How a Lie Gets Around

New Zealand Tablet, Volume XXXIII, Issue 52, 28 December 1905, Page 18

How a Lie Gets Around

From yet another quarter in New Zealand we have received the insane story of the ' walling-in ' of the Roubaud family by priests in distant Lourdes ! In our last issue we let off some dynamite inside that tale which the anticlerical ' Matin ' and ' Petite Republique ' originally spun for the marines of Paris. It was, we think, Mark Twain or Max Adeler who, in the story of the petrified man, proved beyond his utmost expectations the splendid gullibility of ' newspaper men in regard to improbable tales, even when the elements of suspicion are obtrusively presented to their view—insinuated, so to speak, under their very noses. The Roubaud myth is another instructive case in point. It also serves as striking evidence of the truth of the following remarks made by a great American prelate, Dr. John England : ' A person needs no other qualification to write against the Catholic religion than to be so disposed ; and the abundance of the spirit becomes manifest in the vehemence of the phraseology. Little attention need be paid to facts ; circumstances need not be examined ; nor is it always necessary to have regard even to probability itself.' That is just it ! It hardly needed the brain of a half-grown chimpanzee to concoct the story of the ' walling-in ' and ' isolation ' of the Roubaud lainily by ' the priests ' at Lourdes, in the French Pyrenees. And the publication and republication of the crazy invention involved about an equal expenditure of cerebral energy.