The library’s first work from the nineteenth century: On Religion and the Church — the De Religione et Ecclesia of Camillo Cardinal Mazzella, S.J., in English for the first time.
Mazzella taught dogma at Georgetown and Woodstock before Leo XIII called him to the chair of theology at the Gregorian, made him a Cardinal, and set him to work in the Thomist revival. The De Religione et Ecclesia is the treatise of his great lecture-cycle on the foundations: five disputations in forty-five articles — on religion in general and the possibility, necessity, and marks of revelation; on Christian revelation and its proofs from miracle, resurrection, and propagation; on the institution and constitution of the Church; on her unity, sanctity, catholicity, apostolicity, and infallibility; and on her visible Head — the primacy of Peter and of the Roman Pontiff, councils, and the infallible magisterium defined at the Vatican Council, whose theology Mazzella teaches from within its own generation. His continuous numeration of 1,096 paragraphs runs through the whole, so that any paragraph can be cited — at a glance.
The work may be read online article by article, or downloaded as a PDF with a clickable table of contents and as an EPUB, alongside the author’s analytic index with the printed pages of the 1905 edition. Every article is joined to the library-wide indexes — where the Vatican Council now takes its row among the councils, and Bellarmine, Suárez, Melchior Cano, Perrone, and Franzelin their places among the persons.
The next book will be Cardinal Mazzella’s De Deo Creatore.