Education: Present for the Vatican

In a small auditorium of Rome's Pontifical Institute of Christian Archaeology, New York's Cardinal Spellman stood last week before 200 assembled notables to dedicate an impressive gift. Everyone on hand knew the value of the 100,000 photographs and 500,000 duplicate catalogue cards that had come from the U.S. "It is," said one Vatican scholar, "just as if an encyclopedia had never existed before, and the first encyclopedia had just been issued." The gift the cardinal was presenting: a complete copy of Princeton's massive Index of Christian Art.

The original index, still at Princeton,...

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