Robbing Protestant Missions

New Zealand Tablet, Volume XXXV, Issue 39, 26 September 1907, Page 9

Robbing Protestant Missions

It matters a good deal, after all, whose ox .jis gored. .'Way down in Madagascar the French Governor , fcM. Augagnier, a Socialist) has been giving . the non-

Catholic missions a taste of the quality' of ©the socalled Separation Law. , And the Protestant missionaries naturally no more relish confiscation under forms vof law than the Catholic missionaries do. The Governor (says the ' Catholic Times ') 1 Has excited the just indignation of the missionaries by declaring "their churches and mission houses ,to be national property, and by forbidding the use of. the churches for school teaching. The Catholic missionaries, who belong to the Jesuit Order, have, according to M. Augagnier, given much less trouble over this matter than .the Protestants, probably from their knowledge of the futility of any protest. But the Protestant missionaries, who belong mostly to nationalities other than the French, have been able through .tfce medium of the Continental Protestant press and societies', to bring pressure to bear on prominent members of the Parliamentary " bloc '', and these have tried to put some sort of brake on the go-ahead tendencies of the Socialist Governor. They" appear to have reminded M. Augagnier of the dictum of Gambetta as to antidlericalisni not being an article for transportation, for M>: Augagnier, who publishes his defence in the " Matin " under the headline "Le Prote^stantisme e'est Pennemi " (" Protestantism is the enemy "), scoffs at this notion of Gambetta's as a piece of stupidity, and likens "clericalism " to a virulent contagious disease which must be got- rid of .wherever it occurs.' The Socialist Governor laj's against the Protestant missionaries a cliarge' jof inciting the natives to disloyalty. This accusation, coming, from such a source, we decline to believe. But there is another side • to this question, which has been emphasised more than once in our editorial columns. Here is how it is 'set forth by our Liverpool contemporary :— ' The anticlerical Governor certainly' scores a point when lie reminds • these gentlemen and their agencies and supporters abroad that they made no objection so long as all the rigor of the Separation Law was applied lo the Catholic Church in France and its foreign missions. M. Pressense, in particular, and M. Sabatier and others like them, he roundly accuses of seeking under the cloak of a free thought movement to oust Catholicism and put Protestantism -in its place, in which he is probably right, but that is another matter. The English public, and especially those fervent Nonconformist divines , who seem to regard the movement to dechristianise France in the light of a holy war waged by the French Government against an aggressive ultramontanism, and those ' Liberal ' Catholics who write so loyally of their Mother the Church- in the passes of secularist journals, need to be told, of these things and we hone that one of the latest phases of French anticlencalism will be described in its true .colors in every Anglican and Nonconformist journal in the kingdom.' ' The free and impartial secular press ', says our English contemporary, ' will not enlighten ' them, and the Paris correspondent of the " Times " is of course silent.'