The Passing of the Fanatic

New Zealand Tablet, Volume XXXI, Issue 39, 24 September 1903, Page 3

The Passing of the Fanatic

No-Popery fanaticism, at least of the Orange and kindred types, is happily passing. Its agony may be long, but its death is sure. The world is not likely to witness again such scenes as disgraced the United States in the Knownothing days and England in the perfervid times that followed the restoration of the Catholic hierarchy in 1850. Lodge-chaplains inciting directly to riot and bloodshed— like the Revs. ' Johnny ' McCrae, Drew, ancLthe two clerical firebrands that, on the judgment of a Royal Commission, were responsible for the Belfast civil war. of 1857— would probably meet nowadays, outside the yellow plague-belt of Ulster, with scant mercy from a Protestant judge and jury. Times have changed and people are busy shuffling off the wild and insensate views of the Catholic Church that were propagated in the stormy period of the great religious revolution of the sixteenth century. 1 The world goes up and the world goes down, And the sunshine follows the rain ; And yesterday's sneer and yesterday's frown Can never come over again.' * A few days after the death of Leo XIII. the New York ' Sun ' referred to the ' change in the attitude of Protestantism towards the Roman Catholic Church ' as • one of the most remarkable religious developments of recent years.' ' Harper's Weekly,' another non-Catholic publication, also voiced in a recent issue this change of feeling towards the Catholic Church and the coming dissolution of rankling bigotry. ' There is ground for thinking,' it says, ' that the disposition of civilised mankind to desire the upholding of Catholicism as a force conducive to the commonweal is likely to wax rather than to wane. From both a religious and an economic point of view the Catholic Church is coming to be legarded as a sheet anchor of society. What else is there to be found a rampart against scepticism on the one hand and against Socialism on the other ? We are not amongst those who expect that the twentieth century will witness a reabsorption by Catholicism of many, if any, of the Protestant sects that seceded from it some four hundred years ago It is quite possible that individual members of the High Church wing of the Anglican communion may in increasing numbers go over to the Church of Rome. It is also possible that like sporadic conversions may take place in those Continental countries in which (Episcopal hierarchies were established by the Lutherans The Anglican and Lutheran bodies, however, will, no doubt, retain for a long period their separate organisations, and this may be predicted with an e\en closer approach to certainty of the Presbyterians, the Congregationahsts, the Baptists, and other minor Protestant sects But while no reabsorption on a considerable scale is probable, there will be evolved a tolerance, and c\en a sympathy, for Catholicism of which m Piotc-.tanl countnes there was no trace a hundred years aim '