Those Convent Scandals

New Zealand Tablet, Volume XXXV, Issue 47, 21 November 1907, Page 10

Those Convent Scandal s

1 A nickname ', says Isaac. Disraeli, ' a man may chance to wear out ; but a system of calumny, pursued by a faction, may descend even to posterity '. Such a ' system of calfimny ' has been ' pursued by a faction ' of late in northern Italy, as their first line of attack upon the religious Orders 'there. Hapipily, circumstances have, thus far, prevented their slanders descending to posterity. "The action cf the courts, and the- course of official investigation, have proved — for the. moment' at least, *a serious set-back to the anticlerical faction. In our last issue we referred" to 1 the alleged ' scandals ' at Varazze and elsewhere, which the ' Weekly Press ' dishe-d up to its readers in language that was" ' frequent and free ', without so .much as a hint regarding the official exposures which had dynamited them long before. A further query on the Varazze ' scandal ' iroves us to remark that the imaginative youth who concocted the horrible stories against a cosmipjanibn in the Sales Lan College there, was (says the Boston ' Pilot '.) declared by anticlerical doctors to be a degenerate of the most pronounced type. Even the ' Giornale d" Italia ', which at first 'took him up, clapped him on a pedestal, - and accepted his blackguardly tales as true, has found it desirable to revise its first impressions and to admit that the youthful degenerate 'Jiad sinister aid in his evil work '. The ' Giornale d' ltalia ' adds : ' Leaving, it, therefore, to science to establish the nature and' the entity of the phenomenon of this boy who has turned half Italy upside down, we note that anybody who wishes to find a written source for ihis monstrous product has but to remember the ludicrous pages of that perverse and infamous writer, Leo Taxil, a liar always, whether he combated Catholicism, or whether he was attacking Freemasonry in the same vituperative way after he became its. enemy.'

The justification of the slandered religious in northern Italy came in at the rate of a mile a minute. But will the exposures of the Varazze and Milan ' scandals ' cTose the anticlerical steam-factories where such calumnies are generally concocted and exploited ? By no means. With a few verbal alterations, we might apply to them the words that Newman wrote, in his ' Christ Upon the Waters ', regarding Reformed calumniators of the Church : ' There is a demand for such fabrications, and there is a consequent supply. Our antiquity, our vastness, our strangeness, our successes, our unmovableness, all require a solution ; and the impostor is hailed as a prophet, who will extemporise against us some tale of blood, and the orator as an evangelist, who points to some real scandal of the Church, dead and gone, man or measure, as the pattern fact of Catholicism '. ' Fear not to lie, 'twill seem a lucky hit ; Shrink not from blasphemy; 'twill pass for wit '. Such would seem to be the motto of the more bitter kind of banded haters of religion in Italy and France. And "in the matter of credulity of anti-coiwent lales of portentous wickedness, there seem to be, even ,in" this twentieth century, a few journals' in English-speaking countries that have the ready and indiscriminate appetite of Ihe adjutant-bird— or of the renowned goat of Harlem.