THE CHAMPION NEWSPAPER LIAR LEAVES ROME.

New Zealand Tablet, Volume V, Issue 267, 14 June 1878, Page 9

THE CHAMPION NEWSPAPER LIAR LEAVES ROME.

(From the Dublin Freeman.")

It was lately announced that his Eminence Cardinal Cullen had been charged by the Holy See with tlic mission to treat with the English Government for the establishment of diplomatic relations between the Vatican and the Court of St. James. So for as Cardinal Cullen is concerned, this information is altogether false, and has no foundation savem the inventive faculty of some ambitious newspaper correspondent. The manufacture of news from the Vatican is carried on vigorously by two or three Italian journalists, and by some of the Roman correspondents of the London newspapers. The Italic, a paper printed in Rome in the French language, and reputed to be an organ of the Italian Government, is notorious for the audacity and | mendacity of its Vatican information. The late Roman correspon«fnt of the Times also signalized himself by his inaccuracies, and by the bitterness and venom which he vented upon the deceased Pontiff, J. ius IX., and upon Cardinal Manning. That correspondent was Mr. Antonio Galleuga, who, a few days ago, left Eome for Athens to take the place of the murdered Mr. Ogle. Before leaving Rome Mr. Gallenga caused a paragraph to be inserted in the Roman journals announcing his departure, and requesting his friends to excuse him for not personally waiting upon them to say farewell. But Mr. Gallenga has not so many friends in Rome. He has never been forgiven by the Mazzinians for his desertion of his party ; and he was excluded from the society of the fashionable leaders of the various coteries of the Italians in Home. By the Romans proper lie is despised and hated. Into the Vatican he could not put his foot, and the Quirinal kept him at arm's length. When he called on Sir Augustus Paget and upon the Duke of Abercorn to solicit admission to the ceremony of investing King Humbert with the Order of the Garter, Mr. Gallenga was courteously refused the favour which he asked in the name of the Times, so he was forced to write his description of the investiture out of the accounts given in the Roman journals. Yet it was not so difficult for correspondents to get permission to witness the investiture. Several of the Italian journalists were freely admitted, and Sir Augustus Paget, who refused to help the correspondent of the Times in this matter, actually brought with himself to the Quirinal on. that occasion the Cavalier Cook, a gentleman whom Mr. Gallenga, on a subsequent opportunity, contemptuously described as "a worthy old bcotch painter. Mr. Gallenga's last blunder was his misrepresentation, or mistranslation, of the Papal bull establishing the Catholic Hierarchy in Scotland. He said the Pope referred to "St. Ninian instructed in the faith by the Venerable Bede." As St. Ninian and Bede lived three centuries apart from each other, the chronological blunder contained in the above statement was too glaring to escape notice, and the blunder was duly fathered on Leo XIII, with sneers, of course, at Papal infallibility. The original Latin of the bulls was before Mr. Gallenga when he telegraphed to the Times that extraordinary statement, and the same Roman newspaper which contained the Latin contained also an Italian version of the bulls. As neither the Latin nor the Italian mentioned the circumstance that Ninian was instructed by Bede, it follows that Mr. Gallenga must have imagined that Bede and Ninian were contemporaries, aud taken an opportunity to improve, as he thought, on the statement of the bull, which was simply that it was recorded by the Venerable Bede that St. Ninian had been instructed at Rome in the true doctrine of the Church. Not content with publishing himself a Ninny in chronology, Mr. Gallenga m his following despatch to London sent to the Times a foolish, or rather an April fool's story of the sudden death of an Indian prince at Florence. r