Current Topics

New Zealand Tablet, Volume XXXV, Issue 6, 7 February 1907, Page 9

Current Topics

The Maori

Races may vanish- by physical extinction or by assimilation- According to Dr_ Pomare (Native Health "Officer) oUr splendid aboj&ginal people are treading the latter path to racial extinction. •It is only a question of time', said Tie in Wellington last week, 'when the whole Maori race will disappear, as it becomes assimilated with the pakeha. Take the South Island, nearly all the Maoris fcher,e now are half-castes. Fully 75 per cent, of the Maoris in the South Island have European blood in them, if not more. There is the same tale to tell in the North Island. The old stock is gradually 'dying! off, and even now ' the majority of the young representatives of the race have European blood in them. Within 30 years there will not be a pure-blooded Maori in the whole of New Zealand. In the King Country 40 per cent, of the Natives are half-castes. -In the Urewera Country you find less half-castes than elsewhere, but there you also see the poorest class of Natives, many of the old stock still preferring to live in their primitive state.'

A • Bluggy * Tale We are accustomed to associate mentally pork and beans, beer and skittles, chops and tomato sauce. In like manner, long experience has led the public to associate Orange leaflets with the hysterical, the preposterous, and the ' bluggy '. No one out of Bedlam would dream of going to such a source for sanity of statement, honesty of quotation, or normal reasoning. To suit the crude mental condition of the lodges, the leaflet amust, above all, be ' bluggy '. This sort of mentality finds an apt illustration in ' Helen's Babies '. .'Tell

us about Bliaff (Goliath) ', said the story-loving Toddy. 'No ', said Budge, ' tell us about Joseph '. 'No ', urged Toddy, ' I want Bliaff. Bliaff s head was all bluggy . (bloody)— bluggy as everyfing'. • Well, Tod ', replied the brother, ' Joseph's coat was just as bluggy as Bliaff 's head was ! ' It was the ' bluggimess ' of fciie stories, and not their spiritual significance, that . appealed to the undeveloped minds and animal instincts of Helen's Babies. And it is precisely the same" crude and uncultivated instincts that demand the ' bluggy ' leaflets and other ' literature ' that is from time to time circulated among the simple-minded gobemouches who constitute the bulk of the rank and file of the Orange lodges.

In the Auckland distinct the P.D.A. (one of the ' aliases ' of the Orange fraternity) have recently been circulating a fuddlecap anti-Home Rule story (copied from an Irish Orange paper) to -the following effect : (1) That ' the Ancient Order of Hibernians of to-day makes it its proudest boast that it is the same organisation and identical in eve-y respect — except - in name— with the Rapparecs, Irish Tories, Whiteboys, Defenders, Whitefeet, Blackfeet, Molly Maguires, and Ribbonmen, whose iniquities still cry to heaven for vengeance ' ; (2) that it is a secret society,' bound by terrible oaths'; (3) that it is the revolutionary ' great unknown power ' at the back of the Home Rule movement ; (4) that it is l steeped in disloyalty, rebellion, murder, and other (sic) agrarian crimes of the deepest dye ' ; (5) that 'in Australia Cardinal M6ran is its Grand Chaplain ' ; and (6) that it is actively preparing to levy war upon Great Britain ! « Mutato nomine, de te fabula narratur '. Omit the name of Cardinal Morari, and' for the Whitefeet, etc., substitute the Gak Boys and the Steel Boys, the Wreckers and the Peep-o'-day Boys, and in the story given above you have the substance of 'the history of the Orange organisation. The .' bluggy ' and preposterous story- about the A.O.H. was spun ostensibly to keep the moon (the British Empire) from the wolves (the ' rebellj Papishes 'j. People of normal information

and sanity do not need- to be told that the story" is a fabrication. No proof -is, of course, offered in support of this/, glowing Instead, ' ttie^ public are offered— for a small part of the story— some ' extracts ' —two or- three of them, of the. customary scrappy character, and with the usual- bogus air about • them! that one expects as a matter of course in sufch a quarter. By themselves, the alleged ' extracts ' tell no particular tale. But when treated " by an entirely new process^ of ' reasoning • (patent applied for.) they yield,- results that must satisfy to some extent the rather exacting demands of the Helen's" Babies that ; are .' yellow '. The ' blugginess ' of this flimflam story could, however, have been so easily enhanced, that we rather' think " the narrators must (as another great character in history did) have stood- aghast at their own moderation. Why, for instance, did they not warn their brethren in New Zealand that the Ancient Order of . Hibernians carry matches in their pockets, ostensibly to light their pipes, but in reality vto set fire to. Protestants on Pentecost Sunday ; that they secretly bake Protestant babes and serve them hot on toast at twenty minutes past six on Friday mornings ; that they fill the butchers' shops with large blue flics ', cause droughts- in' the South and floods in the, North ; that they, are making preparations to * illi'vate ' Auckland by an earthquake on Aprir Fools' Day, and to bombard the roofs^ of- Nelson on , the ninth of May with stars raked out of the ' constellation of Orion ? If this story is not ' bluggy ', enough for the taste of the P.D.A., we can (for a modestrconsideration) add enough gore to it to slake the thirst of even a Blunderbore. , .-

