CATHOLIC CONGRESS

Evening Star, Issue 14184, 8 October 1909, Page 7

CATHOLIC CONGRESS

LAST WEEK’S REPRESENTATIVE ASSEMBLY.

A cardinal archbishop, archbishops, priests, and laymen assembled in force at Sydney last week for the third Australasian Congress. Naturally, the order paper was chiefly concerned with Catholic topics, but some of the discussions were of general interest, according to reports in the Sydney papers to hand to-day. In his opening address Cardinal Moran set out under seven heads some of the human means which the Church summoned to her aid at the present day to accomplish the grand results desired by the Divine Master. They were enlightenment, abounding charity, peace, religious education, the Christian home, the union of the clergy and the faithful, and a chivalrous enthusiasm in promoting every good catise of piety*and religion. Then there was the social peace which each individual Slate should safeguard and defend, 'iney saw intensified from time to time the strife between capitalist's and labor that developed into strikes, which brought untold miseries to countless families. The late Pontiff, Pope Loo XIII., laid down the golden rule to guarantee true peace, assuring on the one hand to the laboring classes the frugal comfort to themselves to which they were entitled, and on the other securing to the capitalists the legitimate use of the property which was. theirs. The Rev. Dr Cleary (Dunedin), in the course of a paper on "education, said that Catholics, at least, would never accept any maimed, mutilated, or lifeless teaching in matters of faith, or any compromise affecting the principles of religious education. The secularisation of public instruction arose materially and logically out of the anti-religious philosophy by which Voltaire and Rousseau and their school sought to blot Christianity out of the souls of men. The secularisation of public schools had failed to promote educational peace. It was not a solution, but an evasion of the “ religious difficulty.” It violated the crown rights of Christ by dethroning Him from His olden and prescriptive place in (.lie school: by treating the child as an intelligent, but not as a moral, being; by mouopahsing the best, most impressionable, and most formative part, of its life, and shutting out therefrom the highest, tendercst,' and most inspiring and most exalting influences, and concentrating its intellectual faculties, by a lop-sided development thereof, upon material interests and pursuits alone. A pape« prepared by Rev. A. L. Cortie, vS.J., F.R.A.S., dealt with ‘The Attitude of the Church Towards Natural Science.’ The paper opened with the assertion that “the enemies of the Catholic Church, and more especially those who pose as intellectuals, are never weary of declaring that she is opposed to all progress in natural science, because her dogmas aud theological system necessarily hamper the intellectual freedom and development of her children, and because the credentials on which she bases her claims to a reasoned assent as a preliminary to faith are founded upon proofs which are unscientific, in that they lack the necessary foundations of scientific assent, observation, and experiment.” The conclusion was drawn by the writer that “ the moral is obvious that even in matters scientific it ■will conduce most to true progress if we follow obediently the teaching and guidance of the Church, and her voice as expressed and made known to us by her accredited agents. Roman congregations may make mistakes, though one who carefully studies the history of science must be bound to admit that they have made exceedingly few, probably onlv one, and that solitary instance in a matter of fact, which was not then proved.”