St. Louis Cultural History Project—Spring 2021
Henry Herman Regnet, S.J. (1888-1979):
Universal Librarian
by John Waide, M.A.
In April 1974, the Greater St. Louis Chapter of the Catholic Library Association, presented its first Fons Sapientiae Award to Father Henry Regnet. S. J., in recognition of his outstanding contributions to the library world, especially Catholic libraries. Father Regnet’s reception of the award was announced in an issue of the chapter’s regular newsletter. In that same issue of the newsletter that contained the announcement about Father Regnet and the award, there was a short piece which described the librarian as “the universal person” for the breadth of knowledge displayed by librarians and their willingness to share that knowledge with their patrons.
Who was Father Regnet, this universal person,
and what kind of career did he enjoy in libraries? Henry Herman Regnet was born on June 13, 1888 in Swormville, New York. Swormville is a small hamlet located approximately 15 miles northeast of Buffalo, New York. Regnet attended the nearby St. Mary’s Catholic School in Swormville and he graduated from Canisius High School in Buffalo in 1905. Canisius High School had been established by German members of the Society of Jesus (the Jesuits) in 1870 as part of Canisius College. On August 31, 1905, a few months after his graduation from high school, Henry Regnet entered the Jesuit’s St. Stanislaus novitiate at Cleveland, Ohio, as a member of the Buffalo Mission. When the Buffalo Mission was dissolved in 1907, Regnet became associated with the Missouri Province of the Jesuits.
He received his A. B. degree from Saint Louis University in 1911. Regnet served as an assistant librarian for the Saint Louis University High School during his early Jesuit studies, and during his regency, from 1912 to 1917, he was assigned to St. Ignatius High School in Chicago where he was a teacher and served as librarian and bookstore manager. Father Regnet was ordained a Catholic priest by Archbishop John Glennon in St. Louis on June 27, 1920.
After his tertianship and a year of teaching at Saint Louis University, Father Regnet was named the University’s librarian in 1923. Shortly after becoming librarian at Saint Louis University, Regnet received his A. M. degree from the University in 1925. Father Regnet remained Saint Louis University librarian until 1939 when he was named librarian at the Jesuit’s St. Mary’s College (Divinity School) in St. Mary’s Kansas.
Father Regnet continued as librarian at St. Mary’s until 1943 when he was named librarian of the Jesuit’s Rockhurst College in Kansas City. Father Regnet spent 12 years at Rockhurst before returning to St. Louis in 1955 at the age of 67, to serve as associate pastor at St. Ferdinand’s Church in Florissant. But after only 2 years at St. Ferdinand’s, Father Regnet was sent to Wichita, Kansas where he lived at Kapuan Memorial High School and helped at the nearby St. Thomas Aquinas Parish. Then in 1960, Father Regnet returned to St. Mary’s College where he served as assistant librarian reporting to Father Charles Heiser, the head librarian at St. Mary’s. When the Jesuits moved their School of Divinity from St. Mary’s to St. Louis in 1967, Regnet returned to St. Louis and he resided at the Jesuit novitiate in Florissant. When the Province sold the novitiate property in 1971, Father Regnet came to live at the Fusz Memorial on the SLU campus.
Father Henry Herman Regnet passed away on May 24, 1979, at Grand Manor Nursing home in St. Louis. At the time of his death, he was the oldest living member of the Missouri Province at 90 years old.
Father Regnet enjoyed a distinguished career in Catholic libraries which lasted more than a half-century. Throughout his career, Regnet achieved recognition and notoriety not only in the St. Louis region, but also throughout the United States. Even before assuming the position of Librarian at Saint Louis University in 1923, Father Regnet worked with Father Paul Foik, C. S. C., the librarian for the University of Notre Dame, and several other Catholic librarians, to establish a library “section” within the National Catholic Education Association (NEA) in 1921. This library section of the NEA held their first formal meeting at the Philadelphia convention of the NEA in June 1922. A few years later, in 1929, the library section of NEA became an independent organization, the Catholic Library Association (CLA). A century later, the Catholic Library Association continues as an international membership organization which provides its members with opportunities for professional development through education, publications, scholarships, and other services.
