A Forgery from Palmerston North

New Zealand Tablet, Issue 3, 6 August 1908, Page 22

A Forgery from Palmerston North

Sundry correspondents send us copies of a four-page tract' that has been printed in Palmerston North and circulated in an underhand way among Catholics around that- city and even as far as Kaikoura. From the merely literary point of view, it is a rather under-average specimen of the sort of pious ' skilly * that is * inflicted upon a suffering world by well-meaning but somewhat eccentric people of the tea-meeting order of intellect. The tract in question is entitled ' The Portrait of Mary in Heaven, Drawn from Holy Scripture.' Its history is told with all the delightful vagueness of the ' true-fact ' and ' honorbright ' tract. ' Towards the close of the sixteenth century,' it says, ' the following correspondence took place between a young Mother Abbess and an illustrious painter. It has been translated by Napoleon Roussel.' Only that and nothing more. The information for which the scholar pines, and the investigator sharply presses, is rigorously withheld. Where, for instance, is the manuscript of this fantastic con espondence preserved? Where and when and by whom was it published? And who is (or was) Napoleon Roussel? And where did the correspondents live? No information is tendered—for reasons which the reader will understand as we proceed. Well, the ' Mother Abbess ' makes, by letter, a padded-cell arrangement with the '.illustrious" painter;' She wants nothing less,than 'an exact representation' of (the Blessed Virgin) Mary, 'as she now is, in heaven.' The 'illustrious painter .' was to ' fix your own conditions ' and to charge as extravagantly as." he cared for ' the exact representation.' The generosity of the terms allowed by. the 'Mother Abbess ' may. however, have been intended to cover -the expenses of the ' illustrious painter's' returjj ticket to the New Jerusalem, and-the outlay arising out of the delays that were, perhaps, unavoidable in securing sittings of 'Mary in heaven,' so as to make -the ' representation 'an * exact' one—according to specifications. ~

We may here remark that the ' illustrious I one 'lived vat ' Cloister of the Assumption,' in the city of Nowhere— the capital of the country of the same name. He signed his name ' Joseph de St. Pierre '—we will call him, for short, Joseph Peter. The 'Mother Abbess.' resided at' St. Mary's Abbey,' at Noplace, an important town in the country known to the ancient Gfeeks as Utopia' (Nowhere), to modern Germans as Weissnichtwo, to modern Scots as Kennaquhair— to Britons as the Land of I-know-not-where. It is located exactly three and a half leagues from Amauros (known in English as Vanishing Point). Having thus given in full detail the address of the Lady Abbess, if only -remains- to present her to the reader under her proper name She signs herself ' Marie .de St. Roman V-which, being interpreted, actually meaneth 'Mary of Pious Fiction!' The . delightful aptness of this name may have been an. unstudied and unconscious bit of humor on the part of the inyentor of this bit of • pious fiction.' But, on the other hand, it may have been the cue which (with his tongue in his cheek), he gave to the initiated, so-that they might the better enjoy the gullibility of the ignorant and simple-minded non-Catholic folk for whose

edification such silly romances are invented. Many, who peruse theae columns will, .for instance, recall the droll clues which Max Adeler furnished in order to enable the alert reader to detect the hoax in his story of the Marble Man.

