Paul Marx Papers (MRX), University of Notre Dame Archives (UNDA), Notre Dame, IN 46556
Fr. Marx's papers consist primarily of twenty years of correspondence between Marx and church officials; brother priests and men and women religious interested in HLI's pro-life activity; fellow Benedictines regarding Marx's work with HLI and business related to the order and to St. John's Abbey; HLC/HLI personnel and members of the HLI Board of Directors; the leaders of other pro-life groups including, notably, Judie Brown of the American Life League and Dr. Jack Willke of the National Right to Life Committee; speakers and contributors at HLI symposia; individuals involved in various controversies surrounding the organization during the 1980s; contacts Fr. Marx made during national and international speaking tours; HLI members and donors; hostile critics complaining about HLI techniques and aims, particularly the organization's mass mailings and visual propaganda; and persons requesting Masses celebrated by either Fr. Marx or an HLI-affiliated priest commissioned for this purpose.
A second large portion of the papers consists of reference files covering a multitude of issues that interested Fr. Marx as founder and director of both HLC and HLI. Although individual items pre-dating 1960 may be found in various parts of the collection (e.g., some of Marx's homily notes date from the late 1940s), the majority spans Marx's work with HLI, beginning with the events that led to his departure from the Human Life Center in 1979. Several of Marx's writings for the HLI newsletter and other publications appear in a subseries of writings and course materials along with a number of chronicles and diaries that Marx kept, mainly during his international travel on behalf of HLI.
The manuscripts in the collection reflect neither a systematic office structure within HLI nor a rigid filing system within Marx's office: no such system existed prior to the records' transfer to the University of Notre Dame Archives. The papers begin with Marx's correspondence, arranged according to the quite broad categories by which Marx himself kept them filed. While Marx maintained clearly marked files for correspondence with church officials, his fellow Benedictines, and international contacts (grouped primarily by nation), he also singled out other individuals with whom he presumably corresponded frequently enough in order to keep their letters in individual files. Aside from other correspondence relevant to particular "controversies" and the Mass requests of HLI supporters which Marx stored separately, the collection features thirty boxes of general correspondence. Some of the general correspondence overlaps with the categories mentioned above while the remainder consists of Marx's day-to-day business as the president and chairman, and after 1992 as the founder and advisor, of HLI. The chronological overlap in the reference files subseries that follow the correspondence reflect three distinct sets of files that cover the same general range of topics.
For reasons of preservation and efficiency, oversize items, memorabilia and graphic items (photographs and souvenir postcards) have been separated from the papers and each filed together. The memorabilia include bumper stickers, a rosary, a button and a stenographer's tape. The postcards are kept in small albums that presumably correspond to Fr. Marx's various trips abroad and have no writing or postmarks;