Another Escaped 'Nun'

New Zealand Tablet, Volume XXXIV, Issue 12, 22 March 1906, Page 1

Another Escaped 'Nun'

A newspaper clipping sent us by a North Island correspondent contains a story to the effect that a nun named ' Patrocina de San Jose,' ' escaped ' a Tew weeks ago from the convent at Gongoras, near Valencia, in Spain. The ' escape ' was embroidered with the usual tawdry attempts at dramatic effect that make nearly all such stories mere [plagiarisms one of the other. One could write forty such tales, with shut eyes, on a summer's day.

To one versed in the Spanish language, the first thing in the story, that raises the slow, wise smile of incredulity 19 the name of the ' escaped ' nun. Achilles was vulnerable in the hqlel. And this latest clumsy inventor of anti-convent fiction has left himself unarmorcd at various points. In the first place, a plausible liar would' have at 'least given his ' escaped ' nun a probable-looking name. But ' Patrocina ' is a Christian name unknown in Spanish. The words ' Patrocina de San Jose ' are merely an ignorant man's blunder for 1 Patrocinio de San Jose ' — the designation of a feast of t'ho Church : to wit, the Patronage of St. Joseph. The concoctcr of the Gongoras story evidently came across the name of the feast somewhere, mistook it for the name of a person — and trusted to his memory in the matter of spelling In the second place, a more adroit rascal would have avoided plagiarism. ' And in the third place, he would have made sure that there was a convent at Gongoras. .Having ascertained' this, he could have made the Feast of the Patronage of St. Joseph scramble out by the window with some show of plausibility — to those who know nothing of the Spanish language or Spanish ways. But the Father of Lies is given to playing scurvy tricks upon his children. An account of this 'escape' 1 of 'a few weeks ago' appeared in the ' Glasgow Evening News ' of November 30, 1905. Our clever contemporary, the 'Glasgow Observer,' got upon its track, and the ; story of the Gongoras ' escape ' is now in a glass case in the Anti-Convent Section of the Museum of No-Popery Fakes and Frauds. Says the ' Observer,' in its issue of January 27, 1906 : 'We wrote to Gongoras, to the Rev. Mother at the supposed convent, enquiring whether there was any truth in the story, and the letter was returned to us, marked " Not known." So that the presumption is that no such convent exists, and that the whole stcry, like so many others of a similar character, is a Protestant fabrication.'