Alleged Clerical Scandals in Italy

New Zealand Tablet, Volume XXXVI, Issue 25, 25 June 1908, Page 13

Alleged Clerical Scandals in Italy

The libel from ' Lloyd's Weekly ' regarding the Italian clergy, which we dealt with in our editorial columns last week, found its way into the bfekpages of some of the secular papers of New Zealand, among others the Auckland ' Star.' The fiction was effectively disposed of by the following letter which appeared in the issue of that journal of June 13. The communication appeared o\er the initials, ' W.H.M.,' which are those of a well known priest in the Auckland diocese .— ' CRIMINAL CLERICS (?) ' " Whom the gods wish to destroy they first make mad." &o runs the old pagan aphorism ; but whom the atheists and rabid anti-clericals of Continental Europe wish to destroy they first make "bad." hence the campaign of slander and calumny which was inaugurated in France by the " ni Dieu ni l'homme" party, and engineered in Italy by their emissaries, with disastrous results to the libellers themselves, as the following extracts from English and American papers will show, as they also prove that the members of the Italiian priesthood are not the criminal clerics that the gutter press of Italy, controlled by the atheistic " bloc,'* endea\ ored to show them to be. ' A case which was exploited to a great extent by the reptile press was that of the woman Fumagalli, a baby farmer, who opened a house and called it the " Consolata Convent Girls' Orphanage,-" and though she was never a nun, she and her companions, who were of the same class as herself, solicited alms from credulous people, from whom they begged in the garb 1 of nuns. They were denounced to the police of Milan on two occasions by Cardinal Ferrari, the Archbishop, but the police took no action until one of those victimised laid an information against the impostors for obtaining money under false pretences. The home was broken up, the bogus nuns dispersed, and Fumagalli is now in gaol. 'In its issue of January 11, the Philadelphia " Catholic Standard " publishes, in the course of a letter from its Rome correspondent, the following ba,tch of fresh exposures of calumnies that were set afloat by the Masonic and Socialist press :—: — '" At Genoa, 'II Lavoro ' has been obliged to swallow its accusations against the chaplain of the Immacolatine, also in relation to the ' flight ' of Sister Guizzardi from the house of the Devotee, announced by the same paper. The ' flight 'in this case was a rather peculiar one. With the permission of her superiors, the religious visited her home to assist at the dying bed of her aged mother. ' "On information received, the peace authorities of Cotrone hurried to the orphanage of that place to save the children from the ' terrible sticks ' of the Sisters. After a lengthy examination, they trudged home denouncing under their breath the clever scoundrels who had "fooled them. • " The great agitation of the anti-clericals at Adria in consequence of the ' flight ' of a mm with a local

Physician lasted the usual seven days. Then it was round that the Sister had been absent at a branch retreat purpose of makin S the prescribed annual A * < Ca stellamare a Socialist journal published details of 'a horrible scandal ' it had ' discovered ' relative to the superioress of the local hospital and -its chaplain. When brought into court for trial, the precious paper was condemned for calumny. ' " At Pitigliano, Canon Capitani was arrested on a charge of immorality. His case was tried in court, and he was acquitted of the least stain on his honest character and blameless life. I may add that Canon Uapitam issued from the prison a broken and sorrowful man. n +1" A * Pistola > the Socialist ' Avvenire ' accused a father bella of gross crimes. An action taken by the detained priest is at present occupying the courts. At Faenza a rumor was circulated that Father br. da Ferrara was kept imprisoned in the Monastery del Paradiso under cruel circumstances. The police authorities searched the place diligently, but fruitlessly. The good priest had been several months previously, transferred to Massalombarda, a more active mission. ' 1 The ' Glasgow Observer ' of December 14 gives, on the authority of an Italian paper, a number of cases in which the innocence of the slandered has been established by courts holding regular inquiry. 1 From these extracts it would appear that the gaols of Italy are more likely to be filled with criminal libellers than with criminal clerics.' Thus far ' W.H.M.' We (N .Z. Tablet') dealt with these slanders as they arose, and we supplement the writer s exposure of the calumnies of the atheistic newspapers of Italy by the following, which appeared Romance 18 ' 8 "- MaJ ' - 8> Under the headin S' ' Another Even the worm will turn. From time to time we have shown how the slandered religious in Italy have successfully brought to book sundry lewd fellows of the baser sort— almost invariably the editors of anti-Cath-olic and anti-Christian newspapers— who were banded together in what was clearly an organised campaign of defamation. The latest case in point is recorded in the Rome correspondence of the Philadelphia ' Catholic .Standard ' of April 4. It referred to alleged horrifying disclosures ' published against the religious of S lu-anccsco della Vigna in Venice. 'These priests, 5 says the Standard' correspondent, 'were accused in die Secolo Nuovo," edited by Guiseppe Abele, a wellknown Socialist of that city, and they lost no time in giving that worthy an excellent opportunity of proving in a public court of justice the abominable charges cV an <r ? h eS V hh + e ICS^ lt - • The editor was sentenced ny tiie tribunal to suffer imprisonment for two years and to pay, in addition, a fine of two thousand francs. I ci haps the most interesting part of the story is that Abele did not await the conclusion of the trial. Seeine himself about to be unmasked, he fled the city secretly and has not since been heard of. And thus ends' another chapter of the " clerical scandals of Italy " which had been described in certain journals in all the couVstr^ imaginations and foul minds fna-J? iS n •° m the A envenome <* stories of gentry like the vpv f G , lvs ?PH c A^le that a certain notorious pur<RomiS ' S' iar> ' A* 1 ! 58 ' periodically < exposes 'the <w«1 5h5 h rh in Italy ' t0 credulous English and Scottish audiences at so much per ' expose '-' a silver C ?l n n' Ol f Ctlon ' or ' front seats one shilling, back seats