Working Together to Preserve Knowledge

So we welcome in another new year! For me, I look to hope, often difficult to find these days. But there is a story that has inspired me to continue my search for hope amid the darkness.

The stories of those who want to destroy and separate people flood the news. But, there are other quiet stories that often go unnoticed. Those under-the-radar tales are the ones I want to focus on for this new year of 2016.

This one is a gem of inspiration. The Catholic monks from St. Johns in Collegeville, MN are helping to save a trove of ancient manuscripts, presently at risk, the ones most at danger, Islamic literary treasures that have survived floods, heat and invasions over the centuries.

Islamists have been ruthless with libraries and holy sites. Evacuations to save these ancient treasures have been on-going since 2012. Presently many ancient texts are being stored in five different places throughout our world. St. John's Abbey monk, Father Columba, travels to Ethiopia, Mali, India, Iraq, Israel and Lebanon to join with Dr. Haidara of Timbuktu and other stewards of learning to save manuscripts of music, science, logic, rhetoric, remedies and learning for perpetuity. The teams photographed 50,000 endangered volumes in a decade.

Back in Minnesota in the basement of the Abby, manuscripts from the culture of Europe are stored. Today machines are copying more efficiently. Over one and a half millennia, knowledge has been a matter of survival for the Benedictines. Their longevity is rooted in their intellectual abilities. So, as a policy, any relevant text was copied. Through the centuries of threats, from the Vikings, the Reformation, Napoleonic wars and World War II, all were destructive to the libraries of Europe. What happened in Europe in the 20th century is now happening in other places in the 21st. "It is the same mix of ignorance and barbarism, but more heavily armed," says Father Columba.

So at this time, following their history of preserving philosophy, science and all knowledge, St. John's Abbey has a team of latter-day scribes scattered throughout the world, risking their lives to save images of ancient texts on microfilm. The majority of manuscripts are Korans, Hadiths and studies on grammar and rhetoric, but the scanners capture everything, including those dealing with human rights, health and law.

When people look at what the Benedictines are doing with Muslim communities, they ask them why they do this. Father Columba responds, "this is the time God has given us. We can't pretend we live in the sixth century when Benedict wrote his rule. or the 13th, or the 1950's, before the sexual revolution. We live now. and part of the reality is cultures which are threatened trying to figure out how to work together on this fragile planet."