Word: bollandists
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...Century or Two. This week the society will publish its semiannual volume of studies called the Analecta Bollandiana, a dry, multilingual collection of research on the lives of the saints. The latest Analecta, for example, contains one article on the Bollandists' current favorite topic. St. Martin of Tours, plus others on such minutiae as an early Swedish manuscript dealing with Persian saints and a papyrus describing the life of St. Phileas. Eventually, this material may find its way into the Bollandists' Acta Sanctorum of which only 69 volumes have been published in the 360 years since Dutch Jesuit...
Membership in the society (which takes its name from Father John van Bolland, Rosweyde's successor) is limited to six priest-scholars, who are always Jesuits and almost always Belgians. The Bollandists. who have no parish duties and seldom give public lectures, live in one wing of Brussels' College de St. Michel, do most of their work in their own five-tiered, 320,000-volume library. The society's leader is Father Maurice Coens, 70, a soft-spoken expert on medieval German saints and a Bollandist for 35 years. Prospective next member is Michel van Esbroeck...
Philomena's Fall. Bollandist research has no official standing in the church, but Vatican scholars have often relied on the society's discoveries in deciding whether to eliminate a nonexistent saint from the calendar. As a rule, the church takes a tolerant attitude toward cults that have been honored by time and history; it does not forbid St. Christopher medals, for example. Yet it is quick to eliminate veneration of more recent non-saints with a growing vogue. Vatican officials two years ago sternly clamped down on devotees of the Roman "martyr"' St. Philomena, whose authenticity...
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