Fact and Fiction
It is important that a biographer distinguish overly keen hagiography that might make it seem that the local people of Futuna converted overnight. The rigorous scrutiny demanded by Chanel's Beatification as a martyr in 1889, and even more by his canonization in 1954, sifted out such exaggerations and embellished piety. Two of the three notebooks containing his Futuna diary survived, and these provide a solid reference point in assessing his character as a missionary. It is equally regrettable that many of the errors made in earlier biographies abound and can be found on websites elsewhere. Mistakes in geography including statements that Chanel went to the New Hebrides (Vanuatu) or that Futuna is part of that island group are also frequent. (In fact there is another island as part of the Vanuatu group called Futuna but the two islands should not be confused.)
Read more about this topic: Peter Chanel
Famous quotes containing the words fact and, fact and/or fiction:
“Utility is our national shibboleth: the savior of the American businessman is fact and his uterine half-brother, statistics.”
—Edward Dahlberg (1900–1977)
“The fact is that my wife if she had common sense would have more power over me than any other whatsoever, for my heart always alights upon the nearest perch.”
—George Gordon Noel Byron (1788–1824)
“A reader who quarrels with postulates, who dislikes Hamlet because he does not believe that there are ghosts or that people speak in pentameters, clearly has no business in literature. He cannot distinguish fiction from fact, and belongs in the same category as the people who send cheques to radio stations for the relief of suffering heroines in soap operas.”
—Northrop Frye (b. 1912)