Got too much Notice!

New Zealand Tablet, Volume 40, Issue 40, 1 October 1903, Page 1

Got too much Notice !

So far as we have been able to discover, the Anglican Bishop of Dunedin is the only clergyman of any Christian creed who so far forgot the saving proprieties of our social life as to go whooping around the \inburied coffin of the late Pope and challenging ' Romanists ' all and sundry to tread on the tail of his controversial coat. It seems, however, that at least one clenoal soul somewhat akin to his Liordship exists upon our planet. He has been hoist into passing notice by the breezy ridicule of the American secular press. His name is Potts—the Rev. Dr. Potts ;he is editor ©f the ' Christian Advocate ' (Methodist) ; and he has a local habitation in distant Michigan, in whose legislature it was seriously proposed some years ago to tear down all crosses, as ' superstitious emblems,' from churches, chapels, and other institutes /of religion. The Rev. Pottts shares to a small extent with Bishop Nevill the unwholesome notoriety of having made the death of the great-hearted old Pontiff the occasion for what an indignant Anglican, in a letter to us, describes as 'an exhibition of execrable taste.' The Michigan editor, like the Arctic hare, has caught the color of his surroundings. But he did not proceed to such lengths as his New Zealand Protestant Episcopal brother. He neatly let the cat out of the bag by showing that his remarks were dictated by jealousy of the extended notice given by the world's press to the late Pojpe aoid the Papacy. Then 'he stoppled, r took his breath, put his head into a refrigerator, -and cooled off. Unlike his Dunedin brother, he had sufficient sense of decorum left to refrain from pelting the corpse of the dead Pope with dishonoring charges against the Papacy. He did not assail it as a huge fraud, a monstrous ' figment ' concocted by conscienceless rogues and forced by them, with preternatural cunning, upon the rest of the Christian world at some unknown but propitious moment when its wits were steeped in chloroform or its membership was made up exclusively of simpletons and fools.

All this is a relic of the days— they are only a quarter of a century ago— when the greatest Church in Christendom was held by the mass of the Protestant denominations to be outside the pale of Christianity. The revolution in feeling towards the Papacy was amply de-

monstratefl >by the chor.us of laudation thait went up on all sides from the Protestant press and pulpit over the lifeless form of Leo XIII. It is a happy omen for the future when a New York Methodist clergyman could laud the late Pope before an approving congregation as ' a leader of the great army of the Lord's hosts,' « a spiritual commander-in-chief,' one ' who 'has done much for the progress of civilisation,' and who 'has restored the golden age of the Papacy in its best sense.' But this extended press and pulpit notice has been ' pizen ' to some jealous souls. ' The world,' says the candid and indignant Rev. Potts, ' is getting a surfeit of news in these days about the Papacy. 1 Hence those tears ! He waxes indignant at the thought that ' the daily newspapers always teem with references to priests and bishops, Cardinals and Popes. Frequently the items relate to trivial things, even puerile gossip aJnd nonsense, yet they help to advertise Catholicism and keep Rome before the public eye.' ' The death of a Methodist Bishop, 1 says editor Potts, ' is at least one-half as important to Americans as the death of a Pope, yet the dying Bishop gets only a mention, and perhaps not that, while every word and wish and motion and sigh of the departed Pope is chronicled before all the world by column and \page. This disparity is not relishable.' This alleged ' disparity ' of newspaper notice is, of course, the result of a Popish plot. So, at least, says editor Potts. And he flails jthe ' plotters ' and their servile tools of the secular press to the best of his humble ability. We may not uncharitably suppose that a similar motive was not wholly unconnected with the sounding Protestant protest made, against the Pope, the Papacy, and all its works and ways by the Right Rev. Prelate who lately figured for a brief space under the newly-found title of • Catholic Bishop of Dunedin.