OUR PARIS LETTER.

Thames Star, Volume XI, Issue 3579, 16 June 1880, Page 2

OUR PARIS LETTER.

(PBOM OITB.OWN COBBESPONDBNJ.)

Pahw, March 30. ECCLESIASTICAL MATTERS.

Palm Sunday passed off brilliantly for saints and sinners; the atmosphere seemed to breathe the fete of faith, and thus enhanced the souvenir of the triumphal entry into Jerusalem. The weather was not of the kind that Reran describes in his " Life of Jesus," as existing in Palestine, and that Dord suggests in his great picture of the culminating point of Christ's apostleship. However, it was not the less fine, and while recalling the last moments of the cold season, allowed one to perceive the first smiles of spring. Never were the churches so crowded; never were such sales effected in bo?—the shrub that does duty for pe'.m, the latter being too expensive, and having to be brought from Italy. It is M. Gamier, the architect of the new Opera, who supplies from his estate the choicest palm for the Eternal City, and

he forwards also some to Notre Dame here. Box is accepted as the symbol of concealed strength, promising tho soul an ulterior existence. Tho palace as well as the garret—the castle like the cottagehas its branch, bouquet, or twig of 11 blessed box," suspended at the head of beds, or placed in a vase in every sleeping room. lam aware of sceptics who do not object to a sprig of the plant being entwined round the portrait of a departed friend. But man is a tissue of contradictions and whimsicalities: he can never entirely shake off the old Adam. He combats feticbism, but he admits fetiches; he attacks religions, but he tolerates a souvenir that has received a priestly benediction. It is argued that the masses are indifferent to sacred ceremonies: an old liberal who has seen Palm Sundays from the reign of Louis XVIII. downwards, confessed that just passed was never more honored by the crowd. Doss universal suffrage desire to show, that if it be strongly anticlerical, it is far from being anti religious P

The government is displaying its good sense by doing nothing precipitate in the application of the law before dispersing these, official inquiries are being instituted as to the exact scope of the law, for nothing arbitrary will be tempted. If the code be obsolete or contradictory, a bill must be voted to set the complex subject definitely at rest, by compelling every association, religious as well as secular, to obtain a permit. If the Jesuits declined to submit to the authorities, or the national episcopacy, they will be broken up, the foreign members requested to return to their own country, and the natives to become citizens, if they be not priests. There is no persecution of religion; there is only the abolition of exceptions, and a curbing of ecclesiastics who forget the altar in the tribune. Since the clerical influence can no longer command pension, past, or place, much of its power is gone. A far more serious blow to the clerical party is that formulated in the resolutions presented by M. Brisson, President of the Budget Commission, and that will be voted au galop. Ther* is no country in the world ho rich in convents and monasteries as this ; home and foreign religious orders flourish because privileged. As a safe general remark it may be said, they are exempt from nearly all taxation ; they contribute to no succession taxes, as the corporations are exempted : they possess factories and workshops, but pay no licenses; they execute contracts far below business rates, thanks to bands fed but not paid, and a capital supplied by cbarit able donations; the leading monster drapery establishments give all their orders to the religious institutions, thus doing serious wrong to the honest working classes. It has been calculated that at the rate the Orders have been purchasing landed property, they would in the course of one hundred years be the owners of one half of France. M. Brisson will bring all this wealth within the action of the tax gatherer, visiting with the usual severe penalties any attempt at misrepresentations. The revenue will henceforth be swelled by many additional millions of francs, and as the State undertakes to instruct gratuitously, and feed the necessitous, the claims of t'ae ignorant and the needy will will protected. Deprived of priviliges, the religious orders, if they become less numerous, will have fewer enemies. The Eev. Father Didon of the order of Dominicans, has brought his course of sermons or lectures on divorce and socialism to a close. He aims to adopt a middle course between Lacordaire and Lamennais, which is equivalent to sitting between two stoves. He has been so daring, that he has been called to Borne to explain; but if his doctrines were unsafe, why connive to the last at their utterances ? There is a dash of the middle class democrat and modern free-thinker in Pere Didon. Many ask, is he on the road to revolt like Pere Loyson P He belongs to the school of good sense, and is an artiste, a confertncier, not a dilectician or a theologian. He asserts, if the manners of the masses are no great things, those of the upper classes are not much better, and which gave rise in the curious, not pious, congregation, to the rubbing of feet on the floor—the French way of "hissing" in church. The preacher forgets that the fashionable or upper ten world in France, is in a state of open war against democracy and the republic, and who seek in Catholicism, not a means to appease, but a weapon to destroy a regime and tendencies they detest politically, socially, and morally. The malady of the upper classes, here as in England, for a peer confessed in 1875 the disease had crossed the Straits of Dover, is sadness, ennui, said to be the consequence of a waning of religious faith, no love for equality, no confidence in progress or work, and no marked devotion for humanity.