Notes

New Zealand Tablet, Volume XXXIV, Issue 9, 1 March 1906, Page 17

Notes

A Clumsy Forgery Some sanctimonious individual in Palmerston North has unearthed a clumsy No-Popery forgery, had it reprinted, and circulated in the district. Its title is ' The Portrait of Mary in Heaven.' It is headed with the following ' historical ' data :— 4 Towards the close of the sixteenth century the following (correspondence took place between a young Mother Abbess and an illustrious painter. It has been translated by Napoleon Roussel.' The name given to the ' young Mother Abbess ' is an absurd and palpable • fake '— ' Maria de St. Roman.' Of the which, more anon. Well, Maria writes threeletters from ' St. Mary's Abbey,' in the town of . •Nowhere ! Her correspondent is the ' illustrious painter '—which- his name it is Joseph de St. Pierre. Josephwrites three letters to Maria from a ' monastery ' and ' cloister,' which is also situated— Nowhere. No statement is, of course, made as to the original source or authority of this ' sixteenth century * correspondence. Such a course would be altogether contrary tq- the rufes of the No-Popery tract-writer— it would so greatly facilitate investigation and exposure. \Ve are not even told from what" language the alleged documents have been ' translated.' As to the dramatis personae : (1) The Abbess's- name (as stated) is ♦ Maria de St Roman.' But, as all the names, purport to be given in French, why * Maria,' and not • Marie,' the correct form. ? Now there is no saint in the calendar -whose name Vould bo

written in French, or in any other leading European language, ' St. Roman.' There is, however, in French a word ' roman.' It means ' romance ' or ' fiction.' In the present connection, the name has an appropriateness which the author of the forgery probably never suspected. The correct translation of the lady's name is • Maria of Holy Romance.' But the French might be a good deal ' more so.' (2) The history of art contains the name of no ' illustrious painter (or glazier either) named Joseph de St. Pierre. This ' sixteenthcentury ' foreign monk-painter is made to write in the peculiar v theol'ogical slang of the more ignorant class of English-speaking tract-writers of the nineteenth century. And ha knows so little of his religion that he treats t-he bodily assumption of the Blessed Virgin as a defined dogma of the Catholic faith— blundering, just as tractwriters do every day of the week, between private opinion and declared doctrine. (3) The alleged ' translator ' receives the French name of Napoleon Roussel. But ho knows so little of his language that he cannot spell a simple Christian name correctly. And the excruciating blunder that he flounders into is precisely the one that an ignorant English-speaking writer Kvith an extremely meagre smattering of French, would <i)uite naturally make in the case. Maria of Holy Romance and the rest of them are clearly so many Mrs. 'Arrises —mere fictitious names to hang a tale of imagination upon.

The manifest object of this tract is to get some very stupidj biblical ' interpretation,' and some antiCatholic virus, under the skin of simple-minded Catholics, on the pretended authority of holy and 'illustrious' Catholics. Its substance is (1) the old calumny that Catholics place the Blessed Virgin above Christ ; ami (2) it is a rather coarse-grained attempt to make it appear that the sweet Maiden-Mother was no maiden at all, but just an ordinary, common-place, and by no means good-looking married Jewess, with a family of seven or eight children. Not a line of the letters was written ' towards the close of the sixteenth century.' They are the work of three centuries later— concocted by a clumsy tract-writer who did not know enough to forge plausibly. They made their first appearance nearly forty years ago. It was (we believe) in a disreputable combination of newspaper and No-Popery tract that .was published in Dublin, under a bogus Catholic name, and under the auspices of an association for ' converting ' Irish ' Papishes ' by means of soup, flannel, and hideous calumnies against the Old Faith. The forgery ■was so palpable and inartistic that it really did not call for the denunciation which it met. It went beneath the surface and rarely reappeared. We know of no purpose )but one of annoyance and insult to Catholics that can be served by the exhuming of this calumny for Palmerston North. The law of the land shows as scant mercy to the utterer as to the forger of base coin—unless the utterer is able to establish his innocence and botia fides. And it passeth ordinary comprehension that people with souls to be saved or damned should—without scrupulous investigation— gaily expose themselves to the risk of using, even at second hand, the arts of the forger in the service of the God of truth. Decent Protestants—and even decent pagans— would part with dear life rather than descend to the use of such dishonoring methods. But there are lewd fellows of the baser sort who ' esteem all things lawful against " Rome." ' It is such as they that gave rise to the strong protest made by the Protestant writer Whitaker in the third volume of his ' Vindication of Queen Mary ' : ' Forgery (I "blush for the honor of Protestantism while I write it) seems to have been peculiar to the Reformed. I look in vain for one of those accursed outrages of imposition amongst the disciples of Popery.'