Current Topics. AT ROME AND ABROAD.

New Zealand Tablet, Volume XXIV, Issue 2, 10 January 1901, Page 1

Current Topics. AT ROME AND ABROAD.

TWENTY-NINTH YEAR OF PUBLICATION.

DUNEDIN : THURSDAY, JANUARY 10, 1901.

Merchant or peasant, duke's son or cook's

American son, with a clean record, would almost as papers, please soon think of casting his skin as of diskote. carding his honest family name. But an alias is the favourite resort by which the burglar, the forger, and the magsman seek to elude the pursuit of the detectives and the unfriendly clasp of the regulation handcuffs. This is the resort recently adopted by a notorious religious imposter who some time ago disturbed the peace of these colonies. Thanks to the successful exposure of the facts of his unsavory career, he has found his name — in Bobbie Burns' phrase — • a galling load ' too great to bear, and some time ago tore it oil and flung it, at least temporarily, aside. We request our exchanges beyond the Pacific to keep a bright lookout for any combination of alleged 'ex-nun' and 'ex-priest' that, under the name of Whitly, may be touring the United States or Canada and endeavoring to raise bawbees by stirring up the lower depths of the cesspool of sectarian passion for the sort of people who like that sort of thing.

Even Johnnie Raw is capable of improveA musty ment, and Hodge the ploughman has been legend. known to learn. But it is not easy to have patience with men of supposed education who repeat in the closing year of the ninteenth century the old and oft-exploded calumny that indulgences are a pardon of sins, past, present, or to come. And yet this is precisely what a certain Mr. Morant has done in the November issue of the Ninteenth Century. Mr. Morant evidently belongs to that diminishing class of writers of inconspicuous cerebral development who from time to time inform the British public that priests habitually travel about with ' missals ' under their arms and are given to the celebration of ' evening Mass '; that our bishops wear thurifers on their heads and acolytes on their feet; that rosary beads are 'sometimes used by Catholics in confession, when a bead is told off for every sin confessed ' •, that Catholics believe the Pope to be infallible in every statement uttered by him in ordinary conversation on all sorts of subjects from the weather to the differential calculus ; and other such tit-bits of rare and curious knowledge. For the enlightenment and edification of the British public Mr. Morant makes the following statement in the Ninteenth Century regarding Joseph Mayer, who played with such dignity and pathos the part of the Christ in the Passion Play at Ober-Ammergau :— ' Wishing to confer some mark of favor upon so eminent a disciple his Holiness has bestowed upon him (Mayer) a pardon, not only for all his own sins, past, present, and future, but also, with a truly lavish generosity, for those of all his children.' • ♦ • This foolish statement has been copied into the weekly religious or brimstone columns of some of our daily papers. For Catholics and educated Protestants it is needless to state that Mr. Morant's story is wholly untrue and calumnious. The Pope neither did nor could grant such a pardon. The

imaginative writer in the Ninteenth Century is probably attempting to describe the customary papal blessing, with plenary indulgence at the hour of death, which the Holy Father frequently bestows upon devout Catholics, sometimes proprio motu, but far more frequently in response to a request or supplied. And this is not a 'pardon' for any sin, past, present, or future : it is merely a remission of the temporal punishment which is often due to sin after its guilt and eternal punishment have been remitted in the Sacrament of Penance. And every Catholic knows that this, or any other indulgence, can benefit only those who are truly penitent. It is pleasant to find Mr. Labouchere, of Truth, pulling the ears of the editor of the Ninteenth Century and correctly explaining to him what an indulgence is and what it is not. Some years ago the Cape Mercury ' explained ' editorially to its readers that an indulgence of three hundred days means ' three hundred days out of purgatory ! ' The learned editor, by the way, did not provide for the return of the ' patient ' when the furlough was over. In the South African Magazine Dr. Koble had this brief but pregnant comment on the theological acumen of the editor of the Mercury : 'If our Protestant friend were to see a fiftyhorse power engine, he should look inside it for the fifty horses.' • * • The most accurate account of the doctrine of indulgences that we have met with in Protestant literature is contained in Dr. Lee's Glossary of Liturgical and Ecclesiastical Terms (p. 161). For the sake of its fairness it deserves the honor of quotation at our hands. ' Technically,' says this well-known Anglican divine, 'an indulgence is a remission of the temporal punishment which often remains due to sin after its guilt has been forgiven. Now mortal or deadly sin consists in its being an act of rebellion against God. The forgiveness of this guilt must, on God Almighty's part, be an act of free grace, because it is a kind of infinite evil, for which no creature can ever adequately atone. But, even when this guilt has been forgiven, there still remains a debt of temporal punishment. The justice of God requires that every sinner shall himself pay that portion of the debt which he is able to pay, even when that which he is unable to pay has been forgiven. This is evident from Holy Scripture. Hence the Church, in executing her office of remitting sins, havingalways borne in mind the temporal punishment due to them, exercises her authority by granting what are termed " indulgences " suitable to times, states, and circumstances. These are either partial or complete. Partial indulgences have reference to the duration of canonical penance, common in the Primitive Church. Complete or plenary indulgences are those in which the whole of the temporal punishment due to sin is remitted. In order that the indulgences of Holy Church may be advantageously received, the faithful seeking them must be in a state of perfect charity towards God, and of detachment from sin.'

