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Show JUST CRITICISM MISLED. It may be remembered that before King Al-phonso Al-phonso left Spain for Paris and London an extraordinary extra-ordinary letter, bearing his signature and addressed to the cardinal archbishop of Barcelona, appeared in the Barcelona newspapers. Its substance was cabled across tho Atlantic and republished here. According to this letter the king congratulated the cardinal archbishop on the stand which he had taken in opposing the opening of an English Protestant Pro-testant church at Barcelona, and expressing him--pelf in the most hostile fashion concerning tho Protestant church, as well as indicating his sense that the proposal to establish in Barcelona an edifice edi-fice devoted to divine worship according to Protestant Pro-testant ideas constituted an insult lo tho faith in which he (the king) had been reared.- A most amazing letter. ' Xot so frequently of late years, but yet too often, American Catholics 'have been roused to indignation over the acts of the bigoted of the Tatin races. If defense were put up at all for such exhibitions of intolerance, it only showed the weakness of half-hearted effort in, the . doing of something that had better been' left undone. , And really any defense was absurd, for. here is the letter let-ter signed by the king, and its genuineness is beyond be-yond dispute. On top of this, here is the American press, (the ..Deseret Xews included) indulging in caustic comment over the intolerance of "his Catholic Cath-olic majesty" of Spain. Xot a word about the youth of the sovereign to excuse the mischief natural natu-ral for a boy. Xothing for Catholics to do but ratify the censure of non-Catholics and admit the justice of press criticism. Xow comes news from Madrid giving an explanation ex-planation of that mischievous letter. An inquiry was instituted, which brought to light the fact that even the king himself had been ignorant of the nature of "the letter until he saw it in print, that it had been written by Don Merry del Val (tutor in the king's household and" one of his private pri-vate secretaries) and submitted by him for the signature of the king at a moment when the latter was pressed for time and had no leisure to read it, and that Don Alfonso, relying absolutely -upon the discretion of Merry del Val, had affixed his name to the missive without giving it further thought. Strange it is that the spurious act of another for which the king was blamed, never entered tho heads of non-Catholic critics at the time. More strange because, not only was the tenor of the letter let-ter amazing, particularly in view of the fact that the Spanish constitution expressly guarantees freedom free-dom of conscience and equal liberty to all churches, but it was regarded as utterly inconceivable that such a letter should either have been written or published at the moment when the king was leaving for England to pay his first visit to that country and to its reigning family. The members of his court, and, above all, his ministers, were dismayed by the incident, the letter in question having been written and sent off without the knowledge of any of the king's constitutional advisers. This Senor Merry del Val is brother of tho cardinal secretary of state. Xo matter. His exalted ex-alted family connection affords all the more reason rea-son for dismissal, because from that family much is expected and demanded by Catholics of America as well as of Spain. It is in order now for American editors to square themselves with Catholic readers. x . |