This is the room where we work,” says Fr. Robert Godding, SJ, opening the door from the five-tiered library into the vaulted room beyond. Worn tomes mix with modern reference works on the old bookshelves while computer cables worm around stacks of papers on the worktables. “We call it our scriptorium . . . as though we were monks.” He smiled at the comparison and went on, “But we are not monks, of course.”

Robert Godding directs the Society of Bollandists, located in Brussels. This group, which began in the early 1600s to do scientific study of the lives of the saints, has collected, compared, collated, and compiled manuscript data on the saints and published their findings ever since.

Their story began when a Jesuit official from Rome visited Belgium in 1603 and asked what more the Society of Jesus could do for the good of the Church there. One young Jesuit, Héribert Rosweyde, said that it concerned him when reading the lives of the saints that he encountered much that was hearsay or even unorthodox. Local monasteries had treasuries of manuscripts that could shed light on the stories, helping separate legend from fact. He would love to set himself to this work, he said.

The Belgian provincial was ready to commit Fr. Rosweyde to this work, but when a Jesuit professor fell sick at the college of nearby St. Omer, Rosweyde was judged his only suitable replacement. In his spare time, though, Rosweyde pursued his interest in saints and in 1606 published a small book that outlined his project and appealed to scholars to contribute to it. He projected a series of eighteen volumes that would present only the lives of the saints that were found in manuscripts in Belgian libraries. He never saw his ambitious idea through to completion, but one of the many books he published, Lives of the Fathers (1615), is considered a foundation stone for later hagiography, the scientific study of the lives of the saints.

When Rosweyde died in Antwerp in 1629, Jesuit superiors asked Fr. Jean Bolland to examine Rosweyde’s papers and research to judge their worth. Impressed by what he found, this young scholar said he would work on them himself. The provincial agreed, and the Society of Bollandists was born. If he had understood the immensity of the task, Bolland later confessed, he would never have said he was up to it.

The Jesuit church and college of St-Michel, also home to the Bollandists, lie at the end of the street named for them in Brussels.

Early on, Bolland expanded the project’s scope to include not only saints for whom there were written lives but also others for whom there might be only a mention in a local list of saints, a martyrology, or in local histories. The cutoff date was 1500, which is when Rome began to oversee the saintmaking process more carefully.

As the work grew, Bolland appealed for help, which arrived in 1635 in the person of his former pupil Godefroid Henskens. When growing costs threatened the work, Jean Bolland found a patron in the Abbot of Liessies; successive abbots of this monastery continued their support.

Bolland organized the work according to the calendar. Beginning with January 1, he listed and gave the lives of all the saints remembered on that day. Then on to January 2. When Henskens arrived, Bolland was already working with a printer in Antwerp to produce the two January volumes, and Henskens started in on February. But when he showed Bolland his initial work, it was more detailed, more scholarly, and, Bolland judged, more helpful to the project. So Bolland stopped the presses and revised his own manuscript. The January Acta Sanctorum finally appeared in 1643. February appeared in three volumes in 1658.

The project kept growing. In 1660 Henskens and a new Jesuit colleague, Daniel van Papenbroech, traveled through Germany, Italy, and France collecting copies of hagiographic manuscripts. Scholars elsewhere sent material in to Antwerp. March (1668) and April (1675) appeared in three volumes; May (1685–88) grew to seven plus an introduction; June (1695–1717) was five volumes and two appendices; and July (1719-1731) was also seven. August (1733–1743) shrunk to six, but September (1746–1762) balanced it out with eight volumes.

While the October (1765–1883) volumes were appearing, the Jesuit order was suppressed in 1773. The Bollandists kept on until suppressed by the government in 1788. A local abbey picked up the work for while—the volume for October 12–14 appeared in 1794—but did not continue it. In 1837, 25 years after the Jesuit order was restored, the new Society of Bollandists came to be in Brussels, and the volume for October 15–16 appeared in 1845.

Bernard Joassart, SJ, looks through a volume of bound correspondence of his early Bollandist predecessors; these letters are also part of the vast scholarly collection—the early scholars now part of the scholarship.

The suppression had not been simply a work stoppage. The community of scholars was dispersed, and the intensity of their scholarship diffused. Their collections of manuscripts ended up in the royal library and thousands of books were sold off.

So beginning again in 1837 meant assembling scholars, facilities, and books and adjusting to a world with new technologies, new ideas, and new demands of historians. The fourth November volume (November 9-10), published in 1925, was the last in calendar order, which had simply become inadequate for handling vast amounts of new material.

The scholarship of the Bollandists had, in fact, already evolved. In 1882, they began the Analecta Bollandiana, a journal of critical hagiography, and four years later started the Subsidia Hagiographica, a series of monographs and catalogues of manuscripts devoted to hagiography. Both of these series continue today. And always putting the latest tools to work on their sometimes ancient subjects, in 1996 the Société des Bollandistes launched a website.

The Bollandists’ rigorous standards have led to trouble when they cast doubt on cherished legends and popular saints. Disputing the claim that the prophet Elijah had founded the Carmelite order, for example, they came under attack; and in 1695 many of their books were condemned by the Inquisition in Spain, because, it said, they contain “propositions that are erroneous, heretical, smacking of heresy, perilous in matters of faith, scandalous, offensive to pious ears, schismatic, seditious, rash, bold . . .” and the inquisitors were just warming up. A copy of the decree, in Latin, Spanish, French, and Flemish, hangs in the scriptorium. Rome did not uphold the condemnation.

The first volume of the Acta Sanctorum, containing the saints remembered in January, was published in 1643; this frontispiece shows light reflected by a mirror into the cave that has hidden mysteries for ages; a cherub helps with a torch. The title reflects the help that colleague Godefroid Henskens was by then giving to founder Jean Bolland.

Today’s Bollandists work in a complex of buildings with a school and a church, a publishing house, and a large Jesuit community. Five Bollandists engage in research, four Jesuits and one layman. Fr. Joseph van der Straeten at 85, heads the Latin Sector; ten years his junior, Fr. François Leroy helps review the many books that arrive. The younger Jesuits are Bernard Joassart and Robert Godding, in their mid 40s. Layman Xavier Lequeux, who heads the Byzantine Sector, first worked as secretary for publications; when he finished his doctorate, he too became a Bollandist.

Two other Jesuits fill crucial roles: Jean-Marie Delanghe is librarian for the vast collection, and Guy Le Grelle handles accounting, billing, and book orders. A recent arrival is layman François de Vriendt, who manages the publications.

The Bollandists pore through the 800 or so periodicals that arrive, looking for bibliographical references. They also edit manuscripts submitted for publication and write up their own research. They are all clearly comfortable in their library, constructed in 1905. Its cast-iron pillars reach down to basement foundations to support the weight of a half-million books.

“I have often the impression that we have here a kind of elephant that we are just managing with very few people,” says director Godding, reflecting on the size of the operation. “But this is a unique work, I don’t say in the Church but in the world. This is just the best library on saints in the world. And it is the only scientific institution that is full-time committed to the critical research on saints’ lives. There is nothing else. So it is a quite a heritage.”

For more information about the Society of Bollandists, see www.kbr.be/~socboll

Fr. Edward W. Schmidt, SJ, Company's business manager, wrote articles in previous issues on the Jesuit caves in the Netherlands and on Athanasius Kircher, SJ, 16th-century polymath.