Current Topics

New Zealand Tablet, Volume XXVIII, Issue 3, 18 January 1900, Page 1

Current Topics

AT HOME AND ABROAD.

A CATHOLIC INVENTION.

The writers of popular history, like writers of what is called ' popular science,' often need either to mend their education or amend their moral code. A writer in the latest issue of Cassell's Magazine helps to give a further lease of life to the good old fiction that the first successful application of coal-gas was the work of William Murdock, who lighted his house with the new illuminant in 1792. Murdock was not, however, as Cassell's says, ' the father of gas-lighting.' A record in the great Catholic University of Louvain (Belgium) shows that one of its professors, Jean Pierre Minkelers, had made use of coal-gas to light up his lecture-room in 1784, eight years before the clever Ayrshireman had made his successful experiment. Dr. Zahm says : 'To this same professor is also due the first application of coal-gas to balloons — the invention of two Frenchmen, Stephen and Joseph Montgolfier— although the credit of it is usually given to the English aeronaut Green.' Nearly two years ago the Stonyhurst Magazine published the following literal translation of a paragraph that had appeared in a German newspaper, the Neve Augsburger Zeitung : 'Who invented lighting by gas ? The answer is — pray don't be alarmed : — the Jesuits. How did it come about ? During the last century the Jesuits were expelled from England. They met with hospitable reception in France ; but when the Revolution had broken out there, they were forced in 1794 to leave. Now they once more found an asylum in England, and since the English were great opponents of the Revolution, the Jesuits were allowed to settle down again. They very soon erected a large educational establishment, and before very long they had a number of pupils about them. At their place, Stonyhurst, a royal castle, had become very extensive, and required a great deal to light it up, they made attempts to extract gas from coal, in order to bum it instead of oil and candles, and thus practise more economy. The experiment succeeded. Lighting by gas was now introduced, and it rendered excellent service. This discovery excited great astonishment on all sides. In the year 18 15 the Jesuit Father Dunn founded the first gas company in Preston, a considerable commercial and manufacturing town. The portrait of this Jesuit was hung up in the Town Hall as a memorial.'

CATHOLICS SAVE THE TAXES.

Here in New Zealand the Catholic body, by supporting their own schools, lighten the burden of the sometimes not over-grateful tax-payers by some £ 60,000 a year. In New York our fellow- Catholics save the public pocket by even a vastly greater sum. In the five boroughs that constitute Greater New York there are 175 Catholic schools, with an average attendance of 70,187. Now it appears from the Education Board's official returns that every budding American citizen that attends the public schools costs the city treasury 32 dollars. New York is thus saved about 2,268,064 dollars (over £453,600) through Catholics supporting their own schools. 'To this,' says an American contemporary, ' may also be added the cost of the school buildings, some of which are model educational institutions, and cost for construction from 10,000 dollars [about £2000] to 100,000 dollars, without the price paid for the ground on which they are built. An average of about 30,000 dollars would place the value of the buildings at about 4,000,000 dollars. This, added to the cost of education as fixed by the local Board, would amount to over 6,000,000 dollars [about £1,200,000] — money that comes out of the pockets of about one-third of the population and is saved by the city treasury.'

Somebody has said that the man who IS she cannot do the pons asinorum or spell decaying? phthisis never undertakes to reform Euclid or Noah Webster. But there are three things that a good many men can do, without the burden of acquiring previous knowledge or experience : they

can tell an editor exactly how to conduct a paper, a general how to conduct a campaign, and the Pope how to rule the Church. Every country has its few scattered individual Catholics who are hard critics, who know more of ecclesiastical polity and discipline than the Pope, who are more infallible than he, who find the Church — on its administrative side chiefly — a bit awry and lopsided, and whose advice alone is needed to set things plumb and perpendicular again. Indeed, almost every parish has one or two ot those inerrant growlers. And be it noted that the man who year in year out cultivates the habit of finding fault with the priest in his pulpit or the bibhop in his chair or the Pope on his throne is not far off from a disposition to find a sense of irritation in their doctrine and authority also. England, like other countries, has produced a few of those hypercritical Catholics. We do not refer here to the notorious varlet who, not being a Catholic, yet assumes the title ' Cathohcus' and from behind the breastwork of his anonymity fire* his rusty old blunderbuss at the Pope and the College of Cardinals. A century ago, according to Mr. Ward, in the Spectator, ' there were a number of those free lances in the Catholic Committee and the Cisalpine Club, declared enemies of their ecclesiastical superiors, fierce denouncers of the Roman Curia and of the tyranny of the Papal system. But Pius jVI. and Pius VII., Bishop Milne and Bishop Douglas, have not been considered to be spiritually inferior to their accusers.' Some 30 years ago a Catholic — according to the same authority — wrote in the Home and Foreign Review contrasting ' Catholic ' with ' Christian ' morality. And recently Doctor Mivart allowed his strong prejudices in the Dreyfus case to so warp his judgment and his view of straightforward fact as to lead him to attack the Church of France and the Holy See, and to find in the verdict of Rennes, in which no member of his creed was concerned, an evidence of the decadence of the Catholic Church !

