FRENCH MISSIONARY ENTERPRISE.

New Zealand Tablet, Volume XXVII, Issue 9, 2 March 1899, Page 31

FRENCH MISSIONARY ENTERPRISE.

Peripatetic evangelists (says the Catholic Herald) occasionally assure us that Catholicism is losing ground in France. As an ounce of fact is worth a ton of assertion, I have pleasure in quoting the figures given in a missionary journal, with reference to contributions to our Foreign Missions. " During the seventy years — 1822-91 — the grand total of the alms collected by the Lyon3 Society amounted to close upon £10,734,000, of which France alone contributed nearly seven millions." Of the rest of the world, the United Kingdom gave £333,236, and the whole of North America, £311,320. ' And it is not only treasure that France gives for the missions, it is the lives of her sons and daughters. In India, the archdiocese of Pondicherry, the dioaeses of Coimbatore, Mysore. Madura, Vizagapatam, and Naepur ; in Ceylon, Colombo and Jaffna ; the whole of the Straits Settlements and the Milay Peninsula ; the greater part of Burma ; in Africa, all the West Co-tst misaiona, great part of Uganda, and all Nyassaland ; Zanzibar, Basutoland, Natal, the Orange River districts of Caps Colony, the Seychelles, Manitoba, British Columbia, Fiji, New Guinea, the the Solomons ; and these missions are under French bishops, or other French ecclesiastical ordinaries, and are manned, in most ca*es exclusively, in others chiefly, by French priests.' Thus, as the writer observes, it will be seen that the chief and primary support of nearly all our missions is due in overwhelming proportions to the munificent generosity of French Catholics. Whilst on the subject of Fore'gn Missions, it may be noted that during the last I two years, the number of conversions in the two newly-created Coptic dioceses of Hemopolis and Thebes alone was 5,728 ; at the time of the Pope's appeal for unity, there were in the same district 10 Catholic chape's and 10 schools ; there are now 32 ohapels (22 of the Coptic and 10 of the Latin rite), and 52 schools.