A CATHOLIC PROTEST.

Manawatu Times, Volume XLII, Issue 1737, 12 February 1921, Page 7

A CATHOLIC PROTEST.

AM) AN ORA?,(IE REJOINDER. At Thursday night’s meeting of the Loyal Orange Lodge No. IS, Palmerston North, a discussion took place on what was termed ‘The grotesquely untruthful, misleading and highlycoloured pretest,” made by the Roman Catholic Bishop and clergy of the Otago Diocese, assembled in Dunedin on Friday, January 28th, against "the policy of frightfulness,” allegedly “connived at, encouraged and apparently organised by the English Government.” Kegiet was expressed that no attempt appeared to have been made by the press of the Dominion to meet the "monstrous charges made by the Irish hierarchy and endorsed by the Dunedin Roman Catholic clergy; and it was decided, by resolution unanimously endorsed by the Orangemen present, to ask for the publication of the following statement of facts as made public by Mr .Michael, J. F. McCarty, author of “Priests nnd People,” “Five Years in Ireland” etc., in a scries of lectures delivered in London during May and June 1919: (1) The Irish trouble has its root in “the discontent and disloyalty of the Roman Catholic priests and people of Ireland. . . . the ecclesiastical directors of the Papal Church refused to accept the constitution of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland: refused to co-operate loyally with the other religious denominations within the United Kingdom,.and prevented the lay Roman Catholics from taking full advantage of the privileges within their reach as citizens of the United Kingdom, thereby making them discontented and disloyal. (2) Mr do Valera, the President of the so-called Irish Republic, and Mr John MacNelll, President of Sinn Fein, have been paid servants of the Roman ecclesiastics in Ireland all heirt adult lives —do Valera under the priests of the Holy Ghost at Blackrock, and Mac Neill, under the Jesuits at Stephen’s Green. The soi-disant “Count” Plunkett, also a prominent Sinn Feiner, is a Vatican office-holder, and holds his title under the fictitious Holy Roman Empire. (3) The Irish Bishops or hierarchy meet periodically at the Theological Seminary of Maynooth, a lonely place about 20 miles outside Dublin, and issue their decrees in the same automatic way as the Czar and his council used to issue ukases in Russia. This Maynooth hierarchy itself is subject to the super-hierarchy of the cardinals at Rome, consisting of an overwhelming majority of Italians presided over by the Pope, who uses Irekrnd as a pawn in the political game of the Papacy, and the Papacy claims the right to say “if an heretical prince is elected or succeeds to the throne of any country I annul the election or I forbid the succession.” As Cardinal Manning put it in the seventies “to depose kings is as much a right of, the Church as to excommunicate individuals and to lay kingdoms under interdict. These rights are the essence of that royal authority of Christ with which his Vice-Regents on earth are vested.” (4) The Dublin Rebellion of 1916 was conceived and hatched at Maynooth in which all the chief rebel loaders—Pearce, de Valera, Mac Neill, Plunkett and others —were professors or graduates. (5) The trouble which followed the failure of the Rebellion was accentuated by the action of the Irish Bishops in denouncing the Military Service Act as an immoral law, and when in 1918 the Bishops issued their decree “ordering every parish priest in Ireland to say Mass publicly against conscription, to hold a meeting at each chapel after Mass, to get the people to sign a pledge drawn up by the Bishop, binding themselves to resist, conscription by every means in their power and to collect funds for the campaign, “they knew there were thousands of young Roman Catholics only waiting for the excuse of compulsion to join the Army, and the Bishops resolved that compulsion should never come Into force. (6) Throughout the long scries of crimes, murders and outrages perpetrated by the'Sinn Feiners, not one of the Bishops was heard to raise his voice in protest against the reign of ‘■error thus inaugurated in Ireland, and the Roman Catholic bishops and clergy of the Diocese of Otago, when reiterating the declaration of the Irish Bishops that not by inhuman aggression will the Irish question be settled, should have remembered that Die “policy of frightfulness” began, and was continued by the Sinn Feinoi'.s with the practical approval of the Irish hierarchy. The reprisals that have followed are a more natural sequence of the cold-blooded murders that for so long remained unavenged.