Wednesday, March 08, 2017

‘The monk who saves manuscripts from ISIS’

Father Columba Stewart inspects an ancient manuscript as a Syriac monk looks on at St. Mark’s Syrian Orthodox Monastery in Jerusalem.The Atlantic has reported on the work of Father Columba Stewart, a Minnesota Benedictine monk who founded the Hill Museum & Manuscript Library in Collegeville.

Working with local teams, Father Stewart’s library has photographed 50,000,000 pages from over 140,000 manuscripts since 2004. 

The priest’s efforts predate ISIS, but “given what’s happened in the last years since the rise of ISIS, it’s very clear that things are really endangered,” he said.