Woodstock Theological Library

The Woodstock Theological Library is one of the oldest and most notable Catholic theological libraries in the United States. Founded in 1869 at Woodstock College (outside Baltimore, Maryland), it sojourned from 1969 to 1974 in New York City. With the 1974 closing of Woodstock College's Columbia University incarnation, the library moved to Georgetown University, Washington, DC, to become the research tool for the Woodstock Theological Center. Owned by the Maryland and New York provinces of the Society of Jesus (Jesuits), the library is currently housed as a separate collection in Georgetown's Joseph Mark Lauinger Memorial Library for use by Georgetown university students, by students and scholars of theology within the Washington Theological Consortium  and the central Atlantic states, and by scholars from around the world. In 2001 WTCL became a member of the Washington Research Library Consortium.

The collection contains approximately 190,000 circulating volumes, 700 periodical titles, as well as an up-to-day reference collection. It is especially strong in the areas of biblical studies, spirituality, church history, the Jesuits, liturgy, and the social aspects of Christianity. Its rare book holdings of over 17,500 titles is an outstanding collection of 15th through 19th century counter-reformational and American theological works. In 2002, the library began to make available on its web site a number of primary Jesuit texts, including selected letters and instructions of St. Ignatius of Loyola, and the complete works of John Courtney Murray, S.J. We also house two collections of primary works by Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, S.J. Here you can link to the catalog for the Teilhard Schmitz-Moormann Collection, including copies of most of Teilhard's published and unpublished writings and to an index to our George Barbour/Teilhard collection, including a 1934 film of Barbour/Teilhard in China. We have recently acquired a collection of primary Jesuit resources assembled by Libreria Antiquaria Soave, Torino, entitled De Societate Jesu. It is a collection of primary texts stretching from the founding of the Jesuits to the Suppression in 1773. A PDF of the Italian catalog of this collection is available at Soave Collection.

The rare books collection has recently been catalogued and is now searchable using the following link: https://tinyurl.com/woodstockrarebooks. For questions, please email woodstocktheology@georgetown.edu.