ARCHDIOCESE OF WELLINGTON.

New Zealand Tablet, Volume XXVI, Issue 32, 15 December 1898, Page 3

ARCHDIOCESE OF WELLINGTON.

(From our Napier correspondent.)

Somo able and interesting discourses have beea preached here of late by the Very Rev. Father Grogan on the subject of tae present disunion m the English community. lam sorry 1 can give you but an outline of them. Just twelve months ago the Rev. W. Colenso, of this town, made an unwarranted a' tack in a local pap*r on what he termed ' some ot the errors ot the Churoh ot Rome.' Father Grogan considered it his duty to iracurdiately challenge such statements lest, as he said, the uninstruoted might be misled by hia ai ence. Mr. Colen o, seeing himself faro so badly, all of a sudden withdrew from the contest. Since then the rev. gentleman has kept himself tolerably quiet, unfcil last October, when, taking advantage of Archbishop R dwo»d's saying- in Dunedin that this is a century of adulterations, ha had tie impudence t) write in the Hawke's Bay Herald, amongst other things, the following sentence : 'but a lit le extra thought on the part ot the preacher might have led him to trace back and consider the origin of the greatest adulteration, namely — the Church of Rome, which so heinously adulterated Christian teaching and the Holy Scripture*, so that the pregnant words of our Lord to the leaders and teachers of the ancient Jewish Church are equally as applicable to the Romish Church and her adulterated teachings of this day. Well did Isaiah prophesy of you hypocrites . . . 'in vain do they worship me, teaching doctrine and precepts of men . . . making void the word of God by your own tradition which you have given forth, and many other such like things you do ' (Mark vii.). This being of course a gross insult as well as a glaring falsehood in its application, brought Father Grogan again to his feet, not in the public Press as before but in his own church. Week after week he advertised his discourses for the Sunday evenings in St. Patrick's, commencing with the present confused state of the religious atmosphere in England clearly showing from its very nature that nothing else can be expected. The seed was sowed in the wind and must now be reaped in the whirlwind. There is no remedy except that pointed out by the only infallible voice on earth. The reformers, said the Rev. Father, were not particularly anxious as to the sort of religion they should establish on the ruins of the Church of their fathers, nor were they at all particular as to how the ' Inspired Word ' was to be handed down to the people provided their interpretation alone was to be retained, yet they were sufficiently logical to know that for a people who were in heart and habit essentially Catholic for 1.000 years some sort of religion had to be provided. But with all their genius of invention they could hit on nothing feasible except in as much as it ran on Similar lines to those of the religion of their fathers. From this moment commenced the system of imitation on which the Church of England subsists to the present day. They set up the imitation Pope, the imitation Bishop, the imitation priest. Instead or"o r " the altar they put an ordinary table, instead of the Missel, the Book of Common Prayer ; instead of the Holy Communion, the Real Presence. They gave all who wished f'>r 'it, Jew and Gentile, a piece of ordinary bread and n sup of or<lind,fy wine. There w;is to be no lurcher difficulty about -uuminenr,-, ami every ir.au was to interpret the Holy Scriptures as it suited hio tuve. Ttion rose up this ' skeleton ' churcij of convenience, a intre imitation a& it is to-day, a sort of 'golden calf, 1 something like 'a suckmg bottle' or what the ladies call 'a dummy '(a thing intended to keep babies quiet). So is it with this iujitition church in England, a veritable government sucking bottle for the bishops and parsons, but a poor ' dummy ' for the general public. Alter 300 years the people ot England are waking up from their lethargy to nee how they have been deceived, aye, robbed of their spiritual inheritance ; deprived of everything except the spirit of division, criti juun, and contradiction— a Very poor substitute for the faith of tneir fathers. Mr. Coleuso shuts his eyes to all this, baid the rev. Father, and invents from else wa ere what he calls errors a.id adulterations ot the Church of Home. Father Grogan then explained what is meant by the true faich, and assured his audience that it was not m the power of either man or nations to adulterate it Men may take to themselves and form in their own heads an adulterated form of faith, as hovetic.il sects do, but uhe true living taiGh they leave behind them untouched in the guardianship ol the oue true chuich. W fat-re, then, said the preacher, are we to look for Mr. CuleiWs adulterations ? Where we to find theun ? We h«ive often heard that people living in glass houses should be careful about throwing stones. Such he (Father Grogan) believed to be the caae of hit, iriend, if hi&tory were to be relied on. For is it not a notorious fact of history that ttiis church by law established in Eaglaud from its infancy is built on a cougeries ot <I<juu<l«, falsehoodo, and adulterations, and that from the day a of Heny VIII., lih founder, to the prenunt it is maintained, supported, aad defended by toe came / Lot Mr. Colenso deny it ! Father Grogan thi n brought forward the famous ' Gorham heresy' also the cis-e <..f the ' t bsaj s and rtviev\s j.ud showed chut when the Crown of EtiU.uid taOaJcd "the Church of E jglana by l.iw e.tubii^hecl ' wit . the dourruid of the destruction ol! Lhe very fuumi.tioii ot Christianity, h (ciie Ca'irch of Kuglaud) had no power in council or otherwise to clear it>eU >n this legalised heresy, or to decide whether it was heresy or not. The fact of the matter in, continued the preacher, that whin the denial of the necessity of baptism was legalised by the deci-ion ot the Crown — the nighe&i power in the nation ; of 17,000 pamons, a few made an effort to force the I'o.rlianieni to reveise the dm won, and so clear their church from whi>t they con&iuere<i a iaLil crisis in its career, over 15,000 of these pious parsons would not put .i p n to paper, reeling niure scrupulous aoout their staid their reputation before f arhameut than about the doctrine of their Church. Has

my friend, asked the preacher, shut his eyes to these cad adulterations, though pretty clear on the pages of history ? Has he also shut his eyes to the destruction of the Christian law of marriage reduced simply to successive polygamy, something like his namesake, Dr. Colenso, permitted to the Protestants in Natal under the protection of Dr. Whately, of Dublin, with this difference that Dr. Colenso permitted simultaneous polygamy ? Yet my friend's church, according to Bishop Barry, sanctions this. These are only a few of the adulterations that Mr. Colenso passed over. Father Grogan's discourses created much interest and many Protestants were present each evening. The new statues recently erected in St. Patrick's add considerably to the beauty of this already very fine church. That of St. Patrick, the patron of the church, which measures 6ft 9in in height, 18 erected opposite the pulpit, outside the altar rails, on a beautiful panelled pedestal in granite showing an ivy branch entwining round, whilst on the foot or base of the statue itself are worked round the name of the saint several branches of the ' dear little shamrock.' St. Aloysius and Blessed Chanel, each measuring 6ft in height, are erected inside the sanctuary and produce a pretty effect. The Catholics of Napier may well feel proud of their new church. The impressive ceremony of First Communion took place in ht. Mary's on Sunday 4th inst , when a considerable number of children —boys and girls—had the happiness of receiving their Divine Saviour for the first time. The Brothers and Sisters as usual were in attendance, and everything came off beautifully. The happy first communioants renewed their baptismal vows in the evening in St. Patrick's, when the pastor, the Very Rjv. Father Grogan gave a very instructive discourse on the baptismal vows.