One result of the Anglo-Boer war is this : military ex- it has compelled us to revise certain dogmatic perts and expert judgments as to the effect of modern weapons of weapons of war. Future wars may be war. rendered briefer or more difficult by their sheer costliness. But who will now maintain — as some noted military experts did some time ago — that armed struggles between nation and nation would be rendered

impossible by the sheer butchery done by the blood-letting machinery in use on modern battlefields ? The experts may, however, find some consolation for their blighted prophecy in the proverb that ' wise men are oftener wrong than fools are right.' Some years ago one of these ' wise men ' calculated that ' a regiment of 700 infantry, armed with the Krag-Jorgen-sen rifle, a six-gun battery of small breech -loading cannon, and a couple of Gatling guns,' would within two minutes turn 1500 assailants into sundry roods of tangled dead meat. The five millimetre rifle of to-day is computed by Professor Gebler to be 1337 times more effective than the needle-gun of 1870. Langlois has calculated that the French field-gun of 1891 is 20 times more destructive than that of 1870. Later improvements in artillery have left the older guns — French, Boer, and British — still farther in the rear. In a few years they will be thrown aside to rust along with the Armstrong smooth-bores of 1862, or to fill odd corners of military museums side by side with the culverins, demi-culverins, serpentines, and falcons of the middle ages. General Muller (according to Bloch) computed that with 136 to 140 rounds, the artillery of the Tiiple and Dual Alliances could kill and wound over 11,000,000 men ; with 267 rounds per gun, 22,000,000; and with 500 rounds, 41,000,000 ! • * * Very pretty figures, i' faith ! But they call up impertinent reminders of some of the martial calculations of Bobadil in Ben Jonson's Every Man in His Humor. Bobadil's method of wiping out a hostile army of 40,000 men was very simple — and so was Bobadil. He would join with himself nineteen gentlemen 'of a good spirit and able constitution,' challenge twenty of the enemy, kill them, challenge twenty more, kill them, twenty more, kill them too . . . every man his ten a day, that's ten score — 200 a day ; five days, a thousand ; 40,000, forty times five, 200 days — kill them all.' It is a wholesome fact — sometimes ignored in such 'expert' calculations — that potential destructiveness and actual destruction are two very different things. Lyddite, for instance, ought, by calculation, to have been as an active volcano harnessed into the service of the artillerist. But ' Banjo ' Patterson declared it, in irreverent phrase, ' a howling fraud.' Attack in open order, the art of ' taking cover,' the greater use of trenches and earthworks, and the wider distance that now separates combatants, have all combined to reduce the mortality from the use of improved weapons of war. In view of the relatively meagre death-rate from wounds in the Chilian, Spanish-American, and AngloBoer wars — all of which were fought under what are termed ' the new conditions ' — we can afford to smile at the spectacle of colossal carnage figured out on paper for our benefit by Muller, Langlois, and others. As a hard matter of fact, the old-time results of war have not been radically altered by the newer modes of blood-letting. In his Modern Weapons and Modern War, Bloch says : — ' The losses from wounds constitute but a small part of the total number of sacrifices.' So it has been in the Boer war. And so it has been in practically all campaigns of which history bears a record. ' Bad and insufficient food, 1 says the same authority, ' in consequence of the difficulty of provisioning immense masses, will mean increase of sickness, and the over-crowding of the sick at certain points will complicate the danger both from sickness and from wounds, and thereby increase the mortality.' In South Africa only 19 per 1000 of the rank and file had the partnership between soul and body dissolved by weapons of war. As many as 31 8 per 1000 died of disease. This is the old, old story of war. From one point of view, at least, there is a foundation of truth in the saying of good old Homer, of which Samuel Butler gave the following metrical version :—: — ' A skilful leech is better far Than half a hundred men of war.'

