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The Laurentin Find

You never know what you’re going to find while studying Mariology here at the International Marian Research Institute. Take the piece of scrap paper that fell out of the French Bible that I had taken from the Marian Library just before Memorial Day weekend.

When I looked down from the research paper on my computer screen, my eye happened to land upon the name “Laurentin” printed on that bit of scrap. The French Mariologist René Laurentin was the subject of my paper, so it took me a few seconds to realize that this bit was not part of the notes that I had accumulated for my paper. It was something else entirely. As it turned out, it was the ticket stub and baggage-claim tag from a flight that Fr. Laurentin had taken in the summer of 2000 to come to Dayton back when he was still giving lectures here (see the Marian Library’s collection of his lecture notes and other papers).

It dawned on me that Fr. Laurentin probably used the stub to mark the page that he had been reading. Imagine that—I was likely reading the very same Bible used by one of the greatest Mariologists of the 20th century. What a find!

– James R. Koelsch Doctoral Student