So much for the dramatis personae. Now for the drama. After much cogitation, the ' illustrious painter ' (and glazier) came to; the .conclusion that he could manage to procure the exact" representation ' of 'Mary in • Heaven,' 'as she is/ for .Pious Fiction without the bother of a trip to heaven and back. -By some unstated and extraordinary means, he discovered that ther»j was such a thing as a Bible, and that, it would be necessary to go to it for ' authentic details about Mary.' But 'Willow, willow, woe is me! Alack! and" well-a-day !' ' - Poor Joseph Peter had no Bible! None, of course, 1 could be found in the Cloister of the Assumption, nor yet in tnc Abbey of Pious Fiction. Then Mary Pious Fiction ' wrote to Rome to obtain a copy from- one of the libraries of St. Peter!' 'That favor,' writes Pious Fiction, ' was granted.' And this was passing strange ! For docs not every writer and reader of the Pious Fiction order of tract know right well' that there never was a Bible in or near St. Peter's ; that Dr. Martin Luther first discovered the Bible; that the Pope sits awake o' nights trying to keep the Bible from the people— instead of lending copies to remote abbesses and far-off glaziers; that, if you say ' Bible!' to the Man of Sin, he tears around considerably and curses you and yours with bell, book, and candle back to the forty-seventh ' generation; and that he carries a box of wax matches about in his vest pocket, so as> to be ready, on short notice, to set fire to any Bibles and Bible-readers that he may drop across in his morning stroll? However, Joseph Peter proceeds to peruse the Bible miraculously procured from Rome. He writes in the familiar style of the cheap tract of the nineteenth century; ho misuses Catholic terms precisely as the cheap tract-writer of our day does; he is wholly unacquainted with the epistolary style prevalent ' towards the close # of the sixteenth century ;' he advances precisely the controversial illogicalities that you 'may dig by spadefuls out of the more illiterate class of No-Popery pamphlets that added a pang to the religious contentions of the Emancipation period (1 820-1830) ; he credits the Catholic Church with teaching that the Blessed Virgin was independent of Christ's saving grace (a once familiar but long-abandoned misrepresentation by certain Reformed disputants) ; and he falls into the unscholarly error of interpretation by which a certain class of disputants used to endeavor to deprive the Blessed Virgin of her crown of perpetual virginity and make her the mother of a large family The upshot of the whole affair is, of course, the one that is familiar to the reader of the cheap tract: Newman's Biblereading led him to Rome; but the illustrious glazier, having read the Bible, finds himself compelled to abandon the errors of Popery, and to embrace, instead, the errors ' made in Germany 'or in Geneva. Pious Fiction did likewise. Poetic completeness requires that Joseph Peter and Pious Fiction should thereafter go in double harness. It is not, however, asserted that Joseph Peter did, in this .instance, 'ring the belle.' But the author of this piece of ' pious fiction ' leaves the impression that in this, as in other fairy tales,- the hero and heroine contnved, somehow, to 'live happily ever afterwards.'

People who concoct and distribute this eccentric sort of ' pious fiction ' must be deemed to be very much lacking in the sense of humor. The word' Romance 'is writ" large over this absurd tale— in its substance 1 - in its studied avoidance of- names of places and of. particulars as to the origin and history of the alleged letters ; and in the whole terminology thereof, which is throughout, that of typical Protestant tract produced by uneducated persons. For the rest," we need only add (i) that there was no • illustrious painter ' named Joseph de St. Pierre; (2)( 2 ) that the absurd name of the abbess is most probably the blunder of a writer unacquainted with the French tongue; (3) that the whole composition of the alleged letters is of our own^day, and that they are the clumsy forgeries of a person wholly ignorant' of Catholic teaching and of the manners, custbms, language, and epistolary style of the vtimes that he was rash enough to -attempt to portray. Finally, (4) these forgeries are alleged to have been taken from the True Catholic of „ ,871. The inference which would naturally be drawn by the reader— whether Catholic or Protestant— is this : that this preposterous piece of 4 Pious Fiction.' was sent out with the sanction of some "representative organ of. Catholic learning and of Catholic opinion. Whether

it -ever really appeared in the True Catholic, we cannot say. - Nor does it matter a pin-head whether it did or not. -For the little- periodical in question was not a Catholic one ; on the contrary, it was one of the vilest types of the l^o-Popery gutterjournal ; it was started and run (when it was run) by an unfortunate cleric whom his ecclesiastical superiors found necessary, in the interests of religion, to expel in dishonor from the sacred ministry; and by him, it was hawked for, sale on and off through Che streets of New York. It is not creditable . to anyone concerned in Palmersfon North or Kaikoura to be associated with the circulation "of that silly forgery.