The Church in Italy.

New Zealand Tablet, Volume XXX, Issue 17, 24 April 1902, Page 3

The Church in Italy.

Mr. William P. Andrews, fresh from a visit to Italy (says the Boeton Pilot) writes in an esteemed Unitarian contemporary on 'The Church in Italy.' He says :—' Protestantism, which plays such a great part in our own civilisation, makes very little progress in sunny Italy. The Italian can only be reached through the depths of his warm, emotional nature, and the cooler, intellectual appeal of Protestantism is there a seed that falls upon rather barren ground. The Roman Church, with ita splendid ceremonies, the refuge of its always op°n churches, where the duchess in her diamonds and laces and the poor old fruit-vendor with her basket side by side may find a quiet haven amid the turmoil of daily life, its minute interest in the daily affairs of all its members touches the Italian heart much more closely. Every holiday, for instance and there are many in Italy, 18 of which are legally recognised — ig really what its name suggests, a holy day. The Church instructs the communicant from his earliest youth in the meaning of its observance, the significance of the saintly life, or the Divine event which the celebration of the r"ay would commemorate. It is the Church which inaugurates and prepares the great procession through the streets of the town, the flowers and fireworks with which the joyful occasion is celebrated. Its appeal is always to the joyful side of bis nature. He is made to feel that all his joys spring from his religion, and every glad day is thus bound up in his thought with some religious observance. " Worship the Lord with joy "is an idea which the Church is forever inculcating. . . , 1 It is quite true that where, as in Pisa, the Church has lost its hold on the people, they have become much less happy and much less moral. The Church enters very closely into all the relations of life, and certainly has a tendency to keep sacred all that we value as 1 The Sanctities of the Home. The Church is doing a great work in helping the peasants by means of village banks and other co-operative institutions established under its auspices in the rural districts, to become thrifty and well-to-do, and to better develop the agricultural resources of the country. Of the village banks to aid the small agriculturists recently established in rural communities, eight hundred are Catholic institutions, set up by the Church to aid their poorer parishioners ; and only one hundred and twenty-five have been established on an unsectarian basis. These banks have been of very great service, and have done a great work in helping the poor farmers. It has also taught them the advantage of co-operation and co-operative dairies, insurance societies, co-operative trade unions, and co-operative societies for the care of the sick and the old ; and funeral expenses have proved everywhere a great aid in ameliorating the condition of the very poor. Through its dispossessed nuns and monks the Church is doing a very valuable educational work. Its parochial schools for the younger children are decidedly ' The Best of their Class in Italy. The children are taught the things that will be most valuable in the daily lives that they are likely to follow. They are taught to read and write extremely well. A pupil of these schools but ten years old will write a personal letter, admirably expressed, and generally in a very good hand. They also learn the simpler forms of arithmetic, and keep houfehold accounts very well. No attention is given to the merely ornamental branches of education, which are taught in our own public schools ; but they are very carefully instructed in all that goes to make them useful in the household. The little girls are, for instance, taught how to cook and care for the kitchen by the actual practice of cooking their own mid-day meal, which the scholars prepare and eat in the school building. They are also taught all the varieties of the art of sewing, from the simplest stitching to the most elaborate embroidery, and many other things that tend toward the happiness of home and State. ' The little boys are also given a great deal of valuable practical instruction, and come out, on the whole, better fitted for the woik in life they are likely to do than many children who have gone through a more highly intellectual process of training. The French-Canadian, like the Italian, who has preserved faith in the Church, is taught to believe that it is a religious duty to bring as many Catholics into the world as it is possible to do. 'This is the First Great Duty to the Race and to the Church, before which all other interests mußt be regarded as secondary and of very minor importance. It is very noticeable that in Italy and in Canada, where alone the Church has retained its domination over those branches of the Latin race, the families of children are from fifteen to twenty-five in number. ' An admirable article by a careful English observer of statistics, Sir Robert Griffin, in the' Popular Science Monthly ' for December last, h .a called attention to the fact that elsewhere the calculated

excess of births over deaths is constantly diminishing. The Church has lost its hold over the Frenohman in France, and the race there is actually decreasing instead of increasing in numbers. In this connection it is very significant that the only wards of our City of Boston where this laat-mentioned fact was also noted was that portion of the city inhabited almost entirely by descendants of the early English settlers. It is a very painful fact to us, but it must be highly encouraging to our Catholic brethren, who have other aims in view than the special enlightenment of the individual mind. 1 We feel very confident that individual enlightenment and the consequent freedom from what we regard as degrading superstition is a matter of prime importance for all men and all women ; but if the resulting intellectuality is obtained at the expense of happiness and that life-giving emotional nature on which the \ery permanency of the race depends, the price we must pay for that apparently most admirable achievement is certainly a matter for very seri< us consideration. The Catholic, with quite other aims in view, regards with pardonable complacency the inauguration of Catholic mayors in old Puritan co-nmunities like Boston and Salem, blest by the prayers of the so lately despised priests of what he regards as the only true and living Church. It is to his mind the promise of the ultimate fulfilment of the prophecy which the French-Canadian editor made less than quarter of a century ago. What we regard as debasing superstition — the worship of the saints and the Virgin Mother — he looks upon as a life-giving realisation of the visible presence of the Holy Spirit in the human lives which he believes to have been divinely inspired — a source of virile faith and a moat important means toward the ultimate triumph of all that he haa most at heart.' While (says the Pilot) there are some misconceptions of Catholic teaching in the above, at least it is interesting as showing that many of our separated brethren are beginning to think reasonably on Catholic matters.