The New Zealand Tablet THURSDAY, MAY 6, 1909. SOME CHURCH-AND-BIBLE FICTION

New Zealand Tablet, Volume XXXVII, Issue 18, 6 May 1909, Page 701

The New Zealand Tablet THURSDAY, MAY 6, 1909. SOME CHURCH-AND-BIBLE FICTION

§HE lower forms of No-Popery fiction are marked by the same lack of originality that besets other phases of ' penny-dreadful ' aid ' shilling-shocker ' ' literature.' ' Vain repetition ' of old traditions and superstitions is its method and its ' proof.' But 1 ' The legendary tales that pleased of yore Can charm an understanding age no more.' The course of historical study and ' the schoolmaster abroad ' have combined to pole-axe full many of ' the legendary tales that pleased ' the-bitter or uninstructed fancy of a past day. But from the intellectual 'backblocks,' where the old passion still has a fast-relaxing hold, Catholics still hear the old sing-song stories that represent them as mixtures of ape and demon. Catholics know it all by heart. It is dinned into their ears in stormy pamphlets, in anonymous letters to the press, and in the oratorical hysteria of the July platform. * Newman touched this phase of the more bitter forms of No-Popery in a famous passage written during the whirling fury of 1851 : 'As to ourselves, the world has long ago done its worst against us; long ago has it seasoned us for this encounter. In the way of obloquy and ridicule it has exhausted upon us long since all it had to pour, and now it is resourceless. More it cannot say against us than it has said already.' ' There is,' says the same great convert, in another work, ' a demand for such fabrications, and there is a consequent supply. Our antiquity, "our vastness, our strangeness, our successes, our unmovableness, all require a solution ; and the impostor is hailed as a prophet, who will extemporise against us some tale of blood, and the orator as -n. evangelist, who points to some real scandal of the Church, dead and gone, man or measure, as the pattern fact of Catholicism.' * We were reminded of all this by sundry bitter anonymous attacks, by a clergyman, in recent issues of a local contemporary. These were promptly and adequately dealt with at the time. But two of them (as has been repre-

sented to us) are of sufficient interest for further specific treatment in the columns of this paper. • Those here referred to are connected with the moss-grown calumny that the Catholic Church forbids to her children the reading of the Sacred Scriptures. A perusal of Archbishop Carr's Church and the Bible will give the popular reader an excellent idea of the extent to which Protestant writers of the first rank expose the wicked folly of this ' legendary tale that pleased of yore.' We might say of this what Macaulay said of the story which connected Catholics with the starting of the Great Fire of London in 1666 : that it has been ' abandoned by statesmen to aldermen, by aldermen to clergymen, by clergymen to old women, and by old women 'to Sir Harcourt Lees' — who represents the gobemoucherie or gaping credxility that finds an annual voice when the dog-star is in the ascendant. In the present case, two alleged ' modern instances ' are given to support the motheaten legend of ' Rome's ' imaginary hatred of the Written Word. (1) Pope Gregory XVI. is ' quoted ' as forbidding ' the publication, distribution, reading, and possession of books of Holy Scripture translated into the vulgar tongue. 1 And (2) Pope Leo XIII. is alleged to have issued a ' condemnation ' and 'an extraordinary anathema ' against ' the Gospels in present-day French.' Stated in briefest terms, the 'quotation' from Pope Gregory XVI., as given, is a forgery; the story of the 'anathema' is a fabrication. * (1) The story about Pope Gregory XVI. may be briefly dismissed. The alleged total and absolute prohibition of ' the publication, distribution, reading, and possession ff books of Holy Scripture translated into the vulgar tongue ' is stated to constitute a part of that Pope's condemnation of Bible Societies in the Encyclical Letter of May 8, 1844. The words of that condemnation are before us in their Latin text. The Pope condemns the Bible Society founded in America for the purpose of scattering their versions of the Sacred Scriptures indiscriminately (nullo delectu) among Catholics in Italy ; he deprecates (as the Church has ever deprecated) ignorant people, if only they are able to read (si modo leg ere norint), setting up to interpret the Inspired Writings on their own account (sine magistro and nullo duce), and quotes in point the warning words of St. Peter, that there are in the Sacred Scriptures ' things difficult to understand, which the unlearned and the unstable wrest . . . to their own "destruction ' (77. Peter, iii., 16-17). He furthermore condemns the ' very grave errors ' which were introduced into the versions of those societies 'by reason of lack of prudence, or by guile, on the part of so many interpreters ' (gravissimi ex tot interpretum vel imprudentia vel fraude i nserantur errores). And he points out that the real object which these societies had in view in spreading their peculiar versions of the Scriptures indiscriminately among Catholics, was to lead these into error, to work them gradually into the Protestant principle of private judgment, and to induce them to ' repudiate the teaching authority ' of the Catholic Church. A Po >c would indeed be a false shepherd if he would not try to protect his flock against these things.^ In the whole course of the Encyclical Letter referred to here, there is nothing whatever that so much as hints at the wholesale prohibition of ' books of Holy Scripture translated into the vulgar tongue.' On the contrary, in the course of the very same Encyclical Pope Gregory XVI., referring to the fourth rule of the Index, makes provision in, express terms for ' the reading of translations [of the Scriptures] in the vulgar tongue, which have been published with the approval of the Apostolic See, or with annotations by learned and Catholic men ' (ut permissa porro habeatur lectio vulgarium versionum, quae ab Apostolicae Sedis approbatae, aut cy:m adnotationibus desumptis^ex doctis catholicisqite viris editae sunt). We may add that probably no words written or uttered by the Popes in regard to the Bible Societies were marked by greater severity than those which were pronounced against them and their methods by such prominent and God-fearing Protestants as Dr. Andrew Thompson (Edinburgh), Ersch, Gruber, Bretschneider, and other well-known members of Reformed faiths in Great Britain and on the Continent of Europe. m (2) We are likewise told thai Pope Leo XIII. issued'an extraordinary anathema' against 'the Gospels in present-day French.' The ' proof ' of this distressing story is this: that Pope Leo XIII. condemned M. Henri Lasserre's new French translation of the Gospels in 1886. Only that and nothing^more 1 Now, mark how plain a tale shall put the ' narrator ' down. We condense it into tabloid form from the detailed and authoritative history .>f the version told by Father Clarke. M. Lasserre's pious intention in making his new translation was beyond all doubt. The Pope (to whom the translator forwarded a copy of the book) sent him (through Cardinal Jacobini) a letter expressing ' his approval of ..the object with which

you have been inspired ' in bringing out the Gospels in a new present-day French translation. The Pope thus gave his high approval to Lasserre's ' object,' and to the making of translations of ' the Gospels in present-day French.' Ho did not, however, approve of the contents of M. Lasserre's book, or pronounce the translation a good and faithful one. Later on a considerable number of mistranslations and of other inaccuracies were discovered • in M. Lasserre's new translation. Father Clarke gives a long list of these. Here let it suffice to state, by way of example, tha,t a petition of the Lord's Prayer ( ( Lead us not into temptation ') was misrepresented by the translator; that Mark in., 21, Matthew xii., 6, Matthew xix., 9, Matthew vi., 7, were all mistranslated ; that the words, ' Many are called, but few are chosen,' were omitted; and that the footnotes contained numerous false interpretations of the sacred text. The book was submitted to the Sacred Congregation of the Index, carefully examined, and deservedly condemned — not because it was in ' present-day French,' but because of tho many and grave errors it contained. And the condemnation was not an anathema, much less ' an extraordinary - anathema.'

There were heroes before Agamemnon. And there were numerous approved Catholic translations of the Sacred Scriptures in the French tongue before Henri Lasserre. Thus, in 1841, Leroux de Lincy published an ancient French version which dated, apparently, from the early part of the twelfth century. The twelfth and thirteenth centuries saw several new French translations of the Scriptures., One of these (dating from the year 1294) was published by De Rely in Paris in 1487, when the art of printing was in its infancy. Numerous editions of this appeared during the sixteenth century — one of them at Antwerp in 1528, with the approval of the Inquisitor. Soon afterwards the theologians of the Louvain Catholic University, under the direction of Father Nicholas de Leuze, brought out a new French translation of the Scriptures, under the highest ecclesiastical authority. Hundreds of editions of this were published in over fifty towns and cities of Belgium and France till near the close of the seventeenth century. It was then superseded for a time by the celebrated French translation known as that of Lemaistre de Sacy. Calmet's improved version speedily followed (Paris, 1707-1716); then came the 'De Vence ■ Bible ' ; while the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries saw many new French versions,- chief of which were those of Father Bouhours, S.J., and Glaire's. This latter, 'in

present-day French,' was issued with the special approval of Pope Pius IX., by a decree of the Congregation of the Index, personally confirmed by him, and dated January 29, 1861 — a quarter of a century before Lasserre's translation appeared. A very much curtailed list of one Paris Catholic publisher (A. Roger et Chernoviz), open before us, contains six different Bibles 'in present-day French.' And we have not mentioned the versions of Carrieres and Menochius, of Drioux, of Fillion, and the great work in translation and other branches of Biblical science that have won for our old professors, Fathers Bacuez and Vigouroux, a world-wide reputation in sacred science. All the French translations of the Scriptures mentioned above, and many besides, were issued under, direct ecclesiastical sanction. And that is how the Church has issued ' extraordinary anathemas ' against God's Holy Word in past-day and ' present-day French.'