What Bishop Bourget thought of Chiniquy's self-vindication in this letter we have already heard, but it will be interesting, as throwing further light on his methods, to know what his friend M. Brassard thought of it. If we are to believe the account in Fifty Years (p. 529), M. Brassard, after reading the letter of April 18th in the Canadian papers, wrote Chiniquy a letter in which he said "Your last letter has completely unmasked our poor Bishop, and revealed to the world his malice, injustice, and hypocrisy."

Here, however, Mr. Chiniquy seems to have forgotten that, when a man is engaged in fabricating facts, he should be particularly careful about his dates. "When," he says, "I received that last friendly letter from M. Brassard on April 1, 1857, I was far from suspecting that on the 15th of the same month I should read in the press of Canada the following lines from him" (p. 530).

"The following lines " were the text of a letter to the Courrier de Canada, dated April 9th, in which M. Brassard says: "As some people suspect that I am favouring the schism of M. Chiniquy, I think it is my duty to say that I have never encouraged him by my words or writings in that schism. When I went to St. Anne's... my only object was to persuade that old friend to leave the bad ways in which he was walking. I hope all the Canadians who were attached to M. Chiniquy when he was united to the Church will withdraw from him in horror of his schism. However, we have a duty... to call back with our prayers that stray sheep into the true fold."

As M. Brassard wrote thus on April 9th, it is due to him to believe that he did not write in so different a sense on April 1st, nor can this supposed letter of April 1st be genuine, as a letter written before April 1st cannot have been occasioned by a letter published on April 18th. Besides, if M. Brassard had written thus about unmasking Bishop Bourget, it is inconceivable that Chiniquy should have written on April 23rd (Fifty Years, p. 530) to M. Brassard upbraiding him for the published letter of April 9th, without bringing up against him the inconsistency between the published and the private letter. Too much stress, however, must not be laid on this last argument, for we are safe in assuming that the letter of April 23rd was never sent to M. Brassard, and was probably a fabrication perpetrated some twenty to thirty years later, for the purpose of Chiniquy's book. We are practically safe in assuming this, for a real letter is likely to have borne some relation to the facts as known to M. Brassard, which this does not.

For instance, this supposed letter asks M. Brassard to say to the Canadian people what he wrote to Dr. Letourneau, namely, that "they do not wish to know truth in Canada more than at Chicago about the shameful conduct of M. Desaulniers in this affair." But M. Brassard, in a letter to Bishop Bourget of July 10th (Doc. E) tells him that in the early winter of 1856 his advice to Dr. Letourneau had been: "Go with your friends to M. Chiniquy and say to him, 'If you will cease from exercising the ministry we will aid you in obtaining justice if it is due to you, but if you will not we will abandon you,"' and that he further recommended Dr. Letourneau "to get all his friends to abandon him, that finding himself alone he might be constrained to return to his duty."

Besides, we have other and more direct proof that Chiniquy was capable of publishing unreal letters. On p. 441 of his book he tells us that Bishop O'Regan "published to the world the most lying stories to explain his conduct in destroying the French congregation at Chicago," whereas that bishop in his letter to Bishop Prince of November 20, 1858 (Doc. E) says: "I have not contradicted M. Chiniquy's extravagant letters or the advances of his friends in the same matter [namely, the closing of the French church at Chicago, which had got into irremediable debt]. I have felt that these documents contained in themselves their own refutation. These writings purport to be, replies to a letter I am supposed to have written to the Chicago Tribune. But I never wrote or published this pretended letter, nor has any one written or published it for me, save the astute M. Chiniquy himself." That means that Chiniquy had forged and sent to the Chicago papers, as coming from the bishop, a letter in reality composed by himself, and composed in such terms as to make it easy for him afterwards to refute it. And M. Mailloux (Doc. A) has occasion to allude to another public letter written at this same time, December 17, 1856, by M. Chiniquy. It was written to the "Canadians of Troy," and purported to be the reply to an address of sympathy sent him from that quarter. M. Mailloux adds: "We shall see later whether this address of the Canadians was not written by M. Chiniquy and presented to M. Chiniquy by himself. If it was so it was nothing unusual for him to do." As has been noted, the manuscript of M. Mailloux' memoir is defective, and so we miss the promised demonstration which doubtless formed a part of it. (p. 306).

Now let us come to a further, and still more monstrous, instance of his dishonesty in the use of letters. On p. 538 of his book he tells us that on receiving his letter of April 23, 1857 (the letter we have surmised to be spurious), M. Brassard was confounded, and wrote to beg pardon for his untruthful letter of April 9th, which "he had been forced to sign," and in this alleged letter of apology, dated May 20, 1857, M. Brassard is alleged to have said: "My dear Chiniquy, I am more convinced than ever that you have never been legally suspended, now that I have learnt from the Bishop of Montreal that the Bishop of Chicago interdicted you by word of mouth in his own room -- a kind of interdiction which Liguori says is null and of no effect."

With this alleged bit of letter a little history is connected. On June 8, 1858 (Doc. E), M. Brassard wrote to Bishop Bourget, saying. "I have never given any testimony tending to prove that the sentence of excommunication against M. Chiniquy was not signed by the bishop." This disavowal Bishop Bourget sent on to M. Mailloux (Bishop Bourget to M. Brassard, July 2, 1858, Doc. E), then in Bourbonnais, where Chiniquy was still contending that M. Brassard was on his side. M. Mailloux wrote back on June 24th to say that he had been glad to make use of the disavowal, but that the day before (the 23rd) a M. Camille Par�, a friend of Chiniquy's, had brought some papers among which was an affidavit of M. Brassard's, signed with his own hand.

"Under oath M. Brassard declares that a letter annexed to [the affidavit] is his, and that it contains his opinion on the schism of St. Anne's. In this letter M. Brassard declares that Bishop Bourget had told him that the suspension of M. Chiniquy was null because it had been inflicted without witnesses; and M. Brassard further declares that the bishop told him this was the opinion of Liguori."

Naturally Bishop Bourget was perplexed, and called upon M. Brassard for an explanation, which the latter gave in two letters to the bishop dated July 6 and July 10, 1858.

"... If I must be responsible for all that it pleases M. Chiniquy and the inhabitants of St. Anne's to put into my mouth for the furtherance of their cause I can never hope to clear myself. Indeed, M. Mailloux himself would be greatly embarrassed if he were to be held responsible for all that is attributed to him.

"Now let me reply to this latest accusation. I have never written to M. Chiniquy that your lordship had told me the suspension inflicted on him was invalid as having been inflicted without witnesses. Nor did I ever write to him that you had said that this was the opinion of Liguori. If it is my letter that has been shown to M. Mailloux, he cannot have read in it any such thing, and if in the letter that was shown to him he read the phrases I have just cited, that must have been a forged letter, signature and all. As for the affidavit, that was truly signed by me, except for the words that 'it contains my opinion on the schism at St. Anne's.' Let me explain the history of this affidavit. On the fourth of last May, after eight o'clock, Camille Par� came to my house with a letter from M. Chiniquy and one from Mr. Dunn, a Chicago priest who at the time of my visit two years ago to Chicago was Grand Vicar, but (as I have learnt since) is so no longer. M. Chiniquy asked me to make an affidavit acknowledging the genuineness of a letter I had written to him more than a year ago. It was a letter which he had shown to the Bishop of Dubuque, and which he regarded as likely to facilitate his entrance into the good graces of the bishop, but he had been accused before the bishop of having forged this letter, as well as all the other papers he had produced at Dubuque, papers on the strength of which the bishop had consented to send M. Dunn to St. Anne's on on Palm Sunday to announce the return of peace and to celebrate the divine offices. M. Dunn wrote to me at the same time in English asking me to accede to the desire of M. Chiniquy, for the good of religion. It was this letter from M. Dunn which caused me to consent to declare by affidavit that the letter annexed to it was in my handwriting and bore my signature, and that it stated what I thought to be the truth. I wrote at the same time to M. Chiniquy saying that I was giving him the affidavit solely for the purpose for which he had asked it, and that it was not to be published, that it was a confidential letter which I could not consent to have published. Yet see what use he has made of it....

"I see that he has abused a confidence which I have long since withdrawn from him, and that he has even abused the last act I did on his behalf -- one, too, done on the recommendation of M. Dunn, whom I believed still to be Grand Vicar of Chicago. When then I have done what your lordship may think desirable [to put a stop to this misuse of his name], I shall have finished with [M. Chiniquy]."

From this we see that Chiniquy was capable of asking for an affidavit under pretence that it was to attest a genuine letter, and passing it off as attesting one quite different, which contained seriously false statements and which he himself had forged. After this we need surely have no remaining hesitation in disbelieving the many other letters, conversations, and occurrences with which the book abounds, and on which it relies to exhibit the clergy of Canada and Illinois in a detestable light. For instance, to specify some of the more salient points of this kind, we may on this ground reject as spurious the letters attributed to Bishop Vandevelde on pp. 345 and 384 together with the answers to certain questions alleged to have been given by Bishop O'Regan (p. 440); and likewise, the various conversations he is said to have had with M. Beaubien (p. 27), M. Leprohon (pp. 66, 109), M. Perras (p. 136), Bishop Prince (p. 334), M. Primeau (p. 341), Bishop Bourget (pp. 358, 365, 370), Bishop Vandevelde (p 377), Bishop O'Regan (pp. 391, 394, 426, 429, 437), Archbishop Kenrick (p. 434), Bishop Smith (pp. 544, 549).

Similarly we may reject as fictitious the most unlikely account of his various dealings with Abraham (afterwards President) Lincoln, in chapters lix to lxi. Particularly on this ground we may reject the cock-and-bull story of the Catholic origin of the plot to murder President Lincoln, fortified as it is by a palpably bogus affidavit made at Chiniquy's request and for the purpose of his book in 1881 (p. 508).

A simple reference to the contemporary reports of the two trials of the alleged conspirators, or to the standard Life of Lincoln by Nicolay and Hay -� which, whilst exhaustive in its account of the assassination and of the two trials of the accused, does not throw out the smallest suggestion of a religious origin of the crime -- is sufficient to dispel the unsupported allegation of a man convicted of the dishonest practices we have been able to bring home to Chiniquy. Nor does he better his case by invoking General Harris, the Methodist General, who was one of the judges in the military trial of the conspirators. For in the first place, though General Harris, in his History of the Great Conspiracy Trial (1892), censures one or two priests for maintaining the innocence of the Surratts, a great deal of what Chiniquy quotes from him in his Forty Years in the Church of Christ (p. 206) appears to be interpolated into his account. And in the second place, General Harris says distinctly (Great Conspiracy Trial, p. 250), that "the only reference to the Catholic Church had been made in the public press [and] the prosecution had carefully abstained from any assault on that Church." Besides, in 1901 General Harris wrote an approving Introduction to Mr. Osborne Oldroyd's Assassination of President Lincoln, in the Preface to which the latter repudiates the idea that "the Roman Catholic Church ever sanctioned that heinous crime."

We may, too, on the same ground of Chiniquy's proved untrustworthiness reject all that is to his purpose in what he has to say about the Spink trial in chapters lvi and lviii. Some friends have been kind enough to refer for us to the authentic report of this case in the hearing at Urbana, on October 20, 1856. But it seems that only the barest entries were made in those days, and the sole record of this particular hearing is "Spink plaintiff, Chiniquy defendant, cause slander."

Apparently Spink sued Chiniquy for one of the slanderous statements he was wont to set afloat against any one who offended him, and Spink in vindicating himself contended, that Chiniquy himself had been guilty of the offence he had imputed to another. But, as M. Lebel's sister, the person who seems to have declared that Chiniquy had misbehaved with her, declined at the last moment to go into the witness box -� the sort of thing that constantly happens in such cases -� Spink's suit suffered.

Anyhow two things about Chiniquy's account of the case are suspicious -� one that he so mixes the items in his narrative that no one could gather that the charge against him in this instance was one of libel; the other that the affidavit of Philomene Moffat, made in in 1881 (p. 462), sounds untruthful, even if it be not altogether spurious. It professes to testify to an overheard conversation, always a doubtful kind of testimony, and whereas at its commencement it states that two persons overheard the conversation, at the end it states that there were three, a contradiction most unlikely in a genuine affidavit. Besides it is hard to conceive how what is supposed to have happened in bringing Philomene Moffat from Chicago to Urbana, a distance of some 125 miles, could have taken place within the short space of ten hours at most. The railway from Chicago to Urbana had only been opened two years previously. Whether by 1856 it had been so fully equipped with express trains, and whether, again, at that date there were regular evening papers at Chicago, both of which the story implies, we have not been able to ascertain.

We might stop here, but for completeness' sake will give briefly the closing scene of Chiniquy's Catholic life.

Curiously, at the very time when, according to his book, he was so much exercised by M. Brassard's condemnation of his schism, he was meditating another attempt to get reconciled (on his own conditions?). On May 12, 1857 (Doc. K) M. Campeaux, writing to Bishop Bourget from Bourbonnais, reported that "Chiniquy is showing signs of giving in," and two days previously (ibid.) Chiniquy himself had written to the same bishop to say he was inviting Bishop Pinsonneault, of Sandwich, Ontario, and M. Brassard to be his intermediaries with Bishop O'Regan for this purpose. Bishop Bourget wrote him back a kind letter of encouragement (Doc. E) but we hear nothing more of the project at this time.

The next episode in the history brings us to the spring of the following year, 1858. During the interval Bishop O'Regan went to Rome, probably on his official visit ad limina. As the visit terminated in his translation to the titular see of Dora, it was in accordance with Chiniquy's style that he should claim to have obtained his deposition by representations made to the Holy See and to the Emperor Napoleon (p. 540); but Mr. Gilmary Shea's account sounds more probable. His successor at Chicago was Bishop Duggan, who, however, did not get his Bulls till January 21, 1859, though he was named administrator in the summer of 1858. Bishop Smith, of Dubuque, was appointed administrator of the see of Chicago during the interval. Hence it was with Bishop Smith that Chiniquy had to deal in 1858.

According to Fifty Years, Mr. Dunn -- formerly Grand Vicar of Chicago -- who apparently was of Chiniquy's party, arrived at St. Anne's on March 11, 1858, with the news of Bishop Smith's appointment. He is represented as having been sent by the bishop to invite Chiniquy to send in his submission, and the bishop is made to say a good deal to the discredit of Bishop O'Regan which probably he did not say. Indeed, it looks as if the initiative was taken by Chiniquy, with the object of rushing the administrator, who could as yet have had insufficient time to sift his case.

Anyhow, Chiniquy went with Mr. Dunn to Dubuque on March 25th, and signed an act of retractation, which the bishop seems to have accepted, and on the basis of which he authorised Mr. Dunn to go back with Chiniquy to St. Anne's and announce the reconciliation of congregation and pastor on Palm Sunday, which that year fell on March 28th. We may presume that this did happen, though we do not feel certain, having only Chiniquy's testimony to go by. Nor for the same reason can we feel certain that his act of submission was worded as he gives it in his book, namely, "We promise to obey the authority of the Church according to the commandments of God as we find them expressed in the Gospel of Christ." Such a form may be innocent, in itself, but is evidently intended to lend to quibbling, by enabling the person signing it to say, whenever he wished to disobey, that he did not find that particular order in Scripture; nor is it likely that Bishop Smith would have accepted so equivocal a document. Moreover, now that we know how little trust can be reposed in Chiniquy's assertions, we may doubt whether there was any tendency to Protestantism in him until the day, not then arrived, when he found it convenient to exploit Protestant credulity for reasons of bread and butter.

What is certain is that on March 27, 1858, he wrote (Doc. A) to M. Mailloux, then at Bourbonnais, as follows: "I am happy to inform you that I have made my peace with our good Bishop Smith, administrator of the diocese. The Reverend Mr. Dunn will be with me at noon, at your residence, to dine with you, and deliver into your hands my act of submission. Meanwhile, help me to thank God for having put an end to these deplorable divisions. And believe me your devoted servant, Charles Chiniquy, Missionary of St. Anne's."

This looks as if the Bishop of Dubuque was not altogether satisfied with the act of submission, and had it submitted to M. Mailloux that he might report on it. M. Mailloux wrote back (Doc. A) to the bishop on the following day (March 28) in terms which show that he thought the bishop was in danger of being taken in by Chiniquy through imperfect knowledge of his previous career. Hence he gives the substance of his bad record from his Canadian days onward, as may be seen from the two salient passages that have been already quoted from this letter.

The next we hear of Chiniquy was from St. Joseph, Indiana, where he went to make the retreat which is sure to have been one of the stipulated conditions of reconciliation. From his Fifty Years we see that he realized that M. Mailloux was doubtful about the sincerity of his depositions, and was warning the bishop to be careful; and Mgr. T�tu in his Notes has preserved for us another letter written to M. Mailloux by Chiniquy from this place of retreat.

"In April, 1858," he says, "Chiniquy wrote to M. Mailloux that he was making a retreat and sued for peace. 'You know,' he said, 'how weak and sinful I am. Ah! do not make me still weaker and more sinful by driving me to despair.'" Another illustration of the different language which the unfortunate man held in private from that which he ascribes to himself in his book!

This letter of "April" must have been written at the beginning of April. At least it must have been if Chiniquy is telling the truth when he says that he was recalled from his retreat on April 6th, and went back at once to see the bishop at Dubuque. In his account of this interview he tells us that the bishop took back the previously accepted act of submission, and demanded another expressed in more absolute terms. This, he tells us, he refused to give, and hence was told he "could no longer be a Roman Catholic priest" (p. 551).

Then he went to his hotel, where, according to his own tragic account, after spending some time in an agony of distress over his abandoned position, just in the nick of time -- when, having made himself impossible to every Catholic bishop, he must needs seek elsewhere for some means of living -- the light from Heaven dawned upon him, and he saw clearly that the Church of Rome was false and that salvation was with the Protestants. Then he went back to his flock at St. Anne's, and on Sunday, April 11th, told them of the treatment he had experienced from the bishop, and of the subsequent light from on high which had come to deliver him. To his delight he found that his whole congregation was prepared to secede with him.

It all sounds most beautiful in his pages, but once more there are some considerations which make us a little skeptical as to whether it happened, at all events at this time. For according to M. Brassard's letter of July 6th, M. Camille Par� came to him on May 4th -- that is, three weeks later than this supposed conversion of Chiniquy to Protestantism -- and brought a message from Chiniquy asking for an affidavit, "which he regarded as likely to facilitate his entrance into the good graces of the bishop."

Moreover, as late as June 23rd this Camille Par�, still acting on behalf of Chiniquy, was using this very affidavit to palm off the spurious letter on M. Mailloux. Indeed, M. Brassard's letters to Mgr. Bourget may be cited as proving that as late as July 10th no news of Chiniquy's final separation from the Church and conversion to Protestantism had reached the writer, who evidently thinks that he is still keeping up his pretense that his faculties as a Catholic pastor are intact through not having been withdrawn by any valid excommunication.It would appear, then, that Mgr. T�tu's Notes (Doc. A) are nearer the truth when they tell us:

"The unfortunate man was not converted. On August 3, 1858, Bishop Duggan, of Chicago, excommunicated him publicly and in the presence of an enormous crowd. Such was the end of an ignoble comedy: Chiniquy after that could no longer call himself a Catholic. He would have liked to continue to retain the name in order to glut his passions and to command in the Church. It was not he who left the Church; it was the Church who rejected him from her bosom. It was then that he declared himself a Protestant and endeavoured to maintain in heresy and schism all the souls he had perverted. The Canadian missionaries soon set at naught his wiles and deceit. Nearly all the families that had gone astray returned to the fold."

When thus cut off from the Catholic Church his first idea seems to have been to keep his followers together as an independent religious body under the name of "Catholic Christians." But, in striking agreement with his letter of August 9, 1856, and in equally striking contradiction with his published glorifications of the fertility of his settlement, they found before many months were passed that they were in the midst of a financial crisis.

This appears from a letter he wrote on September 28, 1859, to Dr. Hellmuth, at that time Protestant Dean of Quebec (see Father Chiniquy's Reformation in the Far West, reprinted from the Record, B. M. press-mark, 4183 aa. 12). The letter is a cry of distress in face of the "awful calamity" which is "rapidly destroying the noble band of new converts," who "cannot last out much longer."

"Before next spring the Church of Rome will exult over our ruins. We will succumb, not because our new brothers and sisters have no charity, but because there is a want of unity in their charity. You are the only one in Canada who takes any interest in this glorious religious movement. Last year some had shown us some goodwill, they had extended to us a helping hand, but now we do not hear a word from them."

Probably it was for this reason that they quickly discovered that "unless we joined one of the Christian denominations of the day we were in danger of forming a new sect" (p. 571), and so were formally received into the Presbyterian Church of the United States by the Presbytery of Chicago on April 15, 1860 (p. 571).

But how long did he remain with these people? M. Mailloux (Document B) tells us that "not having been able to retain the place which the Presbyterian ministers of the United States had given him among them, because they turned him out of their society, as we shall see later" (namely, in the later part of his manuscript, which is unfortunately lost), "the unfortunate M. Chiniquy had to come and unite himself with those whom he had confounded on January 7, 1851" -- that is, with M. Roussy, and the Presbytery of Montreal. Why was he thus dismissed?

In the days of his lecturing campaign he was often challenged to deny, if possible, that in 1862, after a visit to Europe, during which he had made collections for a supposed seminary in Chicago, he was accused of fraud, and rejected or expelled by the Chicago Synod. He never ventured to take up this challenge, but a passage in his Fifty Years (p. 472) is interesting in this connection. In it he narrates that "through the dishonest and false reports of those two men the money I had collected [for the said seminary]... was retained nearly two years, and lost in the failure of the New York Bank; [and] the only way we found to save ourselves from ruin was to throw ourselves into the hands of our Christian brothers of Canada" -- of Canada, be it noticed, not of Chicago -- [by whom] "our integrity and innocence were publicly acknowledged, and we were solemnly and officially received into the Presbyterian Church of Canada on the 11th of June, 1863."

It is easy here to read between the lines that a charge of dishonesty had been brought against him, one of the same kind as eight years previously had been brought against him in connection with the burning of the Bourbonnais church.

It was his misfortune to be continually having charges of the same kind brought against him from different and independent quarters. However, on January 10, 1864, he gave what his new friends doubtless regarded as a signal proof of the soundness of his Protestantism, for on that day he married his housekeeper.

Still, how did they find him in the matter of personal character? His egotism and violence are conspicuous in all that he spoke or wrote against his former co-religionists; were they entirely absent from his relations with his new friends?

We are never likely to be told, but we cannot read without musing such cryptic allusions as the following in the sermons preached at the time of his decease: "We saw thy faults when thou were with us, but now we see thy virtues," said the Rev. A. J. Mowatt on the Sunday after his funeral (Forty Years in the Church of Christ, p. 497). What faults, we ask?

"He had failings, yes, and who is without these? Those with which he could in a special manner be reproached must be charged to the inadequate and positively harmful clerical education he had received, and which in after years he so vigorously combated," said the Rev. C. E. Amaron, preaching at the graveside on January 19, 1899 (ibid., p. 486).

"On leaving home for more advanced and literary and theological studies, he entered upon a course of training much of which he afterwards deplored. Possibly some of his best friends were right in thinking that they saw occasionally traces of this bad education in his after-life," says his son-in-law in the Preface to this same book. What were these special faults, one wonders?

Of course we are aware that bigots of this type, when they pick up eagerly, but to their cost, the weeds which the Pope has thrown over his wall, find it convenient to ascribe their noxious properties to the defects of the Pope's soil. We are aware, too, what are the particular noxious properties which Chiniquy in his writings finds it convenient to debit to the Pope's soil. Was it to matters of this sort that the preachers and the Preface-writer were thus dimly alluding?

In this connection we may say that the Catholic Truth Society cannot undertake a refutation of Chiniquy's book entitled The Priest, the Woman, and the Confessional.

To write or to circulate such a work, which cannot fail to pollute the minds of its readers, is an outrage upon decency, and it would be impossible to deal with it in a pamphlet intended for general circulation. The reader will accept our assurance that in it Chiniquy has employed the same methods of misrepresentation and misstatement which have been exposed in the foregoing pages.