Those Eastern Mendicants

New Zealand Tablet, Volume XXXIV, Issue 5, 1 February 1906, Page 3

Those Eastern Mendicants

Two Easterns—' bearded like the pard '—are at present and have been for some time perambulating New Zealand, soliciting subscriptions from all and sundry. The object of their collecting tour (so say the bearded strangers) is to build churches and orphanages in their own country. At the homes of Catholics these mendicanfs have represented themselves as ' Catholic priests.' We have already notified our readers that they do not belong to any Church or rite in union with Rome. They bear no credentials signed by any prelate or priest of our Faith, and they have not been authorised by any of our Bishops to collect moneys from Catholics in any part of >Jew Zealand. One of them, who called upon us, is the bearer of a document in an Eastern language. He also exhibits what purports to be a translation of the same, authorising him to collect moneys in foreign lands for the establishment ol schools, orphanages, and churches for the poor. Both documents bore veiy clumsily , made seals in colored ink. But we took occasion to point out two missing links in the chain of evidence as supplied to us : In the fiist place, no independent testimony was tendered to us that the puncipal document was in the handwritmg'of the Eastern pat run eh whose name it was said to bear ; and in the second place, no independent testimony was submitted to us to prove that our \isitor was the person named in the document. >So far as we were concerned, his double claim to be a priest, and to have been duly authorised to solicit subscriptions, rested in in its last resort upon his personal testimony, and upon. that alone. In an inteniew accorded to a representative of the 1 Press,' the Anglican Bishop of Christchurch has been ' saying things ' about Eastern mendicants. ' lie knew nothing,' says the ' Press ' interviewer, ' against these two Oriental missionaries in particular, but his experience of pievious visitors coming with similar stones from the same part of the world had made him very suspicious of them generally. From time to time socalled piicsts of Oriental Churches had paid visits here, and he had found several of them to be utter frauds. s . . There was one standard test of the genuineness of such missionaries which the present visitors to Christchurch were unable to fulfil. The Eastern patriarchs have definitely undertaken to send through the Anglican Bishop in Jerusalem, Bishop Blyth, credentials in all thos>e cases in which they sanction an appeal for funds, and these credentials the \isitors could not show. " Lnlest,," said Bishop Julius, " these visiting Syrians, or Chaldeans, or whatever they may be called, who come to us from time to time, present that credential, certified to by the Bishop of the diocese, I trust my people will have nothing to do with them." . . It had been noticed in the past, the Bishop stated, that roving religious mendicants from the East went round and round the colonies, and never returned home. They kept no statements of accounts, and no one knew whether the money went home, or what became of it. . . Archdeacon Gould, who had been led to speak in defence of these two men, had only their own word to go upon.' • A much-travelled Anglican missionary, now In Chrislchurch, was also interviewed. He (says the 1 Press ') ' had a icon\er.sation with the two strangers, which made him very doubtful of their bona fides. He considered that they contradicted themselves several times, though, of course, they could not talk English at all well.' The publication of the report of the 1 Press ' interview brought one of ' the two swarthy strangers from the Orient ' to the office of our Christchurch contemporary. He made a series of statements in more or less broken English. The chief pertinent matter elicited from him is set forth in the following extract : ' As some doubt had been cast on the destina-

tion of the money collected, he was asked if he could produce any evidence that it had reached the authorities of his Church, lie explained that there were no banks in his country, and then, in tones of reliance on the good intentions of all human beings, declared that his " brother " had tyak.cn it back.' Archdeacon Gould (Anglican), of Oamaru, proceeded to make crows' meat of us for a recent paragraph of ours in reference to those Oriental mendicants. He had his bay in the columns of an Oamaru contemporary. So had we. And there, for the time being, the matter ended. The Archdeacon vouched for the bona fides of the visiting Oriental money-seekers. lie now owes it to himself, to the public, and to the Eastern strangers (assuming their bona fides) to state explicitly the grounds on which he gave his personal guarantee in legard to their claims. On the question of their bona fides we have expressed, and express, no opinion. But Catholics would do well to keep their money in thnir pockets until the position is made quite clear and the relation of these foreign mendicants t<o our episcopate are adjusted in accordance with oiir laws and usages regarding money-seeking clerical strangers. As regards Archdeacon Gould's claim to the title ' Catholic,' we shall be prepared to grant this when he has established his right to it— and not before. And, with some knowledge of the subject, wo ha\e no hesitation in saying that any attempt to establish such a claim, in the face of adverse criticism, would be labor dire and heavy woe.