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Show "IF" SOMETHING HA? HAPPENED. .j Regardless of the Roman dispatch to the New York Times and appearing in the Dose ret News, discounting all the false rumors of ecclesiastical intrigue in the sacred college, that paper apparently appar-ently gives credit to the story that Cardinal Ram-polla Ram-polla failed of election because the emperor of Austria Aus-tria exercised his supposed right of veto. "If the story is true," begins the News writer in comment, followed up by what would inevitably take place in the affairs of the church should kings and emperors emper-ors interfere in the election of a pontiff. This oracular warning, taking its origin from the little word "if," has the merit of logic at any rate, and nobody could object to the sequence "if. the story is true." There is no more truth in this story about the emperor of Austria and Cardinal Rampolla than there is in "the one about Cardinal Gibbons ' and Rampolla. The American Cardinal denounced the last as an absolute falsehood and cabled that all reports about his intentious and actions had no foundation whatever. Cardinal Gibbons criticising criticis-ing Rampolla in a reporter's presence by his own invitation I Abandon" the thought 1 He could not be guilty of such monstrous indiscretion; uor for that matter, could any other cardinal. . But Cardinal Gibbons is not Francis Joseph, and it is to the latter the News calls attention. ; Very improbable is it that the Catholic emperor of Austria would unbosom himself to a reporter, or that any means for ascertaining what is going on in the ''councils of the mighty" could be successfully success-fully applied by the most ingenious representative of the press. Our contemporary should take his Roman news with a grain of salt. It will spare him the w-orry of writing about something to happen hap-pen "if" something had happened. -i- |