Annales de L'Association de La Propagation de La Foi

ANNALES DE L'ASSOCIATION DE LA PROPAGATION DE LA FOI. - Official organ of this Association, which later became the Pontifical Society of the Propagation of the Faith (v.). Begun at Lyon and Paris in 1824, as a continuation of the Association's notebooks that had been published since 1822, it acquired a bimonthly periodicity with the year 1840, the numbering of the volumes thereafter corresponding to the years. Although they presented themselves as a continuation of the celebrated Lettres édificantes, the Annales are far more universal than that collection; besides the communications of the Association, they contain in fact letters and documents coming from every missionary Order and mission country, so as to constitute a source of primary importance for the history of Catholic apostolate in the last century in Europe and on the other continents. In 1931 the periodical changed its title to Annales de la Propagation de la Foi et de s. Pierre Apôtre, taking to publishing news also of this latter society. At present it has lost its original value.

The Annales attained a great diffusion, with more or less integral and adapted versions in almost all European languages, printed in various countries. Against the wish of the central council of Lyon, not all the versions were exactly conformable to the original French edition; especially the Munich version added accounts of German missionaries, informing its readers, among other things, about the development of Catholic activity in the United States of America. The origin of some translations has not yet been precisely established, as for example of the first edition in the German language (perhaps that of Einsiedeln, not that of Strasbourg). The Italian edition saw the light starting from 1828, at Lyon, in close dependence on the original French one. Although in 1839 vol. IV of the reprint declared it the only recognized one, condemning every other version in the Italian language, extracts were published at Naples, which subsequently became more complete.

Ewald Kuyper