Dear Parishioners and Friends,
Okay, I’ll admit it – I’m addicted. My name is Tim and I have an addiction to books. And as much as I enjoy reading e-books on my iPad, I still can’t resist those beautiful art books that weigh ten pounds and take up a lot of space on the bookshelf. Having said that, I’ve been thinking about how the printed book came to be. I’m in the midst of reading two books about the inventor of moveable type, Johann Gutenberg (Gutenberg’s Apprentice by Alix Christie and The Lost Gutenberg by Margaret Leslie Davis).
Gutenberg’s invention of casting individual metal letters that could be arranged into words, sentences, paragraphs and pages, and then re-used to create numerous other pages, revolutionized the art of printing. Until the mid-1400s, books were either written by hand (manuscripts) or entire pages had to carved into a block of wood, and then printed onto paper. No wonder that, in 1997, Time Life picked Gutenberg’s invention as the most important of the second millennium. Oddly enough, as I read those books about Gutenberg’s revolutionary invention on an iPad, I suppose the most important stride of this millennium is the digital age which includes hand- held computers, smart phones and the internet. While it took Gutenberg and his team about three years to print just 180 copies of the Latin Bible, I can pull up any chapter of the Bible on my iPhone in just seconds. But we can be forever grateful that every printed book owes its existence to a guy named Gutenberg.
Think of how the word of God has been passed from one era to the next, first in oral form then, in the written form, followed by the printed form, and now the digital form. You and I are the fortunate recipients of each era’s genius in preserving the word of God and transmitting it to the next generation. There was a time when the printing press was considered the work of the devil, and some might even say the same about the internet. But the power of God’s word is more than a match for human ambitions or pride.
Blessings on your week ahead!
Fr. Tim Shreenan, O.F.M.
Pastor