THE MARPINGEN AFFAIR.

New Zealand Tablet, Volume IV, Issue 209, 6 April 1877, Page 15

THE MARPINGEN AFFAIR.

After having admirably performed the functions of the " devil's attorney-general " in the Marpingen affair (says the Catholic Keview) the Prussian authorities have ignominiously abandoned all their positions. The priests, Neureuter and Schneider, pastors of Marpmgen and Alsweiler, were received, after liberation, vdth triumphant ovations by their respective flocks. The four men who saw the apparition, and who were locked up because they said so, returned to their homes on the 17th November, although they never retracted a single one of their assertions ; and, as a crowning triumph the children have been set at liberty, and restored to their parents, o of Saarbruck quashed the judgment which ordered the three little ones to be shut up in a Protestant reformatory, but the Procurator-General appealed against the decision of this tribunal to the Superior Court of Justice of Berlin, which has confirmed the sentence of the Landgericht. The little ones left their prison on the 12th of December. The authorities have also been torced to acknowledge that the children never made any confession of fraud, but have all persisted in repeating their first assertions under threats which were calculated to influence much older persons. It is generally believed that this result was brought about through fear that the party of the Centre would take hold of it, and expose the motives which have actuated the authorities in the matter. The words of the Landgericht are that '• there was no deceit practised, nor any other punishable offence committed in the matter." The Saarbruck Gazette, which will soon have to defend itself vi court for slandering the pastor of Marpingen, says that multitudes flock daily to the site of the apparitions. The faithful arrive by thousands in the little village. This Liberal journal, which was wont to treat the affair with so much ridicule, is compelled to acknowledge that there is not tho least disorder committed in con-