March 2000
Newsletter #34
 

Off- Campus Storage Frees Space for New Books

Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Database

Study Carrels Wired

Untangling the Web: Specialized Search Engines

Electronic Reference Shelf

Literary Gold Mine Online

CETEDOC Library of Christian Latin Texts

Tax Forms Available

Food for Fines

Barbecues: an Occasion for Sin?

Jon Reynolds, University Archivist

Third Century Campaign Progress

CNDLS: Collaboration to Focus on New Learning Environments

Barbecues: an Occasion for Sin?

At the instigation of Georgetown’s American Studies Program, an initial group of 25 of the manuscript sermons are being scanned and made available at <http://www.library.georgetown .edu/sermons/>, where researchers 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 small and, in some measure, uneducated. But some of the sermons are 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 seventeenth and early eighteenth 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” and based on the text from Acts 16, “What must I do to be saved.” This sermon was 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: a sermon delivered in 1768 provides one of the earliest discovered usages of the word “barbecue” in its modern sense, but it’s 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.

Identified and cataloged in 1984, the sermons were initially pulled together from uncataloged materials in the Maryland Province Archive, the Woodstock College Archives, and Georgetown’s own University Archives. Since then, scholars have made significant use of the collection, and a number of the sermons have been transcribed and published. The Library hopes that their availability via the World Wide Web will lead to increased use of the collection and increased awareness of this central facet of colonial Catholic life.