Summations Only

Faith writes:You flatter yourself that EvC is made up of anyone he would feel a need to try to convince.

Faith writes:You flatter yourselves that you care about truth and evidence, you flatter yourselves that you represent the world's opinion, and the world's methods.

Is this to be your answer to everything, that everyone who finds Chiniquy unreliable has an axe to grind against Chiniquy?

Reading stuff by Paul Serup is just going to confuse you further. Consider how little sense it makes that George used Chiniquy to show Chiniquy wrong.

He does quote Chiniquy, first providing Chiniquy's story, then giving the story provided by the facts.

George clearly states that his sources were court records and attorney notes, and he footnotes the Spink vs. Chiniquy file from the Illinois State Historical Library, which must be where these court records and attorney notes currently reside.

This is why historians find Chiniquy unreliable. His accounts differ markedly from known and well established historical fact.

Reading Chiniquy one is struck by their fanciful and almost fantastical quality, too much for most to credit, but apparently not too much for those convinced snakes can talk and Catholicism is evil.

Faith writes:"Must be," huh? The fact is that WHAT YOU QUOTED was derived from Chiniquy himself and no other source.

Joseph George Jr. writes:The court records and attorneys' notes from that trial contradict almost every point in Chiniquy's autobiography. The original documents show that Spink v. Chiniquy involved little more than a personal feud between two embittered friends. Peter Spink, the plaintiff in the case, charged in his complaint that "on or about the 10th day of January A.D. 1854" he was accused by Chiniquy, "in a public assembly," of committing perjury. Apparently the public assembly was a church service, and Chiniquy, then a priest, had announced to his congregation that Spink, a land speculator, was advising clients to enter public lands on which French-Canadians had cut timber. Spink's plan, Chiniquy told his parishioners, was to make the French-Canadians pay for the wood. Spink charged that the accusation was "false and malicious" and had caused his clients to lose confidence in him. As a result Spink was unable "to do business as before, wherefore he was greatly injured and sustained great damage." Spink further charged that the priest had "at divers times before the instituting of this suit - slandered and defamed this deponent." Those statements are recorded in the official complaint, "Sworn and Enscribed," on February 3, 1855, in the circuit court of Kankakee County. The official charge brought by Spink was slander, not immorality. The Bishop of Chicago (who was not, in any case, Chiniquy's superior) had nothing to do with the complaint. The trial was shifted, as Chiniquy said, from Kankakee to Urbana, but before, not after, the first court proceedings. There was first a mistrial, and the jury chosen for the second hearing could not agree. Lincoln then became Chiniquy's attorney. In the words of his friend H. C. Whitney, Lincoln "abhorred that class of litigation [slander]," and was influential in bringing about a compromise before a third trial. A statement of agreement, in Lincoln's handwriting, is extant. It reads: It is difficult to believe that Chiniquy and Lincoln would have had reason or occasion at Urbana for a discussion of the evils of the Catholic church -- which in any case had no connection with the trial.

Faith writes:I agree only that he was not prepared to cope with the kind of crap that EvC throws at anyone who differs from the accepted PC position here.

Serup was wrong when he claimed that George was incorrect in stating that Chiniquy had described Lincoln influencing the obtaining of a witness.

Second, the obtaining of a witness was something I never mentioned and was entirely irrelevant.