Lloyd Schofield Hates the Covenant

San Francisco, land of alleged tolerance and real discrimination, is now the home of an effort by supposed “civil rights advocates” to outlaw Judaism. Not to mention parental medical choices according to normal US custom.

Under San Francisco’s proposed law, nobody would be allowed to circumcise any male under 18, regardless of parental permission. The circumciser or mohel would be subject to a year in prison and a $1000 fine.

Meanwhile, San Francisco is all in favor of abortions, tattoos, and piercings on minors without parental permission, not to mention legalization of psychotropic drugs, polygamy, sex with minors, using public parks as public bathrooms, female ‘circumcision’ (because it’s multicultural!), and every other form of filth. All religions are to be legal there — except traditional ones. Everything goes — except doing what’s right.

It’s happened before. Remember 1st Maccabees?

“The king also sent edicts by messenger to Jerusalem and the towns of Judah, directing them to adopt customs foreign to the country… profaning Sabbaths and feasts; defiling the sanctuary and everything holy; building altars, shrines and temples for idols; sacrificing pigs and unclean beasts; leaving their sons uncircumcised; and prostituting themselves to all kinds of impurity and abomination; so that they should forget the Law and revoke all observance of it. Anyone not obeying the king’s command was to be put to death… Yet there were many in Israel who stood firm… they chose death rather than… profanation of the holy covenant….”

Two Useful Books by Fr. Thomas Livius

Yeah, I know I never got around to inputting much of that book, and I don’t know why nobody’s just gone ahead and scanned The Blessed Virgin in the Fathers of the First Six Centuries, since it’s so far out of print it’s not funny. (Anybody but the people selling CDs and DVDs full of scanned Catholic books, anyway.)

For some reason, Worldcat has listed the 1893 Benziger edition as “thesis/dissertation”. Thus, it’s a pain in the butt to pull it out of the records.

But your man Fr. Livius has a couple of books online in handy scanned form:

Mary in the Epistles; or, The implicit teaching of the Apostles concerning the Blessed Virgin contained in their writings. Illustrated from the Fathers and Other Authors with Introductory Chapters. 1891. 310 pp.

S. Peter, Bishop of Rome; or, The Roman Episcopate of the Prince of the Apostles. Proved from the Fathers, History, and Archaeology, and Illustrated by Arguments from Other Sources.

He also translated Liguori’s Explanation of the Psalms and Canticles of the Divine Office in 1887. (There’s another English translation by Grimm, which came afterwards.) It’s not online, but reprints are available.

Other books by the man:

The order of corporate reunion, 1882. 31 p. A reprint from The Irish Ecclesiastical Record.

A brief memoir of the Rev. Fr. John Baptist Lans, C.SS.R., 1890.

Our Lady of Perpetual Succour: A manual of devotion for every day in the month by Henri Saintrain. Trans. by Livius, 1886.

Father Furniss and his work for children, 1896.

Cornelius a Lapide: The Great Commentary

Some Jesuit dude named Cornelius a Lapide did a big ol’ commentary on the whole Bible. “All these commentaries are on a very large scale. They explain not only the literal, but also the allegorical, tropological, and anagogical sense of the sacred text, and furnish a large number of quotations from the Church Fathers and the later interpreters of Holy Writ during the Middle Ages. Like most of his predecessors and contemporaries, a Lapide intended to serve not only the historical and scientific study of the Bible, but, even more, the purposes of pious meditation, and especially of pulpit exposition.” It was originally written in Latin, of course, to allow a worldwide audience.

Bits and pieces of it are available online for your convenience. There’s a page that includes little bitty pieces but advertises itself as being the whole schmole, for example. Given the page counts below, you can see that they were only using the summary material. The New Testament commentaries are a lot more available than the OT ones.

However, U of Toronto has scanned in many of the volumes as translated into English by Thomas W. Mossman and W.F. Cobb, albeit with their oft-incredibly-crappy cataloguing. Unless noted otherwise, all editions have the same page count. (Mossman left out some “technical material” from his translation which Loreto Publications added back in; so if you’re wondering why Loreto Publications claims their mostly-reprint edition to be the first translation into English of Lapide’s gospel commentaries, that’s why.)

S. Matthew’s Gospel, Chapters 1-9, trans. Mossman. 1887. 379 pp.

S. Matthew’s Gospel, Chapters 10-21, trans. Mossman. 1889. 435 pp. 1908 ed.

S. Matthew’s Gospel, Chapters 22-28; S. Mark’s Gospel complete. Trans. Mossman. 1891. 448 pp.

S. Luke’s Gospel, trans. Mossman. 1892. 528 pp. 1908 ed.

S. John’s Gospel, Chapters 1-11, trans. Mossman. 1887. 416 pp. 1908 ed.

S. John’s Gospel, Chapters 12-21, and Epistles of John 1, 2, and 3, trans. Mossman. 1892. 516 pp. 1908 ed.

1 Corinthians, trans. Cobb. 1908. 408 pp.

2nd Corinthians and Galatians, trans. Cobb. 1908. 360 pp.

Volumes in Latin of Commentaria in Sacram Scripturam:

Paris 1891 edition, all divvied up into volumes and chapters and everything. Digitized by the New Leon university in Mexico.

Vol. 2: Joshua, Judges, Ruth; the 4 Books of the Kings (today, Samuel and Kings); Chronicles; Ezra, Nehemiah, Tobit, Judith, Esther, and Maccabees. Naples, 1854. 903 pp. Nice lectionary index in back for all volumes.

Vol. 6: The Major Prophets. Naples, 1856. 1276 pp.

Vol. 7: The Minor Prophets. Naples, 1857. 760 pp.

Vol. 8: The Four Gospels. Naples, 1857. 1010 pp.

Vol. 9: S. Paul’s Epistles. Naples, 1858.

Vol. 10: Acts of the Apostles, the Canonical Epistles, and the Apocalypse (Revelation). Naples, 1859. 1154 pp.

Antwerp edition, 1694, at the University of Madrid, over at the Hathi Trust:
Book of Wisdom.
Ecclesiastes.
Song of Songs.

“Ite Ad Thomam” Out-of-Print Library

Other than U of Toronto, Catholic universities have been very slow to scan their formidable collections of library books now in the public domain. Very slow. Slooooooow. And of course, a lot of seminaries, orders, and similar institutions threw out books rather recklessly in the Sixties, Seventies, and Eighties, so some of them don’t have the old books around at all. There are a lot of reprint houses, of course, and a lot of universities with books you can visit, but first you have to know what you’re looking for and what is authoritative and useful. Nobody can reprint everything. Moreover, some of those big ol’ tomes aren’t easy to scan.

The odd result is that a lot of collections of formerly-famous, now-obscure, theological books on CD are still kicking around in the Catholic world, well after most people have been able to trust to the Internet Archive (or even to “borrowing” e-versions of books from its new Open Library).

The Ite ad Thomam Out-of-Print Library is a particularly big one.