A reproduction of the first major book printed in Europe using mass-produced metal moving type will be taking up permanent residency at Toronto's  St. Augustine’s Seminary.

On April 24, Cardinal Frank Leo will participate in a welcoming ceremony for the Gutenberg Bible — also known as the 42-line Bible.

This edition of the Latin Vulgate (a late-fourth-century Latin translation of the Bible) is named after Johannes Gutenberg, the German inventor who devised the printing press around the year 1440. His invention spawned the Printing Revolution.

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Dr. Robert Giurano, president of the Scriptorium Foroiuliense Foundation, an Italian cultural institution dedicated to conserving ancient writing techniques and manuscripts, will be on hand to explain the methodology employed by 20 artisans over two years, starting in 2023, to create two-volume reproductions of the Gutenberg Bible.

In an email to The Catholic Register, Giurano said “this remarkable project was carried out entirely by hand, combining traditional craftsmanship with modern technology.” He shared that while the “printing phase followed historical methods, the content itself was produced through a precise digital acquisition of the original copy preserved at the Bodleian Library in Oxford.”

Copies of this labour of love have already been delivered to the national libraries of Australia, Paraguay and Spain, the Museum of the Bible in Washington, D.C., the Museum of Books and Printing in Kyiv, Ukraine, and as a direct gift to Pope Francis.

Giurano said a page of the Bible accompanied the SpaceX Crew-12 on an orbital flight of the Crew Dragon spacecraft to the International Space Station, which launched on Feb. 13.

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Bestowing St. Augustine’s Seminary with the seventh and final copy brings this three-year journey full circle. Giurano said the idea for the reproduction was conceived in Toronto during an Italian Cultural Institute conference featuring a 14th- and 15th-century Dante’s Inferno manuscript, developed by the scriptorium.

Msgr. Robert Nusca, the president of St. Augustine’s Seminary, expressed appreciation for Giurano and his team’s efforts, and for Fr. Gianni Carparelli and Daniele Cudzio for connecting the seminary and scriptorium.

Nusca explained how he gained a deeper understanding of the Gutenberg Bible’s significance by reading Canadian media theorist Marshall McLuhan’s 1962 book The Gutenberg Galaxy: The Making of Typographic Man. He valued the book’s reflections of how the “printing press fundamentally reshaped the way in which knowledge itself was transmitted” from oral culture to the written word.

“How fitting then for us at St. Augustine's Seminary, where our primary mission is that of forming future priests, deacons as ministers of the Word of God, to be given this monumental work here in our library,” said Nusca. “I think all of this is so important today as the Gutenberg Galaxy of Marshall McLuhan now gives way in the era of AI to what other experts have called this blurring of the lines between the biological and the digital. Because I think this has profound implications for what it is to be human in the first place.

“The Gutenberg Bible communicates the Word of God, the living Word, who is Jesus Christ,” he added. “And at the same time, this reminds us of what it is to be human at the dawn of the era, what many are already referring to as post-human.”

Nusca, Pietro Valent, the mayor of San Daniele del Friuli, the commune where the Scriptorium Foroiuliense Foundation is based, and Fr. Scott Birchall, the rector of St. Augustine’s Seminary, round out the list of speakers at the launch event.

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Birchall expressed excitement about the Gutenberg Bible’s potential to create additional public interest in St. Augustine’s.

“We're quite privileged to have it,” said Birchall. We (hope to) build more momentum and awareness of this project. I think it'd be great because I think the goal is always to make the seminary more visible.”