The following cable message appeared in cardinal moran the New Zealand daily papers of last Saturand the day :—: — commonwealth. The Catholic paper* explain that Cardinal Rforan refused to attend the Commonwealth procession and banquet because he was not allowed preoedenoe of the Primate. They state the Premier informed the Cardinal's private secretary on Monday night that the Committee of Management had awarded precedence to the Primate, and that the Government did not see their way to upset the arrangement. Under the circumstances, Cardinal Moran decided to take no part in any social functions till his due position was reoognised. Other Catholic bishops visiting Sydney refuse to participate, considering- an inßult was offered to the Catholio body.

The incident afforded, of course, a fair subject for editorial remark. Most or all of the daily papers, however, were content to publish it without note or comment. But it afforded an opportunity for a special display to the individual who is permitted to ttick out the cable news of the Dunedin Evening Star wi h bran-brained pseudo-American headings which have for some time past been the subject of much sarcastic<omment and of many a twelve -inch grin at the expense of their composer. This poor parodist ot the smart American caption 'got off' the following lemarks in triple tier regarding the incident of the Commonwealth celebrations to which reference has been

made above :— ' A Remarkable Demand ' ; « Catholic Officials in a Protestant Commonwealth'; 'Cardinal Moran's "due" position.' Briefly, he informs the public that ( i; the Australian Commonwealth is a Protestant one, and (2) that the alleged •demand 1 of Cardinal Moran was 'extraordinary.' and, by inference, preposterous, just because it was made by a Catholic ' official ' to the rulers of a ' Protestant Commonwealth.' * • * We pass by the bad taste displayed in dubbing ihe distinguished body of the Australian Catholic hierarchy as merely officials —a title which in ordinary language is limited to civil functionaries of various kinds, from departmental officers to railway porters and lamp-trimmers, borough turncocks, billiard-markers in clubs, and weighers-in at race-meetings. We know of no sense in which the fresh young Federation beyond the Tasman Sea could be fairly called 'a Protestant Commonwealth.' We can, of course, understand the applicabihty of the term Protestant to countries like Denmark, Sweden and Norway, etc., where members of other than the Reformed creeds count for as little numerically and in the industrial and political life of the nation as Protestants do in Belgium, France, Spain, Mexico, or Russia. But nobody calls the" German States Protestant, even though the parti-colored Reformed denominations within their borders numbered jointly in 1890 62.8 per cent, of its total population as against 35.8 per cent, of Catholics. The same remark applies to the Swiss Confederation, with its 59 per cent, of Protestants and its 40 per cent, of Catholics. Catholics are the most numerous religious body in the United States. Yet they are probably not more than onefourth of the total adherents distributed among the several hundred Reformed denominations scattered through the United States, nor above a sixth of the total population of the country. But who would describe the United States— apart even from Us recent conquests in the West Indies and the East— as a Protestant country? In Australia the percentage of Catholics to total population is much greater. At the census of 1891 the Catholics of the six colonies now federated numbered 713,846 in a total population of 3,175,392, or nearly one-fourth of the whole. The only denomination that outnumbered them was the Anglican, with a membership of 1.234, 121. The great variety of assorted creeds comprised by Mr. Coghlan under the designation of ' Wesleyans and other Methodists ' numbered collectively 372.009. The various Presbyterian bodies counted altogether 351,892. The other Reformed denominations were, in sporting phrase simply nowhere. The comparison is greatly enhanced in favor of our co-religionists in the Australian Commonwealth if we consider the number and eminence of their prelates ; the long roll of persons whose lives are devoted, without fee or reward, to the service of God and the good of their neighbor ; the splendor of the Catholic places of worship; the attendance of Catholics at religious services ; the beauty, extent, variety, and energising activity of Catholic institutes of learning and charity, etc. * * * The headline commentaries of our Dunedin contemporary were, however, apparently written under the extraordinary delusion that some or other form of Protestantism is the recognised official or State religion of the new Australian Commonwealth. Else, wherein lies the ' extraordinary ' folly that a prelate who is at the same time a cardinal and archbishop should claim that it is due to his position to have precedence over one who, although a primate, is nevertheless merely a bishop ? In the British official ' Order of Precedence among Men ' the Archbishop of Canterbury ranks next after the nephews of the Sovereign. Next comes the Lord High Chancellor; then the three remaining archbishops (of York, Armagh, and Dublin). The bishops follow far off in the dim perspective, after the younger sons of marquises. In England, the prelates of the Establishment or State Church naturally take precedence of the members of the Catholic or any other hierarchy. But in the Australian colonies there is not, nor has there ever been— despite repeated efforts in that direction— an established or State religion. 'Statute law,' wrote Dr. Ullathorne in 1840, 'limits the Anglican Establishment to England, Ireland, Wales, and Berwick. All the Acts contain and speak their own expressed limitations. The statute law is so far from giving the Anglican clergy of the colonies the rights and privileges of belonging to the Establishment of the Church of England, that it expressly and by special enactment excludes them from the rights and privileges of that Establishment.' It was 'good old Governor Bourke' — nephew of the great Irish orator and statesman, Edmund Burke — who gave to Australia the charter of her religious liberty. ' I have done my duty,' said he on that memorable day, ' in conferring upon Australia the charter of her liberties ; let Australia now do her duty by preserving that charter inviolate.' Religious equality was guaranteed, and the Act applied to the whole of the Australian mainland, which was then under the jurisdiction of New South Wales. By an Act of the Legislative Council of Tasmania, passed in 1837, the Churches of England, Rome, and Scotland were declared to be on an equality. This measure was confirmed and its provisions further emphasised by an Act passed in 1862. In every case these Acts received

