A Unique Collection goes Online

The collection of 18th century American Catholic manuscript sermons at Georgetown provides a unique resource for students of colonial Catholic life as well as those of homiletics in general. Only four Catholic sermons appeared in America in printed form before the end of the year 1800; to these the sermon collection adds another 456 in manuscript. The four authors who appeared in print are supplemented by works by another 40, most of them Jesuits (or, after 1773, ex-Jesuits), all but one, the author of a single sermon, identified by comparison of the handwriting of the manuscripts with signed examples in the Maryland Province Archives and elsewhere. At the instigation of the American Studies Program, an initial group of 25 of the manuscript sermons are being scanned and made available on their own web page <http://www.library.georgetown .edu/sermons/>, where students will have the texts available in both low and high resolution formats to facilitate reading and transcription.

It should come as no surprise that a significant proportion of the sermons are catechetical in nature, explaining the meaning of familiar prayers or of the articles of the Creed, subjects that in later years would be the province of Sunday schools or similar avenues of instruction. The Catholic populations of Maryland and Pennsylvania, where these sermons were delivered, was both small and in some measure uneducated. But there are quite different examples, too, formal expositions of Biblical texts, sometimes at great length, and sometimes based quite consciously, even to the point of direct translation of passages, on examples provided by the great French Jesuit preachers of the late 17th and early 18th centuries such as Claude de La Colombière and Louis Bourdaloue. Very few of the sermons take up the theological differences dividing the tiny Catholic minority from the Protestants among whom they lived; a surprising exception is a sermon by Bennet Neale, S. J., a 45-page examination entitled "Upon Faith & Good Works" based on the text from Acts 16, "What must I do to be saved," and probably delivered in two parts on successive Sundays, in the course of which Calvin and Luther and their adherents come in for some fairly rough handling.

One of the serious disappointments in the manuscript sermons is their apparent indifference to political affairs; it is impossible to discover in them so much as a passing notice of the American Revolution, for example. On the other hand, they are not entirely devoid of worldly references, and a sermon delivered in 1768 provides the earliest discovered usage of the word "barbecue" in its modern sense-but raised as an example of a social affair in which the joint participation of the two sexes might give rise to an occasion for sin.

The sermons were initially pulled together from uncataloged materials in the Maryland Province Archive, the Woodstock College Archives, and Georgetown's own archives, identified, and cataloged in 1984. Since then, a number of scholars have made significant use of the collection and a number of the sermons have been transcribed and published. We hope that their availability via the World Wide Web will lead to increased use of the collection, not only by Georgetown students, and increased awareness of this central facet of colonial Catholic life.