A Hilarious Hoax

New Zealand Tablet, 20 August 1908, Page 22

A Hilarious Hoax

Josh Billings was not (as he 'declared^ • cdzackly disposed S ™"Z'J lth ° Ut < Stirrsngl ' aH that he heard;. and- he had a prudent habit of * smellin' things before he" swallowed thl*

'The exercise of a similar sane precaution would often savosome of our over-eager No-P,opery . friends from the ' lafture ' (as Artemus Ward calls it) which comes in when the light of exposure illumines the' hoax and exposes the gobemoucherie of those who look upon Catholics as a " collection " of knaves or fools. * The ' lafture '. has- come in over a hilarious hoax that has been played off on the the Rev. Dill-Macky's Watch-man, the organ of the P.D.A. and of the v Orange lodges of New South Wales. With portentous solemnity, that interesting. ' yellow * organ published a story to this effect : That ' Hilaire MaraudSafran, one of the most gifted of France's polemical writers to-day,' has written an article in the Revue des Deux Mondes, advocating the resumption and purchase of every ijich of the city of Rome, with a view to its complete destruction— and, with it, the destruction of the Papacy. 'Reasonable compensation,' is (according to Maraud-Safran) ' to be paid to the present owners— a matter to which the -Protestants of the world would gladly subscribe. Even the name of the city would vanish and the Roman Catholic Church would then become a homeless creed cut away from the root.' In the next issue of the Watchman, its readers learned the following further particulars of the 1 movement ' for wiping Rome off the map, sowing its site with salt, and blotting the Papacy off the face of the earth :— ' The Papacy ... as such has ranged against itself the whole of the Left in the Italian Chamber, and w h this pa S on this question are the Socialist-Atheists returned by the kS masses who have relinquished Romanism, but have not bee gathered into the Protestant fold. That-given publirity-the Protestants of the British Empire, Europe, America^Scani LZ, and the Continent of Europe would" come forward with a sum ?essS IYI^ ° U i Maraud : Saf ™"'s scheme, and that wiSS r?h!H ?»! £ • '' S °^ VIOUS from the fact admitted by the abid little Romanist rag, the Era, published from Oscott College, that in the last nine months four French papers and two Swiss ones have alone collected We are also informed that ' 37 , 5 00 francs (;£i 5 oo) were collected during the last two months in the little Canton of Bale by the local Protestant organ and forwarded to the Eclair to add to its fund' for the destruction of Rome. French papers (we are assured) have thrown themselves into ' the cause ' and are ' meeting with good success.' But— alack and well-a-day !— under the paltry excuse that they may not meddle in another country s affairs, the weak-kneed organs of the United Kincdoir have avoided touching this vexed question.' It seems almost incredible that even the Watchman, gullible as it is in all that relates to Catholics, should be so far taken in as to publish and take seriously the preposterously palpable fooling of he alleged Maraud-Safran and the Revue des Deux MondJ. But the hoax even went so far as the opening of a shilling fund for the obliterate of Rome! Here is a part of the BiLtins breezy comment on the hoax •— l fs r*^n£rjrKi 'usurps, of La Croix tried to show " Maraud-Safran 's " Rome resmnit ion proposal was an "impossible dream"? As a fact tbS is no such person as ". Maraud-Safran "! " Safran » L mfic ° 'yellow" ,n French; "Maraud" means "pup." A gGaulg Gaul htL J " o DetiX Mo " des nncrv *r considered the possibility of resuming Rome ; nor did any newspaper oppose the astounding proposition . The paper has had its leg^Sragged badly by someone, and the solemn reference to Mr. Yellow Pun is a hilarious item.' - ' A correspondent of the Catholic Press who ' knows every yard of the Duche country ' declares, in its issue of August ' * (l) there is no ?*?* named L' Eclair published in or near Dijon; (a) that Dijon would not support an anti-Catholic publication for a moment.' He also adds that Oscott ' has" been closed as a college for many years.' The name of Uieeditor oiLflah is^ by the way, another gem of nomenclature. He !S called . U. Henri Singemoine-which, being interpreted, meaneth (,„ English) Mr. Henry Monkey-Monk ! We think we have now at last .truck upon the authors of the preposterous No-Popery romance which bears the imprint of a knight of the ink-roller in Palmerston North; which is being inLtriously

' circulated as a- religious tract for' the^ conversion 1 , of Catholics ; ' "and in which a" Mother .Abbess— 'whose name, .translated into English, , means. ' Pious, , Fiction ' — is made,. to. talk, a .lot of , preposterous nonsense, to 'an illustrious painter.' (and r glazier), and to, wind, up Jjy. renouncing , the 'errors of . .Rome ' in order to -embrace errors.,' .inade. in (See our issue of August 6.) The intellectual t.-?),. leaders of wjiat" calls itself/ The Sturdy Protestant Party ' in- New South Wales have added to the gaiety of life by -their inability to read "a French pocketdictionary, and by" their unwillingness adopt Josh' 5 ' Billings' saving precaution Id f'smcH. ov' stories '*' about"* Rome"' before swallowing them. 1 , ' " ' " - '"