The Book

Twenty years ago, Pope Pius X commissioned a scholar to head a research into the text of the Vulgate, the 1500-year-old standard Latin version of the Bible. The scholar whom he chose for this task was his Eminence Francis Aidan Cardinal Gasquet. Since the Vulgate is the universal biblical authority for all Roman Catholics and since modern discoveries have posed questions against the validity of its sacred interpretations, Cardinal Gasquet's task is one of enormous value as well as gigantic labor. This year the jubilant festival of Easter will wear for Roman Catholics an additional brilliance; the Cardinal has announced that he expects by then to publish the second volume of his monumental findings.

Gasquet Bible. St. Jerome (A.D. 340-420) translated the Old Testament not from the Greek Septuagint but from the Hebrew original; the New Testament he took from its original Greek. In Bethlehem, where he had journeyed from Rome, he lived like a hermit while he worked. His translation gradually became recognized by the early Church with a sanction more universal than that bestowed upon any of the other Latin scriptures, which were, for the most part, localized and incomplete.

The purpose of Cardinal Gasquet's work is merely to correct as far as possible the errors of text which crept into St. Jerome's careful chapters during the centuries when these were circulated by hand and copied by hasty, sometimes stupid scribes. The Cardinal's method is simple, laborious, exact. He commands a commission of twelve Benedictine monks whose assistants hunt the libraries and collections of Europe, dig and sniff in curious corners, and retrieve for him old manu scripts. By judiciously comparing these, of which some 20,000 have now been gathered, it will be possible to determine more precise readings than those now used.

His Eminence will probably not live to finish what is one of the most comprehensive biblical researches ever attempted. Twenty years ago he was a Benedictine Abbot and a recognized authority upon the medieval Church in England. Upon his appointment he set to work in the Palace of St. Calixtus, which Pius V the last sainted Pope, gave to the Benedictine order in 1566. In 1914, Pius X spoke of him to potent Cardinal Merry del Val, then the Papal Secretary of State: "Abbot Gasquet is really the right man in the right place, and we must show him our appreciation. ..." A few months later His Holiness gave Francis Aidan Gasquet permission to wear a Cardinal's red hat.*Last week, tall, genial in his talk and warmly sensitive, looking much older than he did a few years ago, still carrying the impression of an unintentional austerity, of power, Cardinal Gasquet said to reporters that in order to fulfill the Pope's command: "I have given up everything to which I was attached in life." It was possible to imagine in the Cardinal a worthy successor to those proud Benedictines, monks of the Congregation of St. Maur-sur-Loire who helped to give the order its great tradition of scholarsh/p and learning: even to imagine in him a descendant of that hardy voyager who first collected the ancient chronicles, flowered with miracles and wars, to transmute them into the cool idiom of immortality.