A LECTURE ON ROME. DEAN FITCHETT FLIES ANOTHER KITE.

New Zealand Tablet, Volume XXVI, Issue 25, 27 October 1898, Page 2

A LECTURE ON ROME. DEAN FITCHETT FLIES ANOTHER KITE.

A bko ad-minded and highly-cultured ex-Moderator of the Scottish Presbyterian Church, who passed away recently, used to declare that one of the greatest enemies of religion is the no-Popery parson Dean Fitchett, of Dunedin, has elected to throw in his lot with those noisy declaimers. For some time past he has been badly bitten with Romaphobia. The Dean has swallowed Zola's Borne without salt, and, for ' trimmin's,' some cheap and nasty guidebook, with, perhaps, a controversial pamphlet by way of dessert. Dean Fitchett has, in fact, eaten too much Pope. He ia deadly sick of the feast and decidedly ' livery.' Some time ago he was ' taken bad ' of the Pope in Auckland. He relieved his overcharged mind of great pieces of Zola's savage no-Popery whoops, and — before an assembly of young men— gave a glowing advertisement to one of the envenomed and evil-Bmelling romances of the atheistic French pornographer.

Last week Dean Pitchett broke out in a fresh place— Lawrence, to wit. The report of the proceedings, if lengthy, ia somewhat fuzzy. But it is clear that the performance was a repetition of the Auckland one with a vulgar addendum— the same old kite was flown, but with a longer and more bedraggled tail ; the same old gibes at the Pope and Papal court, coupled with street-corner buffoonery and second-hand burlesque of Catholic faith and practice : attempts at the elephantine kind of 'humour' that is associated in the public mind with paint-patches and dummy pokers and strings of dummy sausages and the sawdust of the circus-ring. We have learned from several independent sources that the grown-up portion of the audience took the Dean's kite-flying coldly, and that it has left a sense of honest indignation in the minds of many fairminded Protestants in the district. Of the Catholic body it is needless to speak. Dean Pitchett is apparently qualifying for the school of those MIGHTY TRAVELLEBS

like Mandeville of happy memory, and the late lamented Lemuel Gulliver, not to speak of David Christie Murray and Max O'Rell. They rush through foreign countries with, perhaps, a strong prejudice against its inhabitants, and oftentimes with scarcely enough knowledge of its language to keep body and soul together. And yet they contrive to see and hear more in five minutes, with half an eye and the lobe of one ear, than old residents of the country could hear in fifty years with, a pair of serviceable ears apiece, and see in the same period with Sam Welter's double- magnifying electroscopic spectacles of hextra power. Dean Fitchett never so much as caught a glimpse of the Pope. What of that ? He has read Zola — the sweet, immaculate Zola — and hey, presto ! he knows more of the outer habits and inmost thoughts and feelings of Leo XIII. than do Leo's life-long 1 intimates. After all there is a royal road to learning. Dean Fitchett is satisfied to echo the opinions of the apostle of filth who was refused the entree of the Vatican, and who, did he come to Dunedin, would probably find the Dean's own door slammed emphatically in his face. We cannot compliment the Dean on his choioe of a guide. But prejudice makes queer bed-fellows. Neither can we commend him for the accuracy of such observations as he was bold enough to make on his own account. Here is a straw which shows how the wind blows. He assured his audience in slangy terms that the statue of St. Peter (in St. Peter's, Rome) ' very much resembled a nigger.' We have no intention of questioning the Dean's personal veracity so long as we can fall back on the assumption of defective eyesight or slippery memory. The writer of these lines, and several others besides him in Dunedin, have eeeu that statue of St. Peter probably many hundreds of