the assent of the Crown. And the Catholic bishops in the Australian colonies were thus placed in a position similar to that of bishops of the Church of England. This religious equality is guaranteed for alt time by one of the fundamental articles of the Commonwealth Constitution, which forbids the establishment of any State or official Church within the limits of its jurisdiction. • • • Differences as tn precedence cropped up in 1864, 1868 (during the visit of the Duke of Edinburgh), and on a few subsequent occasions. These arose for the most part out of a desire on the part of some to extend to Australia the traditions of religious ascendency which had grown up around the State Church in England. These difficulties were, however, arranged by the Colonial Office with due regard to the equal rights of those concerned. By virtue of this arrangement Cardinal Moran was entitled to precedence of the Anglican Primate not alone by reason of his higher dignity, but by priority of appointment — he having been translated to Sydney from the See of Ossory in 1884, while Dr. Saumarez Smith was not elected and consecrated Bishop of Sydney till 1890. (We may here incidentally remark that Cardinal Moran is the successor of Dr. Polding, the first bishop of any Church that was ever appointed to a see in Australasia.) The cable messages in Saturday's and Monday's daily papers show that Sir W. J. Lyne was aware that the Committee of Management of the Commonwealth celebrations had blundered ; that the wellknown rules of precedence laid down by the Colonial Office were set at defiance ; and that the Government of New South Wales, when acquainted with the mistake, had not the good sence or moral courage to rectify it, and, in plain terms, deliberately deprived Cardinal Moran of the honor which the Home authorities long ago decided was ' due to his position.' Monday's cable messages add the following significant bit of information : — ' Cardinal Moran claims that the Home Government had communicated to Lord Hopetoun the order of precedence, in which the Cardinal was allotted a place of honor above the Primate.' * • * Had Cardinal Moran stood alone and merely to himself in this affair, it would probably have mattered little to him what place he occupied at the Commonwealth celebrations. But his position was that of chief representative of a great and ancient religious denomination, the members of which have done so much to build up the Commonwealth. Moreover, a serious question of principle was involved in this matter of precedence — nothing less, in fact, than the principle of religious equality. This— together with certain rights attaching to it that have long been recognised by the Colonial Office— has been dtl berately violated by the Lyne Government. Had Cardinal Moran and the other Australian Catholic prelates acquiesced in the intentional slight thus cast upon their faith, their action would be used as a precedent to justify the unequal social treatment of their Church in the Commonwealth for all future time. They, therefore, deserve the thanks of the Catholic body everywhere for their firmness in thus maintaining, on the very inaugural day of the new Commonwealth, that principle of religious equality which is set in in the corner-stone of its foundation. This principle cannot be too strongly emphasised in a country in which the Catholic Church was for so long a period the object of such a bitter and relentless persecution. But on the Lyne Government lies the heavy disgrace of having marked the inauguration of the Australian Commonwealth with a display of petty religious partisanship which is no good omen for its future harmony and peace.