City by city, page by page, Father Columba Stewart is preserving history.
The Benedictine monk has spent more than a decade traveling to some of the world's most dangerous regions to find and preserve ancient manuscripts before they are destroyed.
The centuries-old works -- historical manuscripts and antique religious books -- are at risk for a few reasons. Sometimes it's moisture eroding the hand-written pages; sometimes it's a calculated attack to erase a cultural heritage.
As Lesley Stahl reported on 60 Minutes, the rise of ISIS -- and their deliberate destruction of artifacts in the regions they hold -- has made his work even more urgent.
Father Columba partners with locals to photograph and digitize the documents.
In Iraq, he has partnered with Father Najeeb Michaeel to rescue works, including some that originated in Mosul, the second largest city in Iraq and the center of some of the most intense battles in the fight against ISIS.
Though they are both men of the cloth, not all the manuscripts they preserve are religious.
"Some of them are purely history so those are ones that tell us about political events, and kings, and battles, and famines, and all of these other things," Father Columba tells Stahl in the video excerpted above.
"So it's not simply history of religion; it's history of every aspect of life."
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