William J. Leonard, SJ

William J. Leonard, SJ was a Jesuit priest who taught and worked at Boston College for the majority of his adult life, save for a few years spent fighting in World War II. After his service, Leonard assumed the position of the chair of the Theology department at Boston College and began devoting his tenure to collecting artifacts in the 1970's and 80's. Leonard's Liturgy & Life collection actually precedes the Burns Library itself, which was founded only in 1986.

In developing the Liturgy and Life Collection at the Burns Library, Leonard solicited donations of a wide variety: "religious publications from pamphlets to books, plus religious works of art, ecclesiastical vestments, and religious objects from statues to monstrances." (1)

"Don't tell me that people don't read the Catholic press!!" said Father William Leonard, S.J. in 1981 when interviewed about his collection. Father Leonard advertised in over fifty American Catholic newspapers and magazines, and had received over 700 packages in only two years' time. At that point, the artifacts sat stacked on "bookcases in a corner of Saint Thomas More Hall's basement" (2).

Leonard also had a particular interest in collecting Catholic artifacts in foreign languages, so as to represent the full scope of global Catholicism. Today, the collection of pamphlets alone span English, French, German, Italian, Latin, Lithuanian, Polish, Slovenian, and Spanish (3).

Father Leonard was not a professional librarian or archivist, but had high hopes for the rapidly increasing collection at Boston College, and eagerly anticipated the construction of the Burns Archive. 

The Boston Sunday Globe in 1999 published an article on Leonard's collection, still being led by the collector even at age 91. Indeed, his age was regarded as a benefit, since he could "remember how Catholicism was practiced before Vatican II opened the windows of the church in the 1960s and blew away centuries of customs, rules and religious practices." The elderly curator and his team at Burns Library also aimed to modernize the collection by digitizing it on the Internet. As of 1999, they had uploaded 150 images to the Archive's brand-new website (5).

In the end, Leonard's requests came to fruition en masse, with "individuals and parishes from the deep South to the far West were delighted to share their treasured religious artifacts" (5). Leonard framed the call for artifacts as a preservation effort to showcase pre-Vatican II (1962-5) Catholicism. There had to be a starting point and a conclusion, though the dates are necessarily somewhat arbitrary; the fifty-year period between 1925 and 1975 was selected because they "not only span the earthquake of Vatican II but also leave a margin on either side" (6).