A correspondent of ours is much exercised over this. But he may possess his soul in peace. These are but the passing anger and disappointments of a disaffected few. People make haste to forget them as they have forgotten the tirades of the extremists of the Catholic Committee and the Cisalpine Club, and of the writer in the Home and Foreign Review ot the sixties. Mr. Wilfrid Ward was, we believe, a strong Dreyfusard, but he knew his facts too well and was too cool and level-headed to make the Rennes verdict an excuse for attacking the Catholic Church. In the course of a letter to the Spectator he says :—: —

Such sweeping 1 statements must be rejected, even by the most indignant Dreyfnsards, if they care to see facts as they are. We may detest the language of La Croix, we may deeply regret the attitude of many French clericals, but none the less we mast see in that attitude the sign, not of a decaying Church, bat of a deep and blinding party prejudice. When Englishmen believed in the Titua Oates plot — for which so many innocent men suffered death— when the fire of London was, in a public inscription, ascribed to the English 'Papists,' England was not a decadent nation. But men, in other matters upright and honourable, were victims of a culpable, though apparently almost irresistible, party prejudice. They deserved reprobation for their flagrant injustice in these specified instances. But they are not simply bad or unjust men. Nor was the nation in ' peril ' from its general corruption and degradation. And the case is similar now, in the eyes of impartial observers, with regard to those French ohurchmen who have approved the Rennes verdict.

The man who goes in search of the decadence of the Catholic Church must seek it with a compound microscope. The Church is not a national institution. It is universal. There may be a decline of fervour in this country or that. Nations may even fall away, and have fallen away, from the centre of the Church's unity, as happened to England, Scotland, Scandinavia, and a part of Germany and Switzerland in the sixteenth century. But the Church is indefectible as well as universal, and despite these temporary checks she still went marching grandly on. The numerical losses which she sustained in Europe in the days of the Reformation were fully compensated by the wondrous successes of the missionary enterprises in Ceylon, India, Japan, and those new countries

which the genius of the great Catholic navigator, Christopher Columbus, discovered beyond the Atlantic. Despite the evil influence of agnosticism here and there, the Catholic Church has probibly never displayed in the long course of her history such a wondrous and varied and successful energy in woiks of charity, education, church extension, and missionary zeal ns at the present time. We have on several occasions dealt with the matter of her growth in numerical strength. The following additional figures in point will be of interest to our readers. They are taken partly from a recent publication,/,* /Vu/cstantisme Covtempoyain, and partly from Mulhall's Dictionary of Statistics for 1899. They show the numerical advance made by the Church in various countries since 1800 :—: —

In the Philippine Islands there are close on six million Catholics, with a school system so perfected by the Spanish jnonks that there is as little illiteracy among them as there is in the United States. In the Dutch colonies of Sunda, Sumatra, and Java there were no Catholics in the year iSou on account of the rigid penal laws which were then in force. King Charles, however, proclaimed religious liberty, and in 1890 the number of Catholics in those colonies amourtcd to 45,271. Some of the greatest relative successes of the Catholic missionaries have been achieved in the face of dire obstacles in Ceylon, India, China, and Japan. But the absolute growth of the Catholic Church in America has been altogother phenomenal. Where there was only one bishop in the year 1800, there are now 18 archbishops, 78 bishops, 1 Prefect Apostolic, 8137 secular priests, 2744 regulars, and no different orders of women dedicated to the services of a God and their neighbour in endless forms of religious activity. At the present moment the Catholic population of the United Slater cannot be less th< t n between twelve and thirteen millions Floreat !

A RAG OF THE PENAL LAWS.

Thr boles of the blue-gums on the Canterbury Plains and down in Otago look fresh and gay in their silver-grey coats. But look into their spreading arms and you will see hanging there for ever and ever the dry and rattling tatters of previous years' discarded bark. It is somewhat the same with that fair Emancipation Act of iß29,which is erroneously supposed to have relieved Catholics of all the disabilities of the old Penal Code. It has, indeed, undone the vastly greater part of the old no- Popery legislation. But some rags and tatters of the old still Code hang upon the Emancipation Act. Until Gladstone's Act of 1870 it was a crime punishable by two years' imprisonment, or by a fine of £500, for a Catholic priest to celebrate a marriage between Catholics if one of the contracting parties had not been a Catholic for fully twelve months. It connot be urged that" this was an obsolete penal statute. On the contrary, it was brought into force repeatedly. Among the instances that occur to our memory was that of Rev. Patrick Campbell, Catholic curate of Waterside, Derry. He was brought up under this Act at the Derry Assi/es, somewhere in the fifties. Judge Torrens presided. Father Campbell was defended by Mr. (afterwards Lord) O'H.igan, whose speech on the occasion did much to rivet public attention to the enormity of this musty old marriage law. The celebrated Yelverton case in the sixties did still more to discredit it. This was followed by the trial of a priest of the diocese of Clogher, before Judge Hayes, for the crime of having officiated at a Catholic marriage. A Bill to abolish the penalty attaching to this Act was introduced into the House of Commons in April, 1866, by Mr. Sergeant Armstrong, M.P. for Sligo. But the infamous law did not disappear from the statute-book till 1870. One case was tried in Dublin in 1898, and another was tried in the middle of last November — the ca=e of a minor named Hughes who wished to join the Jesuit Noviciate — and they prove that to this hour the Jesuits and other religious Orders are simply, as the Dublin Freeman puts it, illegal bodies, 'like the Ribbon Society.' In fact, the application of young Hughes to the Chief Clerk in Chancery was refused on the express grounds that the Jesuits are not merely a non-legal, but an absolutely illegal body. Religious libeity is one of the boasts of our age, and we trust that the Irish Members of Parliament will unite for the nonce and see that this and the remaining rags of penal legislation are swept utterly and finally

TO THOSE WHOM IT MAY CONCERN.

