SOCIAL EVILS

Southland Times, Issue 20662, 18 April 1929, Page 8

SOCIAL EVILS

EXISTANCE IN IRELAND.

BISHOP’S TRENCHANT CRITICISM

Dublin, February 11

In a Lenten pastoral letter the Roman Catholic Bishop of Ossory, Dr. Collier, makes a trenchant attack on some of the social evils which he declares have grown up in Ireland. “Nowhere,” he says, “was home life more beautiful than in Ireland, or productive of more good. Now it would seem largely to have gone. Some parents do their duty nobly and conscientiously, but too many neglect it. “Y’oung boys and girls are allowed to be out at all hours, to go out alone and in the night hours on lonely roads for the purpose of company keeping. In the most brazen and audacious manner these company keepers defy and flaunt public opinion and offend common decency and morality along our public ways. The love scenes of the cinema are reproduced on the public roadsides, tu the scandal and offence of all. It is high time our laws were amended to deal drastically with what is a public moral nuisance.” Another evil of the day, he says, is the vice of betting and gambling, which has killed the spirit of decent work and labour. A very great evil not dead yet is the dance hall without supervision or control, often with excessive drinking and unashamed company keeping and late hours, with the saddest results to virtue and moralitv.

"But,” proceeds the bishop, “one great evil, a new crime in Ireland, calls for criticism and condemnation. The evil I refer to is the crime of infanticide, the murder or death of the illegitimate child, often in circumstances which are callous and revolting, and which in almost all cases make the giving of baptism impossible, soul and body being destroyed together. I do not mean to say that this crime is common, but the cases that have occured are so startling, so unusual, in our Catholic land that the time has come to speak. “The teaching of the Catholic Church is clear and simple. The new-born child has an inviolable right to life quite as much as the grown boy or girl, man or woman, and no difference can be recognized in the murder of one or the other. “YVhile making all allowance and extending pity to the unmarried mother at such a time, we must not be sentimentalized into forgetting or whittling down the law of God, and we cannot help marvelling at the treatment frequently allotted to these cases in our courts. It would seem as if the law did not value the life of the illegitimate child, principally because there is no one to make a case or stand up for it, and certainly it is less valued than the life of the ordinary child. “This is not law or morality. People must take the consequences of their acts. In some cases the illegitimate child was done to death by the father or by relatives, and yet there was no serious trial on the capital charge. One is forced to conclude that this easy treatment has encouraged these deplorable acts. “YVhere the law is weak or faulty it should be amended or strengthened, especially in the direction of making the guilty father fully responsible for his sin.

“The humbler classes in the country seem to have less regard for purity and morality than in the past, and we make an earnest appeal to employers, to masters and mistresses, and to the clergy, to keep a more stringent control over these poor people, often the victims of their own ignorance or want cf religion or the shelter of a home, to give them more and better chances of the Sacraments, to bring them into sodalities, and keep them from the occasions-of sin.”