OCR Text |
Show The fatal errors which are sometimes committed by an entire reliance on circumstantial evidence; and the fearful crimes of which the Catholic confessionals - according to the inevitable rule of their church, are obliged to be the accomplices are illustrated by the following incident which has just come to light: a church organist at Aratoff, near Kieff, lately confessed on his death bed to the murder, twenty years ago, of a farmer. He committed the crime with the priest's pistol, which he stole and then placed in the sacristy, confessed to the priest, so as to preclude the latter from giving evidence against him without infringing the obligation of secrecy, and then went and denounced the priest as a culprit. The priest, who vainly protested his innocence, was sentenced to hard labor for life, and on his liberation being applied for on the strength of the organist's death-bed confession, the reply was that he had died a few months before. |