Zoilus finds fault with Homer, ex-shoe-maker Gifiord with Hazlitt, Keats, and Moore, and in social life we have scores of Dennises and Oldmixons who try to reach fame by libelling better people than themselves, and who are for ever seeking for the fly in the fair amber of other people's motives and conduct. But

there is a foundation of solid truth in the following bit of biting comment which appeared in a recent issue of the S. H. Review. We commend it to the attention of all New Zealand Catholics whom it may concern.- — ' If Catholic pastors showed the majority of our young men that they are spending far more money on cigarettes than on their God ; that the God of most of them is their tobacco, their beer, and their belly ; and that Catholic loyalty and duty should prompt them to -,aye their dimes for Catholic schools nid icii^iuub institutions, it would be all t^e u Ptter for Catholic education, Catholic standing in society, and Catholic unity. If our Catholic men and women of society would devote an occasional five hundred dollars to the purchasing of Catholic books for a parochial or a public library, or for the dissemination of Catholic literature, instead of wasting it on senseless paraphernalia for skulking in dark hall 3 , or for the adornment of the dance-floor, and on sealskin sacque^. for their overbearing wives ; it would be all the better for their souls and for the souls of their poorer brethren, in the name of Catholic unity.'

' somebody's DARLING.'

The brave and disinterested services rendered by the Catholic Sisters to the garrisons of Kimberiey, Mafeking, and Ladysmith have recalled to the mind of a writer in one of the latest South African papers to hand the story of an American lyric entitled 'Somebody's Darling.' It appears that this pathetic little bit of war poetry was written in a military hospital by Sister Lacoste, one of the nuns who did such noble service alike to the men in grey and the men in blue during the great American Civil War. It appears that a gallant young Catholic man, Patrick Feeney, the only son of a widowed mother, took the war fever and decided to join the Norihern Army. He enlisted secretly at Detroit. As soon as his mother heard of his enlistment she made a record trip to Detroit, saw the General in command, and tried to save her boy. She failed, for the men in blue were already under arms and ready to march. The mother pleaded to see her son. He was brought to her. The sight of the fine young fellow in his uniform touched the maternal heart with pride. She embraced and blessed him. 'Heaven,' said she, 'has blessed me with you, lad. I came to take you away, but now I would not if I could. If you come back alive, I'll thank God ; but if you are killed, it will be a joy to me to know that you died a good soldier.' They patted— he to the front, she to her home.

One day Sister L.acoste went into the dead-room of the military hospital. She found there the corpse of a young man who had been fatally wounded at the battle of Cedar Creek. He proved to be Patrick Feeney, the widow's son. According to the writer in the South African paper referred to, she sent the following little poetic effusion to the bereaved mother with the details of his death :—: —

somebody's dabling. Into a ward of unwhitewashed walls, Where the dead and the dying lay Wounded by bayonets, shot, and balls, Somebody's Darling was borne one day. Somebody's Darling so young 1 and so fair, Wearing still on his pale young face, Soon to be hid by the dust of the grave, The lingering light of his boyhood's grace. Matted and damp are the curls of gold Kissing the snow of that fair young brow ; Pale are the lips of delicate mould — Somebody's Darling is dying now. Kiss him once for somebody's Bake, Murmur a prayer soft and low ; One bright ourl from the cluster take— They were somebody's pride, you know. Somebody'shand had rested there ; Was it a mother's soft and white 1 Or have the lips of a sister fair Been baptised in those waves of light 7 God knows best I He was somebody's love. Somebody's heart enshrined him there ; Somebody wafted his name above Night and morn on the wings of pray'r. Somebody's watching and waiting for him, Yearning to clasp him again to her heart ; There he lies, with his blue eyes dim, And smiling child-like lips apart. Tenderly bury the fair young dead, Pausing to drop on his grave a tear ; Carre on the wooden slab at his head : * Somebody's Darling lies buried here. 1

Belgium Sermaßy ... ... England and Scotl-nd Holland Scandanavia Switzerland Janada and Newfoundland United States Montenegro (1554) Bosnia and Herzegovina (1850) iOW. 3,000,000 6,000,000 120,000 ■SiO.ooo 200 .■)42 000 187,000 36,000 3 000 ino.ooo (J.oifi.ooo 1i',.78 ( J.000 2.000,000 1.485.800 8,000 1,100,000 2.088,561 9,856,022 (1808) 6,350 (18 ( .t7) 334,000