Zola and Company 'Zola', says the Boston 'Pilot', 'was a sincere preacher of iniquity : he practised what he -preached. He resembled Victor Hugo " in this matter. Respect for their own wives and the domestic hearth was no article of these French " immo-tals." Madame Zola is as tolerant as Madame Hugo. She has just applied to the French Court of Appeal for leave to confer her' dead husband 's name on two children bom of his intrigue with another woman, a Madame Rozerau? Here is forgiveness indeed, but pathos, too. ' It* is overdone." It is the rotten sentiment of .Ibsen and .Zola— the confusion of right ami wrong; begotten of • baneful ideas and the rejection of God and His moral law.L

This .is a «case in which history has repeated itself. Voltaire and Rousseau were the' literary forbears of Hugo and Zola ; they were the twin prophets and high priests of the eighteenth century infidelity that added such a weight of "hotror to the French. Revolution. And, like the anAi-Christian Hugo and Zola, Voltaire and • Rousseau were ' sincere preachers of iniquity :- they. ' practiced what 'they preached '. * Rousseau tells in his ' Confessions ' how he was a cheat, liar, thief, -roue, and hypocrite. His political creed was that of Russell Lowell's ' pious editor ' :— - ■ ' In short; -I firmly dv "believe In Humbug .generally, . Eer it's a tliing-thet I perceive , To hey a solid vally '. • ; A political Pumblechook, he exhorted the mothers of France, in melting words, to nurse their own infantswhile he sent his own five illegitimate children to the Foundling Hospital. The more virile but more malig-" nant Voltaire was imprisoned for. gross crimes againstmorality. -He betrayed his country, wrote to his friends Diderot and Thiriot panegyrics on lying, openly advocated it as a method of propaganda of. infidelity, traduced tKe sainted Maid of Orleans, and,,, for • half a " century— till death stilled his tongue and pen— waged ' against the Church a bitter war, which, assumed at v last the proportions of an overpowering mania. ' You, must lie like a devil,' said he to Thiriot (vol. xyiii. of his ' Oeuvres Completes ')— ' not timidly and for a

time only, but boldly and always. .> . Lie, my friends, lie. I will do a similar good turn wiien occasion offers.' Voltaire, Rousseau, Hugo, and Zola lie side by side under Tissot's great dome in the desecrated church of St. Genev»leve (Paris) — now called the Pantheon. In divers ways they filled the same role, wrought for the same end, and set -the same evil cx-

ample. The Voltairean motto— unmitigated falsehoodis' the summa summae of the ethical code of his-pol-itical lineal descendants who arg. to-day striving to destroy Christianity in France. Well, time is a great friend of truth. ' The eternal _years of God. are hers.'

And the Faith— strengthened, we hope, by the pruning blade of persecution — will flourish again in France when the little Voltaires of the present hour are, like the * greater ones of a past day, -merely bone dust.

A Collapsing ♦Reform'

The schism in the Philippines has been pole-axed by a recent unanimous decision of the Supreme Court in the islands. It began during the troubled times— the ' Sturm and the Drang '—of the Spanish-American war. Its author and prime mover was Aglipay, who was an -unfrocked native Filipino priest and ■an oflicer in Aguinaldo's island army. He was an adventurous spirit, and— like many ' reformers -' of greater notebegan his new career by seizing property that" was dedicated to Catholic worship, and of which the Church had held undisputed and peaceful possession for cenUries. The ' new Filipino - Luther ' (as many admiring Protestants styled lAm), having got control of a -good deal of church property, styled _ himself archbishop drove out the Catholic clergy, appointed his creatures in their places, and proceeded^ in the customary way, to inaugurate the so-called ' National Catholic Church of the Philippines,' of which he appointed himself on cartii the Supreme Head. Suits were brought against him for the recovery of the church property which he had seized and devoted to non-Oatholic or antiCatholic purposes.' Some weeks ago the first decision —an unanimous one — was given by the Supreme Court in Manila in a typical case, that of Bishop Barlin (a native Filipino prelate) against one of .Agli'pay's priests who had taken possession of the parish church and presbytery at Lagonoy. ' The decision,' says the New York ' Freeman,' ' decrees that the possession of all the churches in the Philippines erected and dedicated by the Spanish Government " is legally in the Catholic Church. A cable dispatch from Manila referring to this important decision says : " Apparently, the case is ideal from a legal standpoint, as it embraced the majority of the issues that were in contention and creates the strongest kind ot precedent, as affecting the cases pending, which involve -the title to fifty churches and convents seized by Aglipay and his followers." '

