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Show Cabk Storp of Loufdts Exploded : Statement Credited to a Government Engineer Concerning the Sourceiof the Water at the Grotto. Traced to a Common, Every-Day Clerk in an Obscure Dry Goods Store. ' SCENE AT THE GROTTO OF LOTJRDES. I : " Readers of newspa pers supplied with European correspondence by the Press Publishing company were recently treated to the following choice morsel of news,' especially cabled from Paris, and displayed under "gcare" headlines: head-lines: v "Louis Probt, a government engineer,, asserts that most of the water used to heal the pilgrims of Lourdes does ! not flow from the grotto where the Virgin is said to have appeared, but is brought from a river in a- neighboring neigh-boring ' cavo through subterranean pipes, said to have been secretly laid by monks years ago. Engineer Probst occupies a high position here, and is a firm believer in the Roman Catholic religion. "A year ago he took his wife, who is afflicted with a malady the doctors had pronounced incurable, to Lourdes expecting a cure by a miracle, but as soon as she plunged into the tank she died. "While the arrangements for her funeral were being made the. engineer spent several days in ooservation. He noticed that the water used in the bottling department did not taste like that in the grotto, and it occurred to him that the enormous quantities consumed con-sumed could not be furnished by the scant grotto spring. Afterward he got a quantity from the grotto to investigate, inves-tigate, and now he has made a report, in which he gives a chart of underground under-ground channels and analysis showing different chemical elements in the water. Last f.year nearly 3,000,000 pilgrims pil-grims went to Lourdes, and the monks in charge contributed $250,000 to St. Peter's Papal fund, besides buying more lands and buildings. ."Lourdes was a -mere hamlet fifteen fif-teen years ago. Today it is a beautiful, beau-tiful, solidly built city of 80,000 inhabitants." inhab-itants." , Rev. J. Van.der Hayden of the University Uni-versity of Louvain, who has several times contributed articles of the Universe, Uni-verse, says in the Catholic Sentinel that this dispatch contains more lies than sentences. "Of course," he says, "any one who puts implicit faith in all that he reads in his favorite newspaper, especially when the news comes by special cable, ca-ble, as' did the above, 'had his belief in. the- Lourdes shrine ... considerable shattered, ' after perusing 'this sensational sensa-tional item. ; "Indeed, who could be better qualified qual-ified to expose the monks' clever canalization canal-ization scheme than an engineer, and a government engineer at that! Moreover, More-over, he is an exception to the common com-mon run. of present day officials in France; he is a firm believer in the Roman Catholic religion. Hence, he could not possibly have acted in his denunciation out of hatred or malice toward the church. If it had not been added that he was a firm believer it J might have got into the head of . the sceptical newspaper reader a rare bird nowadays that the fellow with the "high position" was a common fraud of the Professor Muller type, the learned learn-ed Bavarian pedagogue who attacks the church, as per his own acknowledgement, acknowl-edgement, for revenue only. Not. very long ago, Professor Muller expressed his willingness to give up his anti-religious anti-religious zeal . and to devote himself to scientific subjects entirely, if the Bavarian bishops would be pleased to drop in a few shekels, when he -would pass the hat around among them. "All grounds for doubting the, truth of the great piece of information were eliminated by the. careful, stating that Louis Probst was a government engineer, en-gineer, that he was a firm believer in the Roman Catholic religion, that he occupied a high position. "But alack and alas for all the titles of Louis Probst! "He is . neither an engineer, nor a Catholic nor a man with a high position, posi-tion, according to the ordinary standard stand-ard of a 'high position.' "He is a common, every day clerk, in an obscure dry goods store of an obscure ob-scure provincial town. All the engineering engi-neering he ever did consisted in meas- uring out yards of calico for his em- ployer's customers. "His Catholicity is as wide of the mark as his engineering, for he 1s a member of the Lutheran church, and one of the most venomous anti-Catholic agitators of his district. "His wife may have been sick, and she may have plunged in the water of the grotto; but she certainly did not die there, for she is alive and well. "The observations he made whilst the wife, supposedly dead, was being prepared pre-pared for burial, might as well have been made, for the purpose of the lie, thousands of miles away; they would have had equal value viz., none at all. ' "The superior of the Lourdes Fathers did not at first condescend to notice the foolish inventions of a notoriety-seeking humbug. When he did, on account ;of.'the immense publicity given to the fake, the famous engineer came out with startling retort that the fathers had in the meantime done away with all trace of the incriminating canalization, canal-ization, making the proof of the fraud impossible to him. "The idiot did not reflect for a moment mo-ment that if the channels existed no j more, neither could the enormous quantities of water continue to be furnished. fur-nished. Up to date no one heard that the flow diminished in the least. :: "If the monks contrived $250,000 to the Peter's Pence, they certainly did i not make the Press Publishing company's com-pany's correspondent, nor Mr. Probst, the confidant of that little transaction. "The good fathers very likely contributed con-tributed their modest share to the papal fund as it is every Catholic's filial duty to do; and the veracious and omniscient correspondent multiplied that contribution by a thousand, just as he multiplied the population of Lourdes by ten. "Indeed, a town that shows only an increase of six or seven thousand in fifteen years would not deserve to be made the object of a yarn of the dimensions di-mensions above stated: but for the sake of a beautiful, solidly built city of .0,000 inhabitants, one may do something." |