"Christian Science opens its doors"

$50 million facility provides insight on religion's founder

by Michael Paulson ("Boston Globe," September 27, 2002)

Mary Baker Eddy was once called the most famous woman in America, but by the 1990s, she was largely unknown outside the small group of followers of the religous movement she founded, Christian Science.

All biographies of the 19th-century religious leader were out of print. Some books on American women included little or no mention of her.

This weekend, after decades of relative insularity, the Christian Scientists will open a $50 million visitor center and library in Boston's Back Bay, hoping to transmit her ideas to the general public and her writings to academic researchers.

The library, which is a renovation and partial reconstruction of the church's 70-year-old publications building, brings a face lift to a once-scruffy stretch of Massachusetts Avenue that is becoming increasingly upscale as the Prudential Center expands southward and is part of a broader renovation of the Christian Science campus breathing new life into a plaza designed by I.M. Pei in a burst of 1970s urban renewal.

The library will once again provide public access to what had been one of Boston's most popular attractions, the Mapparium, a walk-in stained-glass globe depicting the political geography of the earth in 1935.

The Mary Baker Eddy Library for the Betterment of Humanity is a significant undertaking for a religious denomination long on money and short on members. For the last decade, after a financially disastrous venture into television broadcasting, the church has been attempting to take advantage of societal interest in women's history and spiritual healing, and the library marks the ultimate test of that new strategy.

The library also reflects a new level of openness for a denomination that had once been more inward-looking. In a significant development for scholars of US religious history and women's history, the church will for the first time give researchers unfettered access to its archives of Eddy's 20,000 letters, as well as journals, scrapbooks, and photographs, which provide what scholars say is a rare window into 19th-century American life.

The church's top official, Virginia S. Harris, who has put Christian Science into the limelight with such tactics as appearing on ''Larry King Live,'' says the church is trying not to create a cult of personality around Eddy, who disdained celebrity. But, she said, Eddy's disappearance from the public eye was a mistake.

''It's a glaring statement about our society, about our history books, and about us,'' said Harris, who as chairwoman of the Christian Science board of directors is the top official of the denomination, which has no clergy. ''I think people didn't know how to talk about this woman, how to place her. But it's now OK. History is being rewritten.''

The library includes two parts - public exhibits and Eddy's archives. It will hold a free open house tomorrow and will begin charging a $5 admission fee on Sunday.

Eddy is among a handful of American women who have founded religious movements - others include Ellen Gould Harmon White, one of the founders of the Seventh-day Adventist Church, and Mother Ann Lee, who brought the Shaker sect to America.

''If you are interested in Mary Baker Eddy, you have a gold mine here,'' said Ann D. Braude, director of the Women's Studies in Religion Program at Harvard Divinity School and an adviser to the Eddy library. ''But in some ways, it doesn't matter whether she as an individual deserves this kind of attention, because she was an observer of American history, and she kept scrapbooks for decades that are absolutely fascinating.''

The Church of Christ, Scientist, as the Christian Scientists are formally known, is not evangelical, and church leaders say they are not seeking new members through the visitor center and library. Instead, church leaders and observers say Christian Scientists have embarked on a strategy unusual among Western religions: to spread their founder's ideas to people who probably will never be adherents of their faith.

Eddy, who professed to have had a spinal malady cured without medicine, founded Christian Science in 1879. The church teaches that healing can come through prayer and faith, and many members eschew medicine. The denomination refuses to estimate the number of its followers. Harris says there are about 2,200 Christian Science churches around the world.

The denomination has been aggressively marketing the new library to the tourism industry. Most say they're impressed with the combination of a spectacular interior with gee-whiz exhibits, but that it remains to be seen whether visitors will be drawn to a museum about ideas.

''People used to like to go there for a whole lot of reasons - one was the Mapparium, and two is that they have the best restrooms in the city, and that's a major issue for tour groups,'' said Norman P. James, president of Pitcairn Tours. ''But it was free before, and now the admission fee will be an element in whether we can afford to do it.''

The library is located in a part of the Back Bay that is experiencing significant change. Several of the area's major institutions are undergoing renovation or expansion projects.

''The Mary Baker Eddy library is truly the jewel of that street now, with the improvements they've made and the opening of that wall to expose a magnificent building,'' said City Councilor Michael P. Ross of Beacon Hill, who represents the neighborhood in which the Christian Science center is located. ''They once again are proving to be one of Boston's great neighbors.''