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Father Joseph Greaton, S.J., the founder of Old
Saint Joseph's Church in Philadelphia, is rightly regarded as
one of the most important of the Jesuit missionaries in colonial
America. Born in 1679, Greaton is recorded as being in Maryland
in 1722. Shortly thereafter he transferred his activities to Philadelphia,
where he served almost all the rest of his life. While the Bible
he used might not be as exciting as the relic of a major saint,
it is worthy of notice, not least in Philadelphia.
| The first tantalizing mention of "Father
Greaton's Bible" is found in an unpublished typescript
history of the early Pennsylvania missions by Father Robert
Parsons, S.J., written at the time he served as a curate at
Old Saint Joseph's in the 1950s. Unfortunately, Father Parsons
neglected to describe the Bible in an easily identifiable
way, and with his death in 1963 the subject passed into obscurity.
He did note, however, that he had seen the Bible in the collections
of the Woodstock College Library. At that time Woodstock was
the seminary for the Maryland Province of the Society of Jesus,
and its library, which now runs to nearly 200,000 volumes,
even then had a collection of over 10,000 early and rare books.
Mercifully, not so very many of these were, or are, Bibles. |
Old St. Joseph's Catholic Church, gateway
from Willings Alley. Courtesy of Old St. Joseph's Archives;
photo by Laird Bindrim, St. Joseph's University Photographer.
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A first attempt to find the missing Bible involved
visiting the lower level of Lauinger Library where Woodstock Theological
Center Library is now housed, to read the shelf list cards for
the rare book collection. Father Henry Bertels, S.J., Woodstock's
librarian in the 1970s, made hundreds of meticulous annotations
on these cards during his tenure. Nonetheless, the search proved
fruitless. A second, and successful, effort involved physically
picking up and examining each Bible in the collection that was
old enough to have been owned-or used-by Father Greaton, who died
at the Jesuit residence at Bohemia Manor in northern Maryland
in 1753.
Sure enough, one of the first items checked was
a two-volume first edition set of the Catholic Old Testament in
English, published in Douai in what is now northern France in
1609-10. Both volumes were rebound in the 19th century by an indifferently
talented craftsman; both revealed considerable and lamentable
flaws in the paper of their text blocks. But in the second volume-had
it been in the first Father Bertels would certainly have found
it-was a pasted-in note reading:
Residentiæ Baltimorensi
Ex domo [probably a misspelling of "dono"]
Rdi. P. Jos: Greaton
Anno Dñi 1752
Residentiæ Sti Josephi
in Baltimore
A search turned up no companion New Testament, hardly
surprising given the rarity of editions of the Catholic Bible,
or even any part of it, in colonial America. The first Catholic
Bible to be printed in America would not appear until 1790.
The route Father Greaton's Bible took to Woodstock
is circuitous, and not entirely known. Considered redundant in
Baltimore, it was given in 1853 by Father Timothy O'Brien to the
then-Jesuit editor, collector, and bibliographer Father Joseph
Maria Finotti, who duly recorded the gift in the book itself.
But Father Finotti died in 1879 in Colorado, leaving a voluminous
library of American Catholic rarities, the basis for his Bibliographica
Catholica Americana, published in 1872; his literary executor
was the noted Catholic historian John Gilmary Shea. Shea picked
out from Finotti's books those he wanted; the rest he consigned
to a series of auctions. We know he didn't pick out this admittedly
somewhat tattered copy of the Douai Bible, because Shea's library
passed intact to Georgetown University following his death in
1892. The Woodstock stamps in the two volumes of the Bible are
early, and it's just possible that the books were purchased at
the Finotti sales; certainly they entered the Woodstock collection
not long after that time.
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