Explanation of the 1987 Index for Pro Dialogo 

Download the index from the link above.

Over the years, we have received many requests at the Secretariat for an analytical index of our Bulletin. The lack of a comprehensive index of back issues has made it difficult both for researchers who want to consult articles which have appeared previously in the Bulletin, as veil as for readers who are simply looking for an article they had previously encountered in our journal. We hope that this present number of the Bulletin, entirely devoted to an index of numbers 1-64, will resolve some of these problems and make the Bulletin more “usable.”

In preparing this Index, we were impressed by the wealth of material which has appeared in the pages of the Bulletin during the past 21 years.

Someone desiring to review the development in theological approach of Catholic thinkers towards other religions in the period following the Second Vatican Council will find this progress chronicled in the issues of the Bulletin. The collection of papal statements concerning the relationship of Christianity to other world religions which is contained in the Bulletin is very extensive. In addition, the Bulletin has reprinted many of the documents and statements of bishops’ conferences, particularly those of the two great continental bodies, SECAM in Africa and FABC in Asia, as veil as papers and discussions which occurred at international colloquia on themes of inculturation, theology of religions, and relations between Christians and the followers of other faith traditions.

The Index follows the format of the Bulletin itself. In the first place are the Statements of the Popes. To the sections listing alphabetically the discourses of Popes Paul VI and John Paul II, there is added a third section which thematically collects the addresses of the two Popes whose teachings have appeared in the Bulletin.

The Articles are presented first by author and title. To this section is added a second in which the articles are arranged according to subject matter, followed by author and volume.

The Dialogue in the World section is organized, as in the Bulletin itself, by country, then city, and finally the event and reference to the proper place in the Bulletin. This is followed by the Book Reviews, arranged according to author and title of the book reviewed, then the reviewer and the Bulletin reference. The Index concludes with a short necrology of references to staff, members, and consultors of the Secretariat who have died.

A particular problem which presented itself in the compiling of this Index is the fact that for numbers 1-24 of the Bulletin there existed separate French and English editions. Only at number 25 were the two editions combined into one which contained articles in both French and English (and occasionally, in Arabic, German, Italian, Latin, or Spanish.) The early French and English editions contained substantially the same articles, although the page-numbering rarely coincided. The Index thus lists each article from the early language editions twice, giving the title and pagination for each edition. A lower case “e” or “f” following the page number indicates the edition in which the reference is to be found. For example: 23:84e/87f means that the listing is found in volume 23, on page 84 in the English edition and on page 87 in the French.

Several issues of the Bulletin were, due to the large amount of material to be presented together, double issues (23-24, 28-29, 34-35, 41-42, 49-50.) In the case of the double issues, the volume is always listed by the lower number. In the example given above, the volume is actually numbered 23-24.

In the “Addresses of the Recent Popes” and “Articles by Subject-Author” tables, a papal discourse or article may have more than one subject listing. In those cases, the same article can be found under more than one heading in the section. Flor example, the article by M. McDonald, “Mission as Dialogue? Christianity Encounters Melanesian Religion” is listed under the subjects: “Melanesian Religions,” “Mission and Dialogue,” and “Theology of religions: Mission as Dialogue?”

The subject headings usually are given in the language in which the article appeared in the Bulletin. However, a Bulletin article in French may have an additional subject listing in English, and vice versa. However, to have done this exhaustively would have doubled the size of the Index. In the section, “Addresses of the Recent Popes,” the general subject headings are given only in English. Again, size of the Index was the determining factor, and we regret any inconvenience caused by this editorial decision. For our readers, we offer on the following page a list of the French-English equivalents used in that section.

The Secretariat staff checked and rechecked the references in the Index many times, but it is inevitable that some errors remain. We apologize for this and ask our readers to inform us of any errors so that a list of Errata can be compiled for distribution with a future number of the Bulletin.

Thomas Michel

Addetto per l’Asia