Notes

New Zealand Tablet, Volume XXXII, Issue 35, 1 September 1904, Page 18

Notes

The Catholic Congress The preparations for the Second Australasian Catholic Congress are in a very advanced stage. Encouraging and. even enthusiastic reports come in from all sides, and from the 23rd to the 30th of October Melbourne will witiness a brilliant series of some of the largest and most representative gatherings ever brought together in connection with any OHur'ch under the Southern Cro6s. Dr. A. L. Kenny, the General Secretary— who, by iUxe way, has a steam-turbine's capacity for work— reports to us : ' The Congress promises to be a pronounced success. Hundreds of members are already enrolled fpom all parts of Australia, New Zealand, New Guin'oa, etc. A large number of very interesting and valuable papers are already ih hand and others are arriving daily. Please inform intending Members that the subscription is half-a-guineia. Ht entitles Members to a volume containing the paperls read at the Congress, whether they attend or not. The Sydney Qcnigress Volume was wonderful value for the half-guinea.' The special redtactiojis in rates of travelling by rail in New Zealand and by sea (Union S.S. Company and Hiiddart Parker) were announced in our editorial columns last week, together with the names of the Diocesan Secretariesi, to whom early application should be made for membership tickets. CarJinal Moran The well-informed Rome correspondent of the Sydney ' Freeman ' states on ' very trustworthy authority p that 1 the many radical changes which the present Pope has miade in the various Congregations were in a groat measure the suggestions of our Cardinal.' ' I call the statement safe,' he adds, ' because as> I Jieard the story it was portentous. The Cardinal would have left Australia for Rome during the Illness of Leo X'lll. had he been summoned. He was not. When he came the new Paipe had been elected, yet his Eminence stayed a very long time at the Irish College in Rome and near Tivoli. There was no ostensible puirpose for so long a stay— the more as the Cardinal had been recently in Rome, and lor Fong— bet for the reason which I sent to the " Freeman's Journal " at the time, namely, tihat he was' revising hte " History of the Irish Saints in Great Britain." " That was not the reason at all," a person in a position to know the facts, told mo—" it was only a blind. In reality, the Cardinal received few, and visited fewer. He was writing in his room all tihe time. I heard from , who must have fcrfown the truih, that he was drawing up a scheme of a mddernisation of the Catholic Church. I heard also the elemehts of this scheme, and so far they have come true. The dominant note is decentralisation, the lessening of the work of the Roman Court and Congregations, the devolution of this labor upon foreign hierarchies^ the creation of pri-

mjacies and patriarchates to receive the weightier parts of this divided responsibility—the sharing, in a word, wilflx foreign hierarchical dignitaries of the immense burden which weighs down the Roman Pontiff." '

Divorce : a Contrast ' during lihe thirty-five years preceding 1901,' says the American ' Guidon,' ' there were granted' in the Uniteti Slates 700,000 divorces. Within the same period of time there were but 69 divorces given In Canada. Of course ~t<he population of our country is much larger than Canada, but making allowance for the difference, let us see the result. The United States has twelve times as many people as has the Dominion of Canada, yet divorces were 10,000 times as many. Had divorce in (the ( 'the United States been the same per capita, we would have had less than 2000. That is, the number wauJd have been reduced by 698,000.' That Italian Fairy Tale In our issue of August 11 we dropped a charge of dynamite into a statement that appeared in the ' New Zealand Ffarmer ' regarding, the ' headway ' which (it allegejd) was heing matie by ' the Protestant preacher ' in iltaly. As a hard matte* of fact, the pjreaohers are not able to hold their own. At the censtop of 18'Sl .there wore 6)2,000 Protestants within the present boundaries of l United Italy.' If they had increased at tlhe same rate as tlhe general population of the country, their numbers would, in 1901, have stood at about 71,000. The recently issued fourth volume of the Italian census of 1801 shows 4 ftiowever, that their total number was then only 65,595. Among these, be it noted, must be included the greatly increased proportion of Proteslant foreigners now resident in the country, as compared with the figures for 1881— Germans, Swiss, Britishers, Americans, Scandinavians, etc., and, among them, some hundreds of missionaries. Setting aside the factor of increase by the immigration of foreigners, the official figures show what must be regarded as a remarkable falling off in natural increase since the census of 1881. There were in Italy in 1901 35,617 Jews, 2472 Greek Schismatics, 280 Mahomedans, 56 Buddhists-, 36,000 of 'no religion,' 794, 000 who refused to state their » religious beliefs, and a Catholic population of 31,539,000 souls. Some Prize Blunders American humiorists from the days of Artemus Ward arid the ' Danbury News ' Man to those of the ' Detroit Free Pares®,' have sluiced many a nugget of genuine humor out of such incongruities as the description of a prize-fight by the religious editor or of an agricultural show by the sporting reporter. The reports of Cathjlic events in the secular press contain, at times, gems of undonsciouis humor of purest ray serene tihat, in their way, might take their place, without blushing, beside the conscious and deliberate blundering of America's professional' funny men. These ludicrous slips are perpetrated in serious good faith and perfect friendliness, and adrise solely from lack of acquaintance with our creed and ritual. The ' evening Mass ' described some time ago in a Dunedin paper is a case in p|oint. The ' Glasgow Observer ' cotataributes some tolerably good specimens which appeared in a local secular paper's elaborate report of an episcopal consecration in St. Andrew's Cathedral. ' The writer,' says the 'Observer,' * noting tiWat the procession genuflected as it passed the Lady Altiar (where the Blessed Sacrament was temporarily placed), stated that the clergy " paid homage %o a 'brazen image of the virgin." The vesting of the Archbishop was sjummeifl up in flhe -phrase :, c< His Grace was adorned with the amice," and all that vaS said of tihe^f unction was tihat " (the Archbishop engaged in Ma3s ait the foot of the altar." A reporter of a Highland paper, 'by the way, describing a High Mass sluing at Fort Augustus by the late Prior, Very R£v. Jerome Valughan, wrote this inimitable setitence : " At