A quote from Beyond Belief - Relevant for the current situation? (Main Forum)

by James, Australia, Monday, July 09, 2012, 20:54 (315 days ago) @ desi

Desi,

This quote is a very good illustration of what I am talking about with Yallop's book. Take any sentence or phrase and put them in a Google search for the exact words and you will get two hits - your own here above in Catholica, and the Elephantsintheroom extract, from which it has been taken. He has put these words in inverted commas, ie a direct quote from Der Spiegel.

Now, this quote cannot be some conversation that Yallop had with Cardinal Lehmann. It is identified as a direct quote from Der Spiegel, an internationally renowned publication whose articles or citations from them are repeated countless times in commentaries in other publications.

There are three explanations for this:

1. This quotation does not appear in Yallop's book, and whoever did the "adapting" for the Elephantsinthelivingroom web page made it up. That itself creates a problem for anyone who read the "adaption", because that is what is being relied on here, not the actual book.

2. The words do appear in Yallop's book and he made his own translation from the original German Der Spiegel - in which case a word for word search would not find it. This would seem to be a strange thing to do because Der Spiegal has an English edition, and the appropriate thing to do would be to use their official translation. However, I haven't been able to trace when the English edition of Der Spiegel started, so this is possible.

3. Yallop simply made the whole lot up.

If you then put in "Cardinal Lehmann Der Spiegel Bishops conference 2002 Canon Law culprit", you end up with 75 hits, none of which relate to the quote.

In view of the nonsense in the second paragraph of the book (and that really has been correctly transcribed from the book to the "adaptation", as can be seen from the Amazon extract) about the effect of the 1983 change to Canon Law, one has to be suspicious.

The problem is that the quote does ring true, because it really does reflect what a number of senior Church officials have been saying, with quotes that can be directly traced.

I'm happy to change my mind about this if anyone wants to spend a bit more time trying to find the source, but when I applied the same test to about 10 quotes in the "adaptation", I came up with about 2 that I could trace.