Catholic Record Society

There are 613 items this collection of the public words of Bishop Rosecrans. Six hundred nine of them were truly public words in his lifetime, either written or spoken. Of the other four that were not public then, two are from his journal, another was written for a student, and one was written for the students of the Ursuline Academy in Brown County. These are included as samples of his poetry and because some of them are indicative of his deepest motives. All four were published at various times after his life had ended.

The bishop's manuscript sermons and letters are bound in two volumes located in the Archives of the Diocese of Columbus. The manuscripts are sorted by size. The first volume, containing the smaller pages, has a nineteenth-century binding. The second was bound in 1976. Three items in the latter have been excluded from this work, because they are not in the bishop's handwriting and are not punctuated in his typical style.

None of the editorials in The Catholic Columbian or The Catholic Telegraph and Advocate were signed. All editorials of any substance in the Columbian have been included here. No doubt almost all were written by the Bishop, since he was the primary if not the sole editor of his own diocesan newspaper. If any were not written by him, he took responsibility for them.

From the large number of editorials published in the Telegraph during his almost ten years on its staff, 180 have been selected as certainly or probably his. The selection was based first on content, for those in which his authorship is betrayed by the inclusion of personal reminiscence or knowledge. Secondly, based on those editorials known to have been his, points of style were used to differentiate his editorials from others where nothing personal gives an indication of authorship. Happily, after the selections were made, some verification of this method was found. The most selected in any year, thirty-eight, were published during 1853 when his fellow, senior editor, Father Edward Purcell, was in Europe for at least part of the year. (Telegraph, Jan. 8, 1861)  Another spate of them was published in August and September of 1859 when, it turns out, Father Purcell was in Philadelphia and New York. (Telegraph, Aug. 29, 1859) And a group concerning Brownson's review was rejected which, it later was learned, had been written by Archbishop Purcell. (Aug. 20, 1854, letter of John Baptist Purcell to Archbishop Blanc in New Orleans, University of Notre Dame Archives)

Modernization of style was tacitly employed, mostly regarding commas, for many of the sermons and lectures. The Telegraph editorials were not modified because the original style was an important indicator of the authorship of many.

The subject arrangement is of course subjective. Some of the editorials, in particular, could have been placed into as many as five different categories. An attempt was made to place them in categories by the major interest or import they might have today. "The Soul's Destiny" was placed as the first section because that concept seems to have been a major one in directing the Bishop's life.

All items are numbered serially for ease of creating and using the subject index. Brackets [ ] indicate editorial titles supplied by the editor.

This compilation was made by Donald M. Schlegel in connection with his biography of the Bishop, Devotion to Truth, published in 2018.