Gallery is 25 years old THEY ARE FAMOUS AND ALL ALIVE!

By Harold Butcher, New York
CONGRATULATIONS are pouring in on Sister Mary Joseph, S.L., of Webster Groves, Missouri, because of an original idea she put into practice 25 years ago.
Among notables in the United States who have written to her are the Apostolic Delegate. Archbishop Cicognani: Bishop Wright of Worcester, Mass., and General Carlos Romulo, ambassador from the Philippines. And the messages of goodwill are likely to continue throughout this jubilee year of the Gallery of Living Catholic Authors.
For the Gallery was the big idea introduced by Sister Mary Joseph in May 1932. A gallery of Catholic writers. with emphasis on the living!
Even as a student, Sister Mary Joseph had chafed at the notion that seemingly an author had to be dead before his works could be used as the theme for a thesis.
Why not a thesis about the living ?
RECOGNISED
And then came the thought of creating a gallery of living Catholic writers, a gallery that would focus worldwide attention on the fine work they were doing, equal in every way to muchbetter-known non-Catholic writers. Not to mention the encouragement that these Catholic writers would derive by recognition while they were still living and writing.
Her superiors quickly recognised that she had a sound idea and she was told to go ahead. The Gallery. a concrete, constructive contribution to Catholic Action, was approved and blessed by Pope Pius XI, and when the late Cardinal Glennon was in Rome, just before his death, he spoke to Pope Pius XII, who, in giving his approval also, referred to the Gallery as " that useful and interesting undertaking, that excellent form of Catholic Action."
In the quarter century since its inauguration the Gallery has become truly international in character. Fifty-eight countries arc represented among the nearly 900 members. It has become known as the Catholic Literary Hall of Fame; its Academy, a special group within the Gallery, has been compared with the French Academy. The present Academy members include Donald Attwater. Christopher Dawson, Graham Greene, Christopher Hollis, Mgr. Ronald Knox, Sir Shane Leslie, D. B. Wyndham Lewis, Arnold Lunn and Evelyn Waugh.
Sister Mary Joseph has collected literary treasures numbering more than 100,000 pages of original manuscript or typescript, hundreds of letters and photographs and some 5,000 books. many inscribed and autographed.
Patroness of the Gallery is Our lady of Letters, who sang The Magnilicat. The coat-of-arms, designed by Pierre de Chaignon la Rose, carries the motto, " In the beginning was the Word."