Current Topics

New Zealand Tablet, Volume XXVIII, Issue 52, 27 December 1900, Page 1

Current Topics

AT HOME AND ABROAD.

THE ANTI-STOKE PRESS.

There is, for Catholics, a sweet significance in the attitude of the hysterical portion of the New Zealand Press towards the Stoke trouble. So long as the case was being whooped against the Marist Brothers, the anti-Stoke newspapers published columns of sensational reports, stuffed odd corners with rabid correspondence, and emphasised the whole with blistering editorial articles. But the whirligig of time brought swift revenge. The prosecution broke down in a way which the N.Z. Times describes as ' absolutely staggering.' From the emotional point of view all this was splendid ' copy.' But the triumph of innocent men over persecution was dismissed by those hysterical organs with a few brief and snappy telegrams supplied by the Press Association. The loud halloa of June-November dwindled suddenly into a still, small voice which was not the voice of conscience. We have looked in vain to some of the newspapers that took a prominent and discreditable part in raising the hue and cry against the Marist Brolhers and in indecent and cowardly comments or insinuations on the cases while still sub judice, for any expression of editorial opinion on the happy termination of what some of them habitually referred to as ' the Stoke scandal.' The newspapers in question are themselves responsible for the widespread conviction which found expression in the editorial columns of the N.Z. Times (Wellington) : ' It is impossible to avoid the conclusion that a certain section of the Press of this country wished above all things that these charges were true, and is disappointed in consequence.' • • • It is a singular coincidence that the same papers which sent up the most sky-piercing shrieks over the conduct of the Dreyfus courts-martial, were precisely those that took the most prominent and disgraceful part in aiding and abetting the rabid fanatics of Nelson in their endeavor to prevent the Marist Brothers securing a fair trial, and to have the verdict decided by an artificially created popular clamor. The American ' pious editor ' of Lowell's Biglow Papers thus begins the first article of his political creed :—: — I da believe in Freedom's cause, Ez fur away ez Payris is ; I like to see her stick her claws In them infarnal Pharisees ; It's wal enough agin a king To dror resolves and triggers, — But libbaty's a kind o' thing Thet don't agree with niggers. We have evidently among us some of the 'pious editor ' class who believe in fair-play, 'libbaty,' 'an' things o' thet description ' when they are ' ez fur away ez Payris is.'

ANOTHER NEWSPAPER VERDICT.

The Wellington Free Lance says of the Stoke cases : 'No trial could have been stricter or more searching. Every possible effort was put forth to secure a conviction. The evidence was collected by clever detectives, skilful lawyers conducted the prosecution, and every care was taken to obtain a jury panel that could not be suspected

of any religious bias in favor of the accused. Some of the cases were heard before Mr. Justice Edwards, and some before the Chief Justice. And in each and every instance the result has been the same — a verdict of acquittal for the accused. Now there has been a disposition in many people's minds to believe the very worst that has been urged against these men, merely because they were members of a monastic order. In some quarters there has been an inclination to take it for granted they were guilty for the simple reason that they were Roman Catholic monks, and to hold them up to public odium and execration in consequence. But those who have followed the trials must now admit, however strong their prejudices may have been, that although the prosecution was skilfully conducted, it would have been surprising if the jury on such evidence had found any other verdict than that which they did. So contradictory was the testimony, that in one case it elicited from Mr. Justice Edwards the remark that he would not hang a cat upon it. ... These men have submitted to the most rigorous tests the law could apply, and have emerged from the trial unscathed.'

ROTTEN STICKS.

Judge Jefpreys is said to have decided the guilt or innocence of accused persons by the size and cut of their beards. 'My Lord,' said one of his victims, ' if you measure consciences by beards, you have no conscience.' The little coterie of self-constituted Jeffreys in Nelson, and their mouthpieces in Press and Parliament, judged the Marist Brothers, of Stoke, not by evidence, but by the shaven chin and the cross and the long cassock and the other signs which proclaim them unpaid members of the great army of charity of the Catholic Church. It would be difficult to imagine tools better fitted for the work than those selected by the Nelson fanatics and the Crown to throw an air of decent legality over this discreditable persecution of the Stoke Brothers. Nearly all of the Crown witnesses belonged to the ' committed ' or criminal class, who had been apprehended by the police and sent to the Stoke Industrial School by the sentence of the courts. It was Cardinal Newman who said that a certain class of fanatics would no more dream of pausing to consider the character of the weapon which they use against Rome than they would of stopping to examine the geological formation of the stone which they pick up to throw at a dog. The nature of the weapon used against the Marist Brothers was sufficiently well known to their enemies in and about Nelson. It was a rotten stick. And it has broken in their hands. They and their blowing-horns in the Press passed over in significant silence the grave moral delinquencies which have been time and again laid to the charge of certain State Industrial Schools and other institutions of a similar nature, under Government control, in the Colony. And their maudlin sympathy with the caning of a youthful horse-thief in Stoke reminds one of Catullus writing an elegy, in heroic numbers, on the death of an impudent pet sparrow, and of Sterne shedding salt tears over the corpse of a kicking donkey.

