The New Zealand Tablet. Fiat Justitia. THURSDAY, MARCH 23, 1899. AN EPISCOPAL SILVER JUBILEE.

New Zealand Tablet, Volume XXVII, Issue 12, 23 March 1899, Page 17

The New Zealand Tablet. Fiat Justitia. THURSDAY, MARCH 23, 1899. AN EPISCOPAL SILVER JUBILEE.

§jt HERE is something pleasant in the idea of a J jubilee. It was one of the good things that i. people ' knew down in Judce ' some thousands of years ago. It was a form of golden jubilee ** — a day of joy for slave and debtor. Its slow5Sf moving cycle turned but once in fifty years. ' Comparatively few of those born of woman e\er • saw the jubilee year either of the old .Jewish or of the later Christian code. Church usage has therefore favoured the increase of jubilees. Social custom has moved j in a similar direction. The century of centenaries has witnessed a marked tendency to rind divisions of time or life-incidents on which to fasten fresh and ever more fresh jubilee celebrations. The silver jubilee has long! been an established fact, and decennial periods both under and over the golden fifty — bronze, iron, copper, pearl, and heaven knows how many other jubilees — are struggling, thus far in vain, for even a faint measure of public recognition. It is, in effect, a search for fresh land-marks in our lives. To change the figure of speech, people would gild and label and ticket all the chief rungs in the ladder of life ; they would at stated times lift us gently and lovingly on the higher steps as upon so many successive thrones, and bedeck us with wreathing smiles and friendly hand-clasps and heart-loads of good wishes, and with every manifestation of that affection and good-will which constitute the sweetest natural charm of life. In the relations of a Catholic priest to his people, of a Catholic bishop to his diocese, of a Catholic metropolitan to his province, there is something sweeter, and so to speak, more domestic, than the looser bonds that hold the married clergyman to his flock. It is a strong, wholesome, and

inborn sense of the spiritual fatherhood of the Catholic priesthood and episcopate. It is present at all times. But its happiest and most enthusiastic external demonstrations are naturally reserved for occasions such as that which marked, on Tuesday night, the Silver Jubilee of the episcopate of the Most Rev. Fraisx'is Redwood, S.M., Archbishop of Wellington and Metropolitan of New Zealand. Both on grounds purely personal to his Grace and on public grounds, the occasion was one which rightly called for rejoicing. Of the former we say little and briefly where much might, be told : for we know that evm a modicum of well-merited personal praise would grate on the distinguished j ubilarian's mind like the sound of a rasping discord. We make the barest recurd of prominent facts when we state that his Grace bears right worthily the highest spiritual dignity in the land ; that his mental attainments have won for him a name beyond the shores of New Zealand ; and that the years of his episcopate since St. Patrick's Day, 1874, have been years of solid achievement which have won for the Archdiocese of Wellington a name of which its people, its priests, and its chief pastor j may alike be proud.

it is, perhaps, more than a mere happy coincidence that A JtCHbisiiop Redwood's Jubilee came in the same year and so close upon the first Provincial Synod of New Zealand—thus far the most striking evidence of the expansion of the Church in the Colony and the fairest promise for its future. The Archbishop of Wellington saw the Church in this new land rise and expand from the few scattered Catholics of the days of the single pioneer Bishop Pompallieii down to the present day, with its 100,000 Catholics, 150 priests, GOO nuns, and four dioceses. He has taken his share in the work of expansion— fii-st as Bishop, from 1874, next as Archbishop, from JBS7, and now as the sole direct intermediary between the Church in New Zealand and the Holy See. And, as evidence of the swiftness of the Church's growth in this new country, all this has taken place in the days of one who is still in a green and virile middle life. How the mustard-seed has grown ! And the Jubilarian of last Tuesday's celebration is, in a way, the measure of its rate of growth. Our readers will join with us in the heartfelt wish that his (Jrace may long be spared to witness the further and still greater triumphs which, we trust, are in store for the Church in New Zealand. Ad mul/os mi mis :