times for the once that it may have met the Anglican Dean's unfriendly eye. It bears no more resemblance to a ' nigger ' than does the bronze statue of Dr. Stuart in Dunedin. Dean Fitchett's eyes are evidently not to be trusted. How then can we believe the evidence of his ears among a strange people, speaking what, for all we know to the contrary, may have been to him an unknown tongue 1 Aa to Dean Fitchett's personal opinions of Catholics, he is perfectly welcome to the worst as to the best he can form of us. That is his affair. But when he steps out on the public platform and makes use of language that is calculated to throw ridicule and contempt upon our religion, then it becomes our affair, and he must be prepared for as plain criticism as the occasion may demand. There is enough and to spare in the history and monuments of Rome for lecturing on till the day of judgmentj udgment without offending decent people's nostrils with the smell of ZOLA'S BTENCH-POTB. But some people go to Rome with the appetite that brings the vulture to the Towers of Silence. They expect to find plenty of caroases there — to come across a moral Pit of Tophet. For does not the grand old superstition say that the Pope is the Man of Sin and Rome the Mistress of 'Abominations ? That has been decided long ago — and to him that doubts, anathema maranatha! Dean Fitchett saw nothing in the precincts of the Vatican particularly suggestive of the seven heads and ten horns of the Beast. So he took a look through the magic mirrors of Zola's fishy eyes, and, presto 1 he saw the Vatican swarming with pink snakes and blue devils and — well, the other noisome things which people the sewer that with the French pornographer stands for a mind. The Dean's lecture on Rome is the mere jnice of Emile Zola's book, coupled with the parrot-repetition of some guide-book talk and the malevolent kitchen or stable gossip of that knowing hawk, the professional guide, who knows so well how to supply justj ust the sort of 'facts' that suit his various customers. Here is a guide- faot ' which Dean Fitchett has contrived to neatly alter :— ' He (the Dean) believed the figure [in St. Peter's] was not a statue of St. Peter but of Jupiter.' A glance at the statue, coupled with a schoolboy's knowledge of mythology or archaeology, would be sufficient to throw ridicule upon the silly tale. But Dean Fitchett, like Rabelais' witches, seems to have gone out occasionally without his eyes. The statue of St. Peter is not a statue of Jupiter. Moreover, it never was used as such. There is a story to the effect that it was cast from bronze that was once in a statue of Jupiter — which is a very different thing ; but we have never been able to find any confirmation for the story. It is well to state facts fully and fairly, even if one does happen to be a Dean Dean Fitchett accepts GOSSIP AND HOARY MYTHS when they suit the bent of his feelings. He kicks history and Protestant historians downstairs when they co counter to his pet preprejudice. He gives it as his personal opinion that St. Peter never was in Rome. It matters little to him that before the fourteenth century no one had ever denied the fact of St. Peter's stay in the Eternal City, and that a host of Protestant writers of the greatest ability have vindicated it. We can smile serenely at the Dean's opinion on the matter when we remember that St. Peter's visit to Rome is upheld by all Catholic; authorities and by Protestant writers of such eminence as Cave, Lardner, Neale, Whiston. Dr. Robinson (Professor of Ecclesiastical History, King's College), Bishops Ellicott and Pearson, Archbishop Bramhall, Palmer, Chamier, Grotius, Leibnitz, Hall, Hammond, Scaliger, Le Clerc, Schaff, Usher, Whitby, Blondell, and ever so many more. Bishop Ellicott — a member of the Church to which Dean Fitchett now belongs — thus neatly ' sizes up ' the grounds upon which the Dean's opinion is based : ' Nothing but Protestant prejudice,' says he, l can stand against the historical evidence that St. Peter sojourned and died in Rome.' That is just it. Prejudice has a hard head. It will knock itself against the loftiest stone-wall of fact and come away smiling and without a headache or a new phrenological bump to rub. Who has not heard the story of the poor inmate of a hospital for the insane who fancied he was a corpse;? ' But a corpse can't bleed,' said the doctor to him one day. ' Decidedly not,' said the patient. The doctor struck the patient's arm with a lancet. The blood flowed freely. ' That proves you're not a corpse.' ' No,' objected the patient, 'it only proves that a corpse can bleed.' Bigotry is only one form of insanity. The publication of offensive matter through the columns of THE PRESS is a matter that deeply concerns the Catholic body in every part of New Zealand. We have had occasion to refer to this subject on two occasions in the columns of this paper. We are staunch upholders of the liberty of the Press. But we are not less staunch supporters of the decency of the Press. We are glad to know that there are very few newspapers in New Zealand— and they of the back-block, boiler-plate kind — that allow themselves to be made the sounding-boards of roving no-Popery declaimers, and to give a wider currency to statements that are an outrage on the faith and feelings of any religious denomination. Such a proceeding would be a violation of the principles and traditions of respectable journalism. Catholics alone attack no other creed. Catholics alone suffer from the vulgar diatribes of itinerant platform enthusiasts who revel in the cheap notoriety won by the devil's work of stirring up creed against creed. But the worse crime lies with the pressmen that make themselves their allies by turning their papers, on occasion, into mouth-pieces of no-Popery. The remedy for this condition of things — where it may exist— lies with Catholics themselves. The publication of vulgar attacks on the Catholic body will cease when it pays no longer. It is for the Catholic supporters of such papers to determine whether it is to pay or not. There are newspaper people who have not much feeling in their head or heart. There are few of them that are not tender in their pocket. Let our readers paste this in their hats. If they forget it in the future it will not be through any fault of ours.