Father Regnet was respected at the national level for his ideas about Catholic libraries and librarians. An article entitled Standards for Catholic High School Libraries
appeared in the Report of the Proceedings and Addresses of the 26th Annual Meeting of the National Catholic Educational Association, 1929. The article indicates that Father Regnet remarked at this meeting, The librarian is, unquestionably, the real crux of the library problem. Not the lack of space for library purposes, nor the want of funds, but the absence of a real librarian is the fundamental cause of trouble in our [Catholic] libraries.’ And let me say here that a librarian cannot be made from an individual whose sole qualification to practice the profession is the possession of an abridged edition of the Dewey Decimal Classification and an out-of-date copy at that.’ The notion of a librarian as a custodian of books has been entered into history books along with the notion that a library was a storehouse to preserve knowledge as though it were a kind of fruit. A librarian can make an effective library under conditions where an untrained worker would be groping for light.
A few years later, in discussing plans for a new library building for Saint Louis University, Father Regnet proposed a modern windowless
building for this new library. Father Regnet wanted this new library building to take advantage of all the newest building technologies. Regnet indicated that building humidity is destroying materials in the University’s current library in Du Bourg Hall. Father Regnet proposed a double wall building with an air chamber in between the walls to insulate the interior from both the heat/cold and noise. Although this statement in the article is not attributed to Father Regnet, it captures his sentiments: The Huntington Library makes use of artificial lighting only and maintains a constant degree of temperature and humidity in the stack room. The windows which when the building was constructed were planned to light the public exhibition room have been bricked up, the better to preserve the priceless books and manuscripts.
In so many ways, Father Regnet’s thinking was many years ahead of his time.
When he became the librarian at Saint Louis University in 1923, Father Regnet was the first person to hold that director’s position in a professional capacity. Although there had been a few Jesuit brothers who had some prior library experience or training before working at the Saint Louis University library, they worked only in a supportive capacity to the director. The Jesuits who were the library directors held that position as a formality. These directors held another faculty position within the University.
While at Saint Louis University, Father Regnet directed the organization and cataloging of the University’s extensive rare book collections, including those items acquired by Father De Smet for the University in the 1830s. It was Father Regnet who discovered in 1928 the handwritten catalog of the University’s first library compiled in 1836. He was always a proponent of good Catholic literature. He worked with a local St. Louis group to compile a vacation reading list in 1935 which circulated over 35,000 copies of the list. Father Regnet also wrote a brief history of the library and library collections at Saint Louis University.
He worked with librarians at the St. Louis Public Library to open a branch of the public library known as the “Free Catholic Library” on the first floor of Du Bourg Hall at Saint Louis University. Father Regnet was recognized for his progressive views on racial and social justice issues, and he appeared on the University’s WEW radio station weekly, giving reviews of new books and a summary of literary news. In 1935, Father Regnet was responsible for the creation of the Greater St. Louis Chapter of the CLA, and he became the chapter’s first president, and he was instrumental in the development of The Catholic Periodical and Literature Index.
Regnet spent years doing research for a biography he was writing on Father Francis Xavier Weninger, the famous Jesuit missionary preacher who was known for the spectacular parish missions he put on across the Midwest (during the middle and later years of the 19th century. In his later years, while working at St. Mary’s College as an assistant librarian to Father Charles Heiser, Father Regnet helped catalog the rare book collection at the St. Mary’s School of Divinity Library. Father Heiser said that Father Regnet spent hours searching Library of Congress catalogs and other sources to verify the names for 16th, 17th, and 18th century authors, and then would type up catalog entries for these books. Finally, in a testimonial written after his friend and colleague passed away in 1979, Father Heiser said: Father Regnet was always cheerful, ready to help in whatever way he could, eager to promote the glory of God through work with books and library patrons.