Current Topics

New Zealand Tablet, Volume XXXVI, Issue 3, 30 January 1908, Page 9

Current Topics

A Fabrication * Made in Germany * In Kipling's ' A Day's, Work ', a philosophising bit of chalk maintained that ' there is no' sense in telling too much truth '. A somewhat similar motto seems to inspire sundry Continental newspapers and news agencies- when it is a question of dealing with Catholic ecclesiastical persons, proceedings, "or institutions. On December 13, for instance, the following cable message appeared in the daily papers of Australia and New Zealand :— - • ' After discussing in conference at Cologne the recent papal ajnti-ModC'i'nist Encyclical, the. majority of the bishops, headed by Dr. Ko i pp > Archbishop of Breslau, maintained that the "Vatican must be gi\en to under- « stand that it must first tal- c s soundings in Germany before issuing an Encyclical affecting Germany '. Tn our issue of December 19, we pointed out that this story had a fish-li) e smell. It now turns out that it is a fabrication. It was first set -afloat by the ' Koelnische Zeitung ', a paper whose hatred of the Catholic Church and' of the Holy See is alone sufficient to render its testimony suspect on a-priori grounds. The story was besides, on tihe face of it, so intrinsically incredible that it carried its own" refutation. It has, moreover, been contradicted by the • ' Schl-esische VolkszeHung ' and by : the x whole- Catholic - press of Germany, and our European files by this week's mails state that the Cardinal-Archbishop of - Cologne has ' given an official denial of the whole statement, which he affirms to be a pure invention '. Unfortunately, the curious code of ' honor ' and of commercial probity that prevails in the offices of some of the European cable agencies seems to demand that, where the Catholic Church is concerned, no contradiction of a calumnious tale shall be permitted to pass through the wires that transmitted the original fakehood. Drinking, Then and Now Someone— we think it was in the days of Steele— ' prophesied that, as ci.ilisation ad.anced dielling v hard d inl in^, and swearing would gradually die out among the human race. The first pro hecy has long been faLfil'ed as regards English-stealing people. The secojnd seems to be ir.O' ing, though slowly, to the same consummation so devoutly to be wished. We still have, among us the sodden topers and swillers of ' lickwid , li:enin ' whose thirsty wish is that of the .Maltworm's Madrigal :— i ' Would that I were fish, pewly, and all the sea were ale !' s But we have happily moved far afield froiu the days of the Calf's Head Clib and the prof ns revelry that its members carried on. urdsr the guidance of Cromwdl's ex -chaplain. 'We drink,' said an English writer of 1657, ' as if we were nothing but spcn.ges ' (we modernise the spelling). We have left behind