Los Angeles Archdiocese’s Treasures on Block : Scholars, Historians Grumble Over Sale of Doheny Collection

When Roger Mahony was named archbishop of the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Los Angeles a year and a half ago, he inherited a two-edged problem concerning the archdiocese’s seminary system: plummeting enrollments and skyrocketing costs.

At the same time, Mahony learned that he was sitting on an untapped treasure chest valued at more than $20 million: the Carrie Estelle Doheny collection of rare books, paintings, paperweights, furniture and decorative objects.

The collection was dedicated to St. John’s Seminary in Camarillo in 1940 with the provision that it be kept intact for 25 years after the death of Mrs. Doheny. She died in 1958.

The idea of selling the vast collection had already been suggested. In fact, the late Msgr. Benjamin Hawkes, the archdiocese’s wily financial officer under Cardinal Timothy Manning, had quietly arranged for $6 million of the collection’s Western paintings to be sold to a private party in 1985 and the proceeds were stashed in archdiocesan coffers.

This week, based on unanimous approval by the St. John’s Seminary Board of Directors, Mahony announced that most of the remaining collection--including a rare Old Testament volume of the 15th-Century Gutenberg Bible--will be auctioned off in eight sales over a two-year period. Christie’s, the London-based auction house, will handle the sales, and the money will be used to advance seminary education in the archdiocese.

But even before news of the sell-off was made public, grumblings were rumbling through the elite world of scholars, historians and rare-book aficionados.

Dr. Edward Petko, a Sherman Oaks dermatologist and lifelong student of rare books and literature, wrote Mahony last September bemoaning “the loss of this great cultural asset and national treasure to the students in the Pacific Basin . . . an attack on the integrity of one of the most important libraries in the Western world . . . .”

Petko, a member of St. Brendan’s Catholic parish in Los Angeles, lamented further: “The great Doheny library is scheduled for destruction and its books will be scattered to the Four Winds.”

Charles R. Ritcheson, dean and vice provost of USC and the university’s librarian, said in an interview this week that he had hoped that at least the 15,000-volume library portion of the collection could be kept intact and remain in Southern California, perhaps by placing it in a major research library while the archdiocese retained legal ownership.

“I don’t want it to be said that I’m engaging in a quarrel with the archdiocese,” said Ritcheson, a Catholic. “I can only observe as a librarian and a scholar that dispersal of this collection is a very sad affair in terms of scholarship.”

Ritcheson’s colleague, USC history Prof. Doyce B. Nunis, said he had written Mahony last year saying that the church had a duty to preserve culture attached to the church.

Nunis called the Doheny library one of the great cultural assets of Southern California.

Martin Ridge, chief of research at the Henry E. Huntington Memorial Library in San Marino, echoed the sentiment that a Southern California “treasure” should not be broken up:

“You cannot place a monetary value on the collection,” Ridge said in a telephone interview. “The whole is enormously more valuable than the parts. . . . In Southern California we’re so new that anything we have is so precious and important to us.”

Ridge declared that breaking up the Doheny collection is “tantamount to saying 100 years from now, ‘Let’s get rid of the Getty (Museum).’ ”

“It’s shortsighted,” complained Hugh Tolford, a retired real estate developer and a past president of the Zamorano Club, a Southern California organization of 80 people interested in book collecting, fine printing and old bindings. “The loss of this library really is not necessary.”

Mahony, asked about the opposition, said he recognized the difficult trade-off between culture and need.

But he said that in the long run, other collections “might be enhanced” when items from the Doheny are bought at auction.

“Relatively few scholars visit the collection (at the Doheny Library in Camarillo) each year--50 to 60--and the collection should be placed in locations where its various parts can become part of larger displays, where large numbers of people can both view and study the volumes and artifacts, and where the security of the items can be enhanced,” the archbishop said. He added:

“The . . . collection, with the greatest portion of its composition of a secular nature . . . no longer serves the legitimate contemporary objectives of our seminary programs.”

The archdiocese currently is subsidizing the three-school seminary system in San Fernando and Camarillo by $3 million a year, is paying $100,000 annually to maintain the Doheny Library at St. John’s Seminary, and is no longer able to secure insurance on the full value of the Doheny collection, according to Mahony.

At the same time, the current 1,400 priests serving the 2.65 million-member archdiocese is 300 to 400 fewer than needed, Mahony said. The archdiocese’s seminaries produced only six priests last year. By the turn of the century, the nation’s largest archdiocese could grow to 4 million and new parishes will have to be established, the archbishop said.

Nevertheless, one highly placed patron of the arts, speaking on condition that he not be identified, said that “a number of scholars and librarians are unhappy about this. . . . There are some old friends of Mrs. Doheny who are very upset. Some of them think she would turn over in her grave” if she knew about the auction.

But Lucille V. Miller, who worked closely with Mrs. Doheny from 1931 until her death, said this week that the dowager “was prepared in her mind that eventually the collection would be dispersed or sold in some way. . . . She knew she couldn’t control it forever.”

Miller, who is now 86 and living in Ventura, was the first curator of the Doheny collection at the seminary from 1958 until 1968. She said she was not consulted about the decision to sell it.

“Personally,” Miller said, “I wish very much the collection could have been sold as a whole to one buyer. . . . I’m not happy about the auction thing.”

Franklin D. Murphy, who serves on the boards of many art centers and museums, including the National Gallery in Washington and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, said alternatives to sale by auction had been rejected by the archdiocesan Doheny Collection Committee.

“The overall concept of converting all the collections . . . into an endowment to support the teaching program at the seminary makes economic and educational sense, especially since the library does not have an adequate endowment,” said Murphy, retired Times Mirror board chairman and former chancellor at UCLA.

“However, I regret that local institutions were not given an opportunity to acquire at fair value certain books and manuscripts that fit into their own local collections and would continue to serve Southern California scholarship--even though such acquisitions probably would have represented only a fraction of the overall collection.”

One problem with that, said Mahony and Msgr. Francis J. Weber, the archdiocesan archivist, is loss of revenue.

“Once the decision to divest was made, then we owed it to the people to get top dollar,” Weber said. “There is no fair market value on a lot of those things. . . . You determine it on what people are willing to pay. At an auction house, it’s more democratic and everyone has the right to go and make a bid. . . . It’s the only fair way to do it.

“If The Getty wants this or that, let them go buy it.”

Jacob Zeitlin, a rare book dealer who has been in business in Los Angeles for almost 60 years, agreed that Doheny “books might find their place in collections which dovetail with their own kind, and some will find their way back here” to Southern California.

Nevertheless, Zeitlin, who said he will try to attend all eight of the Doheny auctions in Los Angeles, New York and London because he has “substantial clients” who have asked him to bid for them, added:

“I do feel we have lost a great cultural resource. There are people who feel there might have been a better way . . . .”

One of them is Dr. Irwin J. Pincus, a Los Angeles physician and book collector.

Pincus, who is Jewish, said many in the community--not just Catholics--would be willing to donate to the archdiocese to make up the $20 million Mahony expects from the auctions.

“I personally would have contributed and done so over a number of years,” Pincus said.

The Doheny collection includes American and French 19th-Century paintings, Currier and Ives prints, 19th-Century French furniture, tapestries from Versailles and the Barberini palace in Rome, Chinese jades, and a celebrated collection of French, English and American paperweights.