The Aglipayan movement was (says the Milwaukee ' Catholic Citizen ; ) 'a crowd of looters banded together under the cloak of religion.' -Their zeal for plunder, at any rate, seerfis -to "have been much keener than their zeal for exemplary living. In poetic aswell .as in Scriptural justice men are often punished in the things in. which they have sinned. The violated church property which" the.. Filipino .adventurers long held in their grip,' in order U> wound and rend the Catholic Church in< the islands, has (so " to speak) kicked and wounded them, full sore. It has acted like the muskets in Trumbull's ' McFingall ' :—

' Some muskets so contrive it. As oft to miss the mark they drive at, And, though well aimed at duck or plover, Bear wide, and kick their owners over.'

The Supreme Court decision on church' property tin < the Philippines may be deemed to spell the approaching end of -the Aglipayan schism.

Another Failure . - , ' Old Catholicism ' is,- like the new Aglipayism, another failure in creed-making. It was doomed from its rise in 1870. It began with Dr. Doellinger 's protest against the dogma of the ' infallibility of the Pope when speaking ' ex-catihedra.' The "poor, proud, prayerless old man was placed between the alternatives of choosing between papal infallibility and his own." 'He' had not -the humility to bow to the former. So he_ went out into schism. The ' Old Catholic ' movement (so called) had, the cordial support of Fiince Bismarck, who was then engaged in a. bitter warfare against the Church. Some university professors joined in the hue and - cry raised by Dr. Doellinger against the Church of the. Ages. But not one^ bishop gave countenance to the schism. And it never got a~ hold upon the ear or soul of the people. For political reasons, Bismarck gave State aid to the new creed. But it was no use. Somebody once told the crusty old Chancellor that ♦ another professor ' had ' gone over ' to Dr. Doellinger's side. 'I would rather 1 ,- he exclaimed, 'have had a single peasant ! ' But the peasantry came not.. In Switzerland only a few priests joined in the movement. v .It is already almost dead in the little mid-European republic. Here is a le.ent paragraph in. point ,from the Liverpool ' Catholic Times ':—: — •. — . • ' Such is the progress of Catholicism in Switzerland/ that in the city of Zurich no less than five fine churches are in course of erection, and the foundation „ stones of a sixth, dedicated to St. Michael, were laid recently/. It will be remembered : that in 1870 Zurich' was, after -Geneva 1 , the chief stronghold " of the schismatic ."Old Catholic " movement. The " Old" Catholic's '.' still -retain two churches, one of which* dates from pre-Refor-mation times, but the"" congregation has dwindled down to only twelve persons, whereas the huge Catholic basilica of SS. Peter and Paul is crowded every morning by immense congregations. Two-thirds of the population of Zurich is now Catholic. They number 45,0J00, and are increasing yearly, not only by the influx of immigrants and visitors from other parts of Switzerland and Europe, but through the return -o>f many of the " Old Catholics ." to the original Fold \ * ; The ' Old Catholics '. reached their greatest numerical strength in I_<S7B. Yet even then they and the Janscnists of Holland and Switzerland numbered, together ' enly 50,002 souls. In, 1895, at their silver jubilee, their former array of university professors was reduced to three, and their__ecclesiastical students to two. The Rev. Dr. Williams, an American Protestant clergyman, says .in his • Chiistian Life in- Germany ' (published at the close of 1897) that the ' Old Catholics ' in the whole German Empire numbered only 4 "a few thousand. In Bohemia and in Austria' proper they have dwindled beyond all hopes of being galvanised even into temporary, life. Dr. • Doellinger died in 1890 ; Dr. Reinkens, the 1 Old Catholic ' bishop at Bonn, in 1895-^he .wasflound dead in his chair. And now, after thirty-six years, the Old Catholic ' schism is fast dying of marasmus in its merest infancy. .

The Right, Rev. Bishop Olier, of Tonga,- .after his 15 months' sojourn in France, jwill proßably. arrive in Sydney on the 17th inst. • He is returning with a number of missionaries for mission work in the Islands.

Mother Mary Francis MeGuigan* has been' again .-reelected Mother-General of the Sisters of Charity mi Australia. Thus she enters on her fifth term of. office in -that position, and as each term covers -a- -period of six years, nothing more "eloquent 1 could be said of her administration and the place she holds in the hearts ot her confreres in religion. •-_ - .

Sir Percy Fitzpatrick, the President of the Chamber of / Unions at Johannesburg, and toie leader of the Progressive Party ift. the Transvaal, comes of an Irish stock. His father, the late Hon. James. C. Fitxpatrick; was one of O'Connell's lieutenants. He was appointed- to a West African Judgcship, -and eventually promoted to a puisne Judgeship in the Supreme : Court of Cape Colony in the sixties of the last, century.