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Paul Serup · (This post was last modified: 10-27-2015 11:35 PM by Paul Serup.)

(09-18-2015 04:43 PM)L Verge Wrote: Thanks for the back-up, Roger. I have been told that this full page "sermon" is being repeated in subsequent issues of the Times. I did not include all of the verbiage, but there is an appeal to Pope Francis to "accept historical and papal responsibility for Lincoln's assassination." (Also a political "comment" on the Church's power.) The page also conveniently recommends reprints of the Harris book as well as one entitled "Who Killed Abraham Lincoln?" purporting to be an investigation of the Roman Catholic Church's role in the assassination.

Speaking of the Harris reprint, that was an issue for me during the 150th ceremonies at Petersen House in April because the cameras kept panning back to Ford's Theatre and there was a huge, mounted banner in the doorway hawking the reprint of Rome's Responsibility... Someone was getting free advertising at a most inappropriate time and for a spurious publication (despite its origins). I have not been on this site (and probably won't view it), but this current ad recommends visiting http://www.OnlyTheGospel.com

Pardon the tardiness of this post but a few things delayed it. Ms. Laurie Verge reported on a book entitled, Who Killed Abraham Lincoln? which was “purporting to be an investigation of the Roman Catholic Church's role in the assassination.” I am the author of the book and I would assert that it is indeed an investigation of the Roman Catholic Church's role in the assassination. The original research I did for my book, accomplished over decades, brought me to libraries, archives, museums, cemeteries, and collections from Minnesota to New York City. It has been reviewed favourable by Ford’s Theatre National Historic Site, their review stating that my book is “well documented with footnotes” and it is sold in the museum bookstore. It is held in Ford’s Theatre N. H. S. research library and other such libraries including, incidentally, the Surratt House and Museum research library, where I understand Ms. Verge was the director for years.

(09-18-2015 04:22 PM)RJNorton Wrote: In The Lincoln Murder Conspiracies Dr. William Hanchett wrote:

++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

“Of course, there never has been any evidence of the Catholic Church’s complicity in the assassination, and none that Lincoln himself feared Catholicism. Professor Joseph George, Jr., has shown that in all probability Chiniquy never talked to Lincoln and the White House, and it is certain that there were no theological discussions. The anti-Catholic sentiments Chiniquy put in Lincoln’s mouth were only a propagandist trick. To the editor of the Catholic magazine, Columbia, Robert Todd Lincoln wrote that he knew of no anti-catholic statement or writing of his father and reminded the editor that through the years, his father’s name had been ‘a peg on which to hang many things.’”

There is an online article by Professor George here:

