ARCHBISHOP MACCABE’S PASTORAL.

South Canterbury Times, Issue 2739, 31 December 1881, Page 2

ARCHBISHOP MACCABE’S PASTORAL.

An important pastoral, by Archbishop Maecabe, of Dublin, was read on Oct. 30, in all the Catholic churches and chapels of the Dublin diocese. It was issued in order to make known the permission granted by the Pope for “ the extension to Dec. 8 of the time appointed for the completion of the present jubilee but the Archbishop avails himself of the occasion to make known his views respecting the present crisis, and to deal a last and most damaging blow at the Land League. He says : “We feel ourselves imperatively called upon to enter our most solemn protest against another indignity which has been offered to the moral seise of our people in this city—the centre of Catholic Ireland. Only a few days ago the over-confiding were startled from their dream of security by the publication of a manifesto which at once assailed the external law of God, and struck at the foundation 'on which society rests —the rights of property. Passing over all the cases in which these rights are threatened, let us confine ourselves to one particular class of the community. There were and are, as we all know, hundreds of honest industrious men amongst us, who, trusting to the faith of the public conscience, and the seenrity which a duly constituted Government is expected to give, invested the fruits of their years of toil and sacrifice in property, from which they hoped that they and theirs might draw the means of an honorable subsistence. But all this must be swept away by the breath of a handful of men, the bulk of whom have neither stake nor interest in the country. We disregarded the warnings which cautioned ns against the dangers that lurked in specious pro grammes, pretending to aim at nought save the redress of the wrongs of an oppressed people; but now God’s providence has forced from the lips of uasafe guides an avowal of their aim, and if the notice to pay no rents be not the teaching of Communism, Communism is yet to be defined. Let no one suppose wo have a word to say in defence of the oppression of the poor. We feel as keenly as the most out-spoken of our brethren the cruel injuries worked by bad laws on the defenceless tenants of Ireland ; but wo mast not allow our abhorrence of injustice to betray us into Ji repudiation of the claims of justice, and if God’s blessing is to be invoked in our struggle, for right, God’s sacred ordinances mast not be outraged in that struggle. If to-day the landlord's claim to his just rent ho questioned, who will guarantee the tennant’s right to his outlay of money and toil to-morrow ? Injustice will repay injustice, and in the day of retribution the wrongdoer would be laughed at when he seeks for sympathy in his troubles. The issue is now plainly put to our people which of the two they will follow? The men who have marked out a road that must lead to anger with God and disgrace before the Christian world or the Bishops of Ireland, who, through a glorious and unbroken succession of fourteen centuries, are the heirs of those who encountered poverty, exile—nay, death in its most terrible form—for the people with whom their lives are irrevocably bound up.” The Archbishop then dwelt at length upon the moral turpitude and spiritua 1 danger of refusing, when able to pay just debts, “ which certainly include just rents.” “ But who," he asks, “ would settle settle the question what a just rent means ? Surely no sane man would allow an individual, no matter how unimportant, to be the judge in his own cause,, and the Bishops exhorted the people to avail themselves of the Land Act, under the hope that in the courts established under it the unjustly rented tenant would find redress and protection. Call upon your flocks to follow the guidance of the prelates. Let us take the case of a man who refuses to discharge the obligations which he has already assumed, because he and his friends have come to the conclusion that their obligations are unjust. Nevertheless, he refuses to bring his complaints before a tribunal which commands the confidence of the prelates and which has been constituted expressly for the rectification of wrongs such as he complains of. Is this man’s position before God a safe one ? Again because a man has pronounced the Government harsh and tyrannical in certain public acts he refuses to keep a contract made with a fellow subject, can that man’s conscience be pefeotly at rest ? These are momentous questions, involving terrible con sequence a—not for a time, but for eternity.”