In my day in the New York Archdiocesan seminary there was a room in the library dedicated entirely to anti-Catholic literature, with four walls, ceiling to floor, of books and pamphlets exposing the various shortcomings and infidelities of the Romish Church. That collection in the New York seminary was more extensive than the collections I found in the Buswell Library at Wheaton College and the Billy Graham Center, and in the library of Westminster Theological Seminary forty years later. In the last ten years I have closely studied only a small fraction of the extant material. Even so, the literature I have plowed through is huge, and the literature of evangelical criticism and Catholic response which I will never get to study is vaster still.

While all of the material belongs in a collection of some sort, not much belongs on a library shelf. Much of it is literary and historical junk. Some of it borders on the savage: for example, H.G. Wells' Crux Ansata with his suggestion that the allied bombers in World War II obliterate the Vatican. Wells and Jack Chick will sit in the same circle of Purgatory. But some of it is intellectually respectable, even if panic-ridden. Some of it is serious and responsible in its attempts at theological and historical criticism.