A SPLENDID REBUKE.

There is ' many a gem of purest ray serene* in the writings of Father Sheehan, the gifted parish priest of Doneraile. Here is one, from his Triumph of Failure — a splendid rebuke to those spineless, and by no means rare, Catholics who are

ever ready to decry any new discovery, if it should happen to be the work of a Catholic, or to minimise its value until it has received the hall-mark of the non-Catholic world : ' There is a good deal of what is good and pure and holy amongst the Catholics of to-day, but we want the trumpet-blast of a Tertullian to awaken us to higher things. For the old cry, " Can anything good come out of Nazareth ?" is in the hearts of the worldly Catholics to-day, though it is not on their lips. They «xrc pi cpaicJ Lv admire everything, provided it is not introduced to their notice under the Church's sanction. In philosophy you are called upon to admire Plato, but not St. John. Porphyry and Plontinus we know, but who was Justin ? The hybrid Greek of Lucian we admire, but what of Clement and Origen ? We are told of the hidden beauties in Plautus and Tibullus, Bion and Moschus; but who ever heard of Ephrem the Syrian ? We all know about Giordano Bruno, but what of St. Thomas ? We call Kant and Fichte and Spinoza the demigods of science; what of Suarez and Velasquez? For one Catholic who has heard of apologists like the Abbd Moigno, there are a hundred who have heard of great iconoclasts like Spencer and Darwin. We are ashamed of our immortals ; we are proud of the " parvenus "of science. And yet what a glorious roll of illustrious names illumines the history of the Church. Even in modern times what a litany one may sing of Tycho-Brahe, Copernicus, Descartes, Galileo, Leibnitz, Pascal, Bossuet, Gerdie, Malebranche. In oratory what a galaxy of French and Italian geniuses. In science, three-fourths of the world's inventions sprang from the children of the Church — from the discovery of gunpowder to the discovery of dynamic electricity. All the world's sacred orators were Catholics. All the world's discoverers were Catholics. We conquer the world, and bow before its idols; we lead the world and suffer ourselves to be harnessed to its triumphal car; we give the world the example of our genius, our self-sacrifice, our zeal, and then cry " Io triumphe ! " when it parades its own little deities.'

NOT AN ADJUTANT BIRD.

The Aye Maria has a pleasant reply for those who find fault with the Church because she has not, as some of the sects have, the appetite of the adjutant bird, which bolts with equal composure a healthy frog or a saw-file. • This comparison of the Church with the sects,' says the Aye Maria, ' not only limps ; it hasn't a leg to stand on. Father Ryder has pointed out that a healthy man will naturally reject indigestible food that is offered to him, while a carpet bag rejects nothing that is put into it. But since a man is a living organism, and the carpet bag is not, it is inconclusive to point to the greater receptive power of the carpet bag, which really assimilates nothing of what it takes in. Moreover, when poison is offered as food, what a healthy man needs is not power of assimilation but an emetic ; and incases of heresy the Church promptly administers an emetic. That sort of medicine has never been pleasant to take, but is it reasonable to cast the odium of it on the physician who finds it necessary to prescribe the emetic rather than on the poison for which it is the antidote ? '

D VRKLANTTRN ASSOCIATIONS.

Dark-lantern and underground associations receive, it appears, almost as scant sympathy in the Reformed Presbyterian as in the Catholic Church. The Rev. W. J. Coleman, pastor of the Allegheney, Pa., congregation of that denomination, said in a recent discourse that ' the law of the Church is that none who are " members of associations, either sworn or pledged to secrecy in regard to the nature and doings of such associations, may be admitted to ecclesiastical fellowship." ' Among other reasons for condemning oath-bound societies, he gave the following : ' Lodge influences are unfavourable to spiritual life. There are more lodges than churches in this city. There are many more men than women in the lodges, and many more women than men in the churches. The presence of many men in the lodge may help to account for their absence from the church. The men •who cultivate the lodge do not generally cultivate the prayer meeting. Secret societies are rivals to the Church, offering a way of salvation that is not based on the merits of Christ and a life of godliness. They are unchristian in that while they recognise God they do not recognise the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ. They are parasitical, drawing- all the vitality they have from the divine institutions of the family, the Church and the State. The secrecy of co-operative insurance societies is either useless or deceptive, mostly the latter. Secret societies are modern survivals of the heathen mysteries of Egypt, Chaldea, and Greece, which are denounced in the Bible.'

