That French 'Scandal'

New Zealand Tablet, 18 October 1906, Page 22

That French 'Scandal'

In their issues of September 1 and 2, the daily papers of New Zealand published the' following cablemessage, which purported to have been sent from Paris on August 31 :— ' Father Oassan, the parish piiest at Fangeres (near Beziers) who was arrested on suspicion of causing the death of a young girl, admits that he caused her death. He also acknowledges that he betrayed many women through the medium of the confessional' In our issue of September 6 we gave ooir readers cogent reasons for maintaining, previous to investigation, an open mind regarding injurious statements coming from French anticlerical sources concerning Catholic ecclesiastical persons and institutions. Like some of the so-called ' Irish outrages ' that have recently been cabled to the Australian and New Zealand press, the story of 'the parish priest at Fangeres ' seems' to have been pretty musty when it was cabled to tins end of the earth. It appeared in the American l yellow ' papers a week or two before the cable demon remem. bered Australia. And it was, journalistically, ancient history before it was sent across the Atlantic through the submarine wire. But there was one trifling circumstance that the impenitent Ananias at the Paris end of the line carefully omitted to say— namely that three months before the story was wired to New Zealand, the incriminated pastor had been declared innocent by the hostile French tribunal that had tried him on the capital charge. So much we learn from American papeis to hand by the last mail. The rest of the story is simply cable fiction. We have not found the story in the British secular press. The incident is a fresh illustration of the danger of taking French or other Catholic news that originates in hostile sources. Yet there are Catholics who furnish their households with no corrective to the malignant -falsehoods that have 'been week after week oozing into our secular papers through the ocean cables ever since the Freemason-Radical-Socialist campaign against religion began in lodge-ridden France.