FOREIGN MISSIONS.

New Zealand Tablet, Volume XXVIII, Issue 52, 27 December 1900, Page 10

FOREIGN MISSIONS.

The Rev. Thomas .T. Shahan, D.D., has an account of ' The Catholic Missionaries from France and Germany,' in a recent issue of the Catholic World. After introducing hie readers to general sources of information in regard to the actual administration of the Catholic Church, such aa the ' Missiones Catholicae' of the Roman authorities, ' Die Katholische Kirche,' by the Germans, and the works published by the Society for the Propagation of the Faith, of which the familiar Annals is a specimen, he takes up the Abbe Kannengieser's new volume on the Catholic missions of France and Germany, and shows us how truly and admirably France has won her right to the French protectorate of Catholicism in the Orient. 'It seems incredible,' he says, ' that 7,745 French missionaries, mostly priests, are scattered through the foreign missions — a body that almost equals the entire Catholic clergy of the United States in the last census. They are everywhere, in Turkey and China, in farther Asia and in Africa, in Madagascar and in Egypt, in Palestine and in Persia, wherever the name of Christ is preached.' Yet the Catholic women of France have surpassed the missionaries. In January of thus year there were 9,150 French Sisters attached to Ca'holic mipsions in Aeia Minor, China. Africa and India. Surely the race that has produced such men and women as these must not only, as Dr. Shahan says, one day return to its high pedestal among the nations of the earth, but to a higher station still. And Catholic Germany, while by no means so far to the front, is making noble strides forward. ' The total cf the gennine army of salvation that labors on the foreign missions of Catholicism is about 60,000 men and women, priest* and Brothers.'