes to the Michigan Essay also known as Essai du Michigan published for a short time in Detroit circa 1809 by Rev. Gabriel Richard, a French Sulpician and one of the founders of the University of Michigan. However, Rev. Thomas Middleton, O.S.A., wrote in 1908 that he considered The Shamrock, which was published in New York City beginning in 1814, the first Catholic serial. He considered the Michigan Essay to be too secular to be deemed Catholic. Middleton, working at Villanova College in Pennsylvania, was the first person to inventory and chronicle the history of Catholic serials in the United States. In 1893, in the Records of the American Catholic Historical Society of Philadelphia, he listed 473 titles for which he gave the place of publication, language, character (school, devotional, general, society, etc.), frequency, and dates of publication. Fifteen years later, Middleton supplemented his original list with the addition of ninety more titles.
Most of the writers on nineteenth Catholic serials, such as Middleton, have spent a good portion of their time with the formidable task of identifying the numerous titles. This difficulty can be explained by examining some of the characteristics of these early publications. Many of them were published by laymen or by clergy working independently, rather than by a official agency of the Church, such as a diocese or religious order. The private venture was often too localized or it floundered due to insufficient planning, or lack of journalistic expertise, financial backing, or institutional support. The result of these good intentions was often a very short-lived publication that was quickly forgotten and often haphazardly preserved, if at all. All this was especially true for the period preceding the second (1866) and second third (1884) Plenary Councils of Baltimore, which encouraged the publication of official Catholic serials, such as diocesan newspapers, as a way to support and strengthen the faith of the burgeoning population of Catholics in the United States. Even before the Councils, the rapidly growing Catholic immigrant population had triggered the founding of numerous publications, many of which were in the native languages of the target audiences. However, this is not to say that there were not official Church publications prior to 1866. In 1831 Rev. Edward D. Fenwick, first Bishop of Cincinnati established the Catholic Telegraph, which is still the current official organ of the Archdiocese of Cincinnati and has the distinction of being the oldest continually published Catholic serial in the United States.
The two articles by Middleton which strove to identify serial publications were followed in 1915 with a more analytical piece. Rev. Paul J. Foik, librarian at the University of Notre Dame, wrote about the condition of Catholic journalism between 1809 and 1840. He concentrated on the Irish nature of the first American Catholic serials and on the later impetus to Catholic journalism provided by the need to defend the faith from its various, and vitriolic detractors. He in fact states that until 1840 the "general policy of Catholic journalism was a defense of Catholicism by vigorous appeals to reason and dogmatic principles." Foik later greatly enlarges upon his early article when he publishes in 1930 the treatise, Pioneer Catholic Journalism, which relates in twenty-seven chapters the history of a like number of pre-1840 Catholic serials.
In the next phase of interest, more attention was given to accessing and preserving the early serial publications. Although certain farsighted scholars such as John Gilmary Shea (1824-1892) had at an early date been concerned with the preservation of Catholic serial literature, the subject was not actually addressed in any detail until much later. In the 1930s there began some mention of the need to locate and protect the early Catholic serials, which at this time were beginning to be viewed as vital elements in the history of American Catholicism. Thomas Meehan included the location of the various titles he discusses in his article on early Catholic weeklies in the Historical Records and Studies of the United States Catholic Historical Society. He mainly describes titles possessed by Georgetown University Library, but he also mentions other publications in various locations such as Villanova University, University of Notre Dame, and the Dominican House of Studies in Washington, D.C. Rev. Joseph R. Frese supplements Meehan 1937 work on Catholic weeklies with an article of his own in 1940. He adds fifty-eight titles to Meehan's list and gives the holdings of each in the libraries of Georgetown University, Catholic University, the Library of Congress, and the Woodstock Library. For many, however, he was able to identify the title but was unable to locate any holdings. Much of the information contained in the previously cited publications was synthesized in 1952 by Rev. William L. Lucey, Librarian at Holy Cross College, in a series of four articles appearing in the Records of the American Catholic Historical Society and republished in 1953 as a monograph. This work is a chronological history by year of American Catholic magazines, excluding newspapers, from 1865 to 1900. Although Lucey draws heavily on earlier studies, especially those of Middleton, his writing is more an integrated history than the briefer works that preceded his. Lucey also takes care to relate to the reader the location of many of the publications he discusses.
Another effort in synthesizing the early work on Catholic serials is Bro. David Martin's 1955 master's thesis completed at the University of Chicago's Graduate School of Library Science. His thesis, entitled "A History of Catholic Periodical Production in the United States, 1830-1951" was reprinted as four articles in Catholic Library World. Although Brother Martin takes the study of Catholic serial literature up to the middle of the twentieth century, his work is grounded in nineteenth century beginnings. The work of Martin resembles that of Lucey in that both exclude newspapers from their studies. More importantly, however, they both venture beyond the mere identification and description of serial publications by relating the history of American Catholic serials to the more general history of the Catholic Church in the United States and also to the overall social, political, and religious climate in the United States at that time. Whereas Lucey provides a historical chronology, Martin has organized his work by subject or type of serial publication. Therefore, readers can inform themselves on juvenile, theological, or devotional serials or those dedicated to missionary enterprises. Martin, along with Lucey, has written an excellent history of the nineteenth-century Catholic serials in the United States.
They did not, however, write the final word. For that one must turn to the voluminous and exhaustive work of Willging and Hatzfeld. In 1951, Eugene P. Willging, director of libraries at the Catholic University of America, set out to create a work which would supplement the early findings of Thomas Middleton. He was assisted by Herta Hatzfeld who would finish the project after his death in 1965. The product of their fifteen years of labor was Catholic Serials of the Nineteenth Century in the United States: a Descriptive Bibliography and Union List. This multivolume publication, portions of which first appeared in the Records of the American Catholic Historical Society of Philadelphia, identified 1392 Catholic periodicals, including newspapers, that originated in the nineteenth-century United States. Their work is nothing less than amazing in its comprehensiveness.
Catholic Serials of the Nineteenth Century in the United States is not a narrative history similar to Lucey's or Martin's. Willging and Hatzfeld produced a work comprised of short descriptive paragraphs and tabular data. Occasionally the terseness of language and the abbreviations used can make it a bit difficult to comprehend, but the benefits are well worth what little additional effort is involved. The described publications are arranged geographically by state and then alphabetically by city. For each state, several paragraphs are given on its Catholic heritage, and additional background information is also provided for most cities. For each serial title a brief history, language, place and dates of publication, frequency, known library locations, citations in the literature, and "degree of Catholicity" are given. The latter is rather interesting; each title is coded on how officially Catholic it is. For example, those "publications official by purpose" are coded: 1a, officially commended by a bishop; 1b, published by a religious order; or, 1c, published by priest or layman. The other two categories are: 2, "Catholic by attitude;" and 3, "Catholic by national tradition." For each state, there are concluding paragraphs which summarize in tabular form the preceding findings. These provide for the state a chronology of publications, the number of publications in each language, the number with particular frequencies, etc. For anyone interested in studying the Catholic history of a state or major city, Catholic Serials of the Nineteenth Century in The United States is an appropriate place to begin.
A statistical analysis of the entire publication comprises the final volume of Willging and Hatzfeld's work. Data taken from the volumes pertaining to the individual states has been combined and analyzed in a number of ways. First, there is an alphabetical listing of the 1384 titles described in the other volumes, to which is added an addendum of eight heretofore undiscovered titles. For each the usual information on dates, frequency, language, and Catholicity is given. The same titles are again listed in chronological order by the initial date of publication with dates and place repeated. Willging and Hatzfeld have extracted various sorts of information from their raw data and have segregated it into tables. They report how many of the 1392 serials are of a particular frequency, a particular language, or of a particular type. Therefore the researcher can quickly identify the Italian or Polish language publications, or know which and how many titles were juvenile or temperance serials or musical magazines. The statistical volume holds much information for the person interested in Catholic serials or in nineteenth-century American Catholic intellectual life.
As can be seen from the previously cited studies, much attention has been given to the identification of the first Catholic serials in the United States. Surprisingly, not the same quantity of effort has been given to identifying their twentieth-century counterparts. As year 2000 approaches, and despite the technological progress made in providing access to information resources, little has been done to identify and make available many Catholic serials of this century. These publications have recorded years of enormous change within the American Church and are as important to the history of this century as their predecessors were to the nineteenth century. Twenty percent of the titles listed in the "magazine" section of the 1995 Catholic Press Directory have no records in OCLC; most of these are the more popular or ephemeral publications. What does this mean? Certainly it makes study of these materials difficult unless a researcher has access to a private cache. It may also mean that these serials are not preserved and the information contained in them lost. Further research is needed in this area. It is time to again be inspired by Middleton and his successors and do for today's serials that was done for those of the last century.
For more than one-hundred years, beginning with the work of Thomas Middleton, there has been an interest in nineteenth-century American Catholic serial publications and in the information that they contain. Each author built upon past research, culminating in the work of Martin, and Willging and Hatzfeld. At first librarians and historians were satisfied with the identification of titles. With their interest piqued, they continued to enlarge upon the work of their predecessors by identifying addition titles and also by relating the publications to each other and to the events of the time. Research on this body of literature was seen as being particularly important since it chronicled the beginnings, as well as periods of conflict and tremendous growth, of the Catholic Church in the United States. Without the knowledge gained by the scholarly work in nineteenth-century periodicals, the history of Catholicism in the United States would much the poorer.
References
. Thomas C. Middleton, "Catholic Periodicals Published in the United States," Records of the American Catholic Historical Society of Philadelphia 19 (March 1908): 23.
Thomas A. Middleton, "A List of Catholic and Semi-Catholic Periodicals Published in the United States from the Earliest Date Down to the Close of the Year 1892," Records of the American Catholic Historical Society of Philadelphia 4 (1893): 213-242.
Middleton, "Catholic Periodicals Published in the United States."
For a more extensive explanation of the weaknesses of the early Catholic press, see, L.W. Reilly, "The Weak Points of the Catholic Press," American Ecclesiastical Review 10 (February 1994): 117-125.
Paul J. Foik, "Pioneer Efforts in Catholic Journalism in the United States, 1809-1840," The Catholic Historical review 1, no. 3 (October 1915): 259-270.
Paul J. Foik, Pioneer Catholic Journalism (New York: United States Catholic Historical Society, 1930; reprint, New York: Greenwood Press, 1969).
Thomas F. Meehan, "Early Catholic Weeklies," Historical Records and Studies 28 (1937): 237-255.
Joseph R. Frese, "Pioneer Catholic Weeklies," Historical Records and Studies 30 (1939):237-255.
William L. Lucey, "An Introduction to Catholic Magazines," (Records of the American Catholic Historical Society of Philadelphia 63 no. 1-4, 1952: reprint, Philadelphia: American Catholic Historical Society of Philadelphia, 1952)
David Martin, "Catholic Periodical History," parts 1-4, Catholic Library World, 28, no. 2 (November 1956): 74-83; no. 5 (February 1957): 223-232; no. 7 (April 1957): 341-349; no. 8 (May 1957): 401-418.
Eugene P. Willging and Herta Hatzfeld, Catholic Serials of the Nineteenth Century in the United States (Washington, D.C.: Catholic University of America Press, 1959-1968)
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