Clumsy Lying.

New Zealand Tablet, Volume XXVIII, Issue 5, 1 February 1900, Page 4

Clumsy Lying.

Editor Brann, of the Texas Iconoclast, has much to say regarding the Slattery woman and the roving ex-priest who is the senior partner in this bad business of stirring up religious fanaticism for the sake of personal gain. In an article that appeared from his pen in July, 1895, Mr. Braun says of himself : ' I was raised a Protestant, and, thank God ! I'm no apostate. I learned Protestantism at my mother's knee and from my father's pulpit.' In the same article lie thus refers to ex-priest Slattery : ' There are three kinds of liars at large in the land : the harmless Munchausen who romances for amusement, and his falsehoods do no harm ; the Macchiavellian liar, ■whose mendacity bears the stamp of original genius ; and the stupid prevaricator, who rechews the fetid vomit of other villians simply because he lacks a fecund brain to breed falsehood to which he may play the father. And Slattery is a rank specimen of the latter class, . . . What Slattery seems to lack to become a first-class fraud, is continuity of thought. He lies fluently, even entertainingly, but not consistently.' Mrs. Slattery lies boldly and fluently too, but neither entertainingly, nor cleverly, nor consistently. Slattery advertises her on flaming yellow handbills as a person of ' talent ' and ' highly educated.' He is evidently easily pleased. For her pamphlets are marked by a serene and frequent disregard of the rules of grammar, spelling, and punctuation, by occasional lapses into her native slang, and by the crude style — or rather total lack of style — so characteristic of the screaming no Popery ' penny dreadful.' A further evidence of the • talent ' of this ' highly educated ' lady will be found on p. 124 of her Convent Life, where she boldly attributes to 'the immortal Shakespeare ' the following threadbare quotation from Pope's Essay on Man (Ep. IV) :—: — ' Honour and shame from no condition rise ; Act well your part, there all the honour lies.'

Convent L ife purports to be her autobiography. We have alread y pointed out that the Slattery woman, like the male partner in the business, is a bold but clumsy liar. Not merely fact, but probability, are Bet at calm defiance on almost every page of her noisome book. The following are mild samples taken at sheer random from her ostensible autobiography : An Irish priest who (p. 34) habitually pronounces ' virgin ' as ' vargin ' — a blunder which is as unknown in Ireland as calling ' sweet ' ' swate.' Then we have (p. 93) a Jew that bears the name of Isaac Cole man ; a parish priest (her alleged uncle) who, contrary to all Irish usage in such cases, is, after his

*A fiercely, not to say ferociously, anti-Catholic association in the United States, on the lines of the Orange Society. Its object, as shown by its rules and oaths, published in the A T orlk American Review for May, 189 1, was, in effect, to persecute and outlaw the whole Catholic population of the United States, It is strongly denounced by Mr. W. T. Stead in If Christ Came to Chicago (pp. H56-3R7). Like the Orange Society, it is also strongly antagonistic to liberal-minded Protestants of every creed.

fOn appeal, this sentence was sustained.

1 In the United States (says the Boston Pilot), the trade of the A.P.A. lecturers was that 'of stirring up strife among 1 American labouring: men of one religion against labouring men of another religion.' 'Bryanism' scotched" the A PA. conspiracy by soliditying the labour element. When Bryan was nominated for President and the A.P.A. collapsed in ignominy, a notorious but genuine ex-priest lecturer and gaol-bird is said to have remarked : 'If this thing keeps on, it i^ goin? to play hell with my trade.'

§He had previously been pastor of a denomination of his own creation, called by him ' The Independent Catholic Church.' |i The Slatterys, by Mr. J. Britten. K.S.G.. p. 12. C.T.S. 1 1bid. i The Business of Vilification. C.T.S. of America, No 30 (St. P.uil, Minucsota),

- See Slattery's Complete R 'filiation of Popish Lies, pp. 5-6.

death, kept unburied for four days (p. 113) ; a novice who is permitted to spend ' most of her time ' entertaining guests (p. 36) ; the familiar old fables of novices being forcibly detained in convents against their will (p. 1 27, etc ), and. of priests who denounce the Bible as 'a very dangerous book' (p. I'M) ; and her positive assertion (pp. 68 and 114) that, as a fact of her own personal knowledge and experience, a minor may, under English law, ' sign away ' to her guardian or trustee ' all her property ' and that such signature, even when fraudulently obtained, give 3 him 'full power to what he liked with it I' This will be news indeed for the lawyers. * Intelligent Protestants will be blow to believe the woman's mad tale to the effect that the Convent of Poor Clares, Cavan — an inmate of which she falsely alleges herself to have been — is a place where long and earnest prayer and mortification, and heroic penitential works are associated with aimless and diabolical cruelty, gross immorality, abortion, and murder — all perpetrated in the sacred name of religion 1 Miss Cusack was for thirty years a nun in a convent of the same Order. She knew the Cavan Abbey of Poor Clares well. And yet, in her Life Inside the Church of Home (written after she had left the Church) she declared that she never saw anything immoral or improper within those retreats of piety and learning. She, moreover, roundly declared that Mrs. Slattery's book was from beginning to end a tissue of falsehoods, f There is happily no need of examining into and refuting the loathsome charges of Mrs. Slattery ; for we shall prove beyond the reach of yea or nay that the woman never was, in any capacity, an inmate of the Convent of Poor Clares, Cavan. For the rest this shocking book is notable for its coarse and blasphemous references to the Sacrament of the Altar. A perusal of its malignant and fetid falsehoods has enabled us to quite understand why Mrs. Slattery could find no publisher for her reputed productions, and why even her printers have dared the penalties of the law rather than affix their imprint to such vile literary garbage. J