“But ‘they were submitted to the most competent judge for criticism and,
if need be, correction.’ Were they submitted to any judge at all, or to
any man of sense, before they were sent off to be printed and scattered
throughout the English speaking world? Is it permissible to imagine for
a moment that any Catholic could have read some of those pages and not
have been filled with horror at the multiplied and studied insults to
everything he holds most sacred in his religion? Or did ‘the editor
responsible for the theological side of the work’ reserve for himself the
right to reject or accept whatever recommended itself to his superior
judgment?”
The article then points out that “far from being just to Catholics, the
_Britannica_ pointedly and persistently discriminated against them.”
The article on the Episcopalians was assigned to the Rev. Dr. D. D.
Addison, Rector of All Saints, Brookline, Mass.; that on Methodists to
the Rev. Dr. J. M. Buckley, Editor of the _Christian Advocate_, New
York; that on the Baptists to the Rev. Newton Herbert Marshall, Baptist
Church, Hampstead, England; that on the Jews to Israel Abrahams, formerly
President of the Jewish Historical Society and now Reader on Talmudic
and Rabbinic Literature in Cambridge, and so on for the Presbyterians,
Unitarians, Lutherans, etc. But in the case of the Catholic Church not
only its history but its theology was given to a critic who was neither
a theologian, nor a cleric, nor even a Catholic, and who, as Father
Campbell notes, is not known outside of his little London coterie.
The _Britannica’s_ editor also apologized for his encyclopædia by
stating that “Father Braun, S. J., has _assisted_ us in our article on
_Vestments_, and that Father Delehaye, S. J., has contributed, among
other articles, those on _The Bollandists and Canonization_. Abbé
Boudinhon and Mgr. Duchesne, and Luchaire and Ludwig von Pastor and Dr.
Kraus have also contributed, and Abbot Butler, O. S. B., has written on
the Augustinians, Benedictines, Carthusians, Cistercians, Dominicans and
Franciscans”; and, finally: “The new _Britannica_ has had the honor of
having as a contributor His Eminence James Cardinal Gibbons, Archbishop
of Baltimore, who has written of the Roman Catholic Church in America.”
“But, after all,” answers Father Campbell, “it was not a very generous
concession to let Father Joseph Braun, S. J., _Staatsexamen als
Religionsoberlehren für Gymnasien_, University of Bonn, _assist_
the editors in the very safe article on _Vestments_, nor to let the
Bollandists write a column on their publication, which has been going
on for three or four hundred years. The list of those who wrote on the
_Papacy_ is no doubt respectable in ability if not in number, but we note
that the editor is careful to say that the writers of that article were
‘_principally_’ Roman Catholics.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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