DYING OF THE TOPE.

It is not the custom of Catholic journalists to load their columns with blistering attacks on the faith of Protestants. But, alas ! for the rarity of Christian charity under the sun, our good example has not received the extensive imitation which it deserves in the offices of some of our Protestant contemporaries. Of such is a small Auckland monthly which is edited

by an animated pair of shears and sub-edited by a pot of paste. Copies of the current issue of this publication have been circulated among our co-religionists by the Waitemata— presumably because of a blasphemous parody of Catholic doctrine which it contains. This is a variant of the moth-eaten old calumny that Catholics place the Pope on a level with the Almighty Creator of all things. This time the story comes from Italy. A gay romancer informs us that a leaflet was issued by a Catholic society in Fluience containing the following blasphemy (among others) : • The Pope really constitutes one moral person with jesus the Incarnate Word.' » « « Perhaps the unkindest thing we can say of this monstrous tale is this: that it appeared in the brimstone column of the Christian World. As usual with such calumnies, the scene of this latest piece of sanctified fiction is laid afar off — in a place where inquiry is slow or difficult or costly. It is, in good sooth, a ' travellers' tale ' — as wild as the best for worst) of Mandeville or Morden or Le Blanc or De Rougemont (alias Grin). An annotator of Le Blanc's romances of India shrewdly remarked that if travellers ' write nothing but what is possible or probable they might appear to have lost their labor, and to have observed nothing but what they might have done as well at home.' But Mandeville's tales of horned and oneeyed peoples, of ducks and oysters being produced by trees, etc., were more firmly believed by the gobemouches of his time than the inspiration and historical accuracy of the Word of God are in our day among the denominations for which the Auckland monthly professes to cater. Sectarian passion is notoriously credulous of horrors and monstrosities and impossibilities. Your healthy bigot is like the Queen in Lewis Carroll's Looking-Glass Land. He draws a long breath, shuts his eyes, and for half an hour each day practises believing impossibilities. And he becomes in time so expert in the art that he brings himself at last to believe 'as many as six impossible things before breakfast.' • ♦ • The whole story of the Florentine pamphlet is from top to bottom a fabrication — a wild ' travellers' tale ' and nothing more. The ' quotations ' given from it have not even the merit of novelty. They are an old ' fake,' saddled, for the sake of bluffing inquiry, on the far-off city of Florence. They are part and parcel of an extensive stock of counterfeits that have been in circulation at any time during the past ten to fifty years among the rag-tag-and-bobtail of the so-called ' religious ' Press, and are found in most malodorous abundance in the noisome ' literature ' of the Orange lodges. It came from the same kind of agencies that produced the Arsenal of Devotion ; that published a rabid anti-Catholic news-sheet under the sham title of The Catholic Banner; that sent forth a notorious 'extract' from the Shepherd of the Valley (St. Louis, U.S.A.), which held its ground for over forty years till exploded by the writer of this note a few years ago ; that manufactures the bogus 'quotations' from 'Romish canon law ' which form part of the stock leaflet * literature ' of the Orange lodges and the Protestant Alliance, and the bogus Papal briefs, rescripts, and encyclicals and episcopal letters that have played so infamous a part in certain controversies in England and still more in the screaming no-Popery campaigns of the A. P. A. in the United States. Papers like the Christian World and the least respectable of the smaller fry of ' religious' journals make themselves the mediums for the circulation of this form of base coinage — without even the decent pretence of preliminary inquiry, and undeterred by the repeated exposure which lias so frequently followed such forgeries. We are willing to subscribe to a fund having for its object to frame and hang up in the offices of such papers the commandment which says : ' Thou shalt not bear false witness against thy neighbor. 1 But we fear that portion of the drcalogue has already been hanged — and drawn and quartered as well — in some of the offices that we refer to. • • • We entertain a great respect for the truthfulness and honesty of fair-minded Protestants of every degree. But we cannot blink the fact of the persistent lying and manufacture or distribution of forged documents by many of their organs in the Press, and by some of their Church associations, such as, for instance, the Protestant Alliance. The conduct of these compels us to believe that there is even still a solid substratum of fact in the terrible and too sweeping words which Dr. Whitaker — himself a Protestant — said of his co-religionists of another day in the third volume of his Queen Mary : that • forgery [of documents] seems to have been peculiar to the Reformed,' and that it * seems to have been the peculiar disease of Protestantism.' ' I look in vain,' said he, ' for one of those accursed outrages of imposition amongst the disciples of Popery.' It is hard to have patience with the cowardly form of calumny to which we have drawn attention in these paragraphs. And the moral of it all is this : that the worst enemies of Christian charity, the most unscrupulous fomentors of sectarian passion, are to be found among the editors of a numerically large, though not intellectual, class of so-called ' religious ' journals.