http://www.reocities.com/chiniquy/lincoln_writings.html

RJNorton declares that Dr. William Hanchett wrote the above.
Pardon the tardiness of this post. There is a problem with quoting William Hanchett and Joseph George and the problem is that they did not get it right, they did not refute Charles Chiniquy. Mr. Hanchett followed George, which is a very bad idea and actually Hanchett wasn’t competent enough to do that correctly.
I researched Chiniquy’s life and allegations over a period of more than twenty years and my conclusions were published in my book, Who Killed Abraham Lincoln?, As I stated in my volume,
“Since Joseph George Jr.’s, paper, ‘The Lincoln Writings of Charles P. T. Chiniquy’, was published in the February, 1976 issue of the Journal of the Illinois Historical Society, most, if not all, of those commenting negatively on Chiniquy have used his work as the basis for dismissing the ex-priest’s allegations against the Catholic Church.”
Joseph George Jr., however, erred in his dismissal of the celebrated clergyman, Charles Chiniquy. At the time his paper was published, George was chair of the history department of Villanova University, a Catholic institution.
George’s paper essentially stopped me in my tracks when I first read it some twenty years ago. One of the personnel of the Illinois State Historical Library in Springfield kindly gave me a copy of this issue of the Journal of the Illinois Historical Society, gratis, when I was there doing research on Charles Chiniquy and I then read what George said about him. The paper was written in such a final, conclusive manner that it made me think, at the time, that Chiniquy must have been wrong. I put away my work on the clergyman and his allegations for at least a year, I recall.
Having put time into my research and having traveled to places like Illinois from my home in Canada to do so however, I picked up the paper again, many months later, to see exactly where Chiniquy had gone wrong. I then discovered how George had misquoted him and all the errors of fact and reason the history professor had made.
To begin, one would think that Professor George would have put his best foot forward, if you will, at the start of his paper. He begins however, by introducing two men who have essentially nothing to say about Lincoln’s assassination, his personal secretaries: John Nicolay and John Hay. Yes the 16th President’s two secretaries may have known him, perhaps very well, but they knew no more about the assassination than any well read person in Washington. Neither Nicolay or Hay had any unique information on the assassination, neither one testified at the trial of the conspirators or the trial of John Surratt. Would anyone really question, for example, the secretaries of John F. Kennedy as to who might have been behind his murder? Why did Professor George introduce these two men who had no unique information about Lincoln’s murder? Perhaps he hoped that readers would just accept that the secretaries probably knew much about his life and not think any deeper and ask what they really had to say about his death.
After that underwhelming opening, George reviews Chiniquy’s life and allegations and how biographers have dealt with him with the same dubious level of competence and reason.
He then discusses how Chiniquy made Lincoln’s acquaintance and this is where he believes he can show the clergyman to be wrong. He states on page 22 of this issue of the Journal of the Illinois Historical Society, “The evidence is conclusive that reliance on Chiniquy was unfortunate, for his claims were baseless. Chiniquy did meet Lincoln in 1856 and he did engage Lincoln’s services as an attorney. But the facts of the trial bear little resemblance to the account presented in Fifty Years in the Church of Rome”
Professor George is concerned about the evidence, he is concerned about the facts. That is very good, historians should be very concerned about these things. George declares that the facts of the trial bear little resemblance to what Chiniquy said in Fifty Years in the Church of Rome.
If Professor George is going to take anyone to task, he has to get it right, it behoves him, it is incumbent that he gets the facts correct. In his effort to take Chiniquy to task, he does not do so I suggest. In fact, I estimate there is many more mistakes of fact in the eight pages of his paper than in the 800 plus pages of Chiniquy’s autobiography, Fifty Years in the Church of Rome.
In order to show Chiniquy is not be trusted, on the point of how Lincoln helped him and the legal struggle he had, Professor George had to accurately give the facts of the trial, as well as the account presented in Fifty Years in the Church of Rome. If he does not do so, he is either misstating the facts of the case, or misquoting Chiniquy, and doing either of these things would bring his competence, his credibility, into question, as opposed to Chiniquy’s.
To show Chiniquy was not to be trusted, for example, George gives an error that he charges the clergyman with. On page 23 of his paper he states, “The official charge brought by Spink was slander, not immorality.” This, George asserts, is one of the mistakes Chiniquy made. Chiniquy, George states, declared that the official charge was immorality, while it really was slander, so Chiniquy is wrong on this point. It is Professor George who errs here, by the way, not Chiniquy, but as I will show, this was not out of the ordinary for George. As I said, in order to debunk Chiniquy, Professor George has to accurately give the facts of the trial and also accurately recount what Chiniquy stated in Fifty Years in the Church of Rome and he fails fairly spectacularly to do so.
I will give a sentence in his paper as an example. There actually are a number of errors contained in this one sentence. On page 22, George stated, “At that time Lincoln was hired as defense attorney and was influential in producing a key witness from Chicago who exposed Spink as a perjurer.” Just before this, Professor George declared, “According to Chiniquy, the Bishop of Chicago, Chiniquy’s superior, had induced a land speculator named Peter Spink to bring charges of immorality against Chiniquy in 1855. Chiniquy said the court found him innocent but that Spink obtained a change of venue. Chiniquy was then retried, he said, at Urbana.”
George’s source was Charles Chiniquy’s autobiography, Fifty Years in the Church of Rome, as the paper clearly states. It can be hard sometimes to keep track of all of the mistakes of Professor George but he makes possibly as many as four mistakes in the sentence that came next, which I had mentioned in the previous paragraph: “At that time Lincoln was hired as defense attorney and was influential in producing a key witness from Chicago who exposed Spink as a perjurer.” A straight forward reading of what George says would mean that Lincoln was hired after at least one court action in Urbana, which would meant he was hired in 1856. Fifty Years however reported that Lincoln was hired in 1855, via the telegraph, after Chiniquy heard of the change of venue. This is the first mistake.
Secondly, Fifty Years did not state that Lincoln was influential in producing this key witness from Chicago. The witness in question was Philomene Moffat and it was another man, Narcisse Terrien, who independently contacted her and asked her to go to Urbana to testify. Lincoln was not aware of her existence until she showed up at his hotel door. Also, according to Chiniquy, she didn’t publicly expose anyone as a perjurer, as she didn’t end up being a witness, because Spink withdrew his charges and no more testimony was given. It appears that only Abraham Lincoln, Charles Chiniquy and his other lawyers, along with those on Spink’s side of the suit, that knew of the perjury before the case ended. Finally, if she had testified, she would have exposed the priest Lebel as a perjurer, not Spink. The account of Spink v. Chiniquy in Fifty Years, 3rd edition, are on pages, 566, 623 – 628, 653 – 667.
That is fairly impressive ineptitude. George made a number of such errors and it could be asked: why did he do so? Was it simple incompetence? Did he have reading comprehension difficulties? He seemed to suffer from blindness but I would suggest it might be a blindness caused by his anger at Chiniquy for criticizing his religion. Regardless of the reason however, as I stated in my book, “whatever George accomplished, it definitely wasn’t a refutation of Charles Chiniquy’s allegations.”
Regarding George’s statement that, “The official charge brought by Spink was slander, not immorality”, Chiniquy did not specify what charges Spink brought against him until the last court action in October, 1856. As well, the clergyman’s autobiography indicates that the charge of personal immorality at the last court action was a departure from what he had been previously accused of.
My book contains a more complete review of Joseph George’s criticism of Charles Chiniquy, as well as an examination of the criticism of four other, including three academics and a Jesuit priest.
As my work has been brought up on this site and provided that people are generally indentified and willing to engage in a civilized discourse, I am willing to engage in the discussion as much as time will allow.