Taking a break from the temp road, we continue making the story of how this library is coming about.
Loyola Marymount is a religious university rooted deeply from monastic life. Many early European Christian orders began in the ancient rugged caves of the Pyrennes wall of mountains separating the Ibernian peninsula from the plains of Europe. The nearby Spanish port of Barcelona exported missionaries world wide and eventually contributed the scholastics necessary to rebuild a Roman Catholic hierarchy in early American Los Angeles.
The waterfront at Barcelona.
The year was 1838 and Thaddeus Amat, a young Basque priest inspired with St. Vincent’s urgings for instruction of both the poor and priests eagerly debarked in New Orleans to begin a teaching career up river at the Assumption Seminary near Donaldsonville Louisiana.
A son of prominence, Amat was an outstanding student mastering native Spanish, Catalan, French, and Italian tongues. In America he added Latin, Greek, Hebrew and English.
A talent for administration yet overcame his teaching abilities and by the time he was only thirty-nine Father Thad had risen to Superior at St. Charles Seminary in Philadelphia. To his dismay the priest teacher would not be a regular patron of the Theological Library that he had then established on Race Street. It would take an 1853 order from the Holy Father himself to compel Amat to assume the Bishopric of the Diocese of Monterey in the wild new state of American California. Below is Los Angeles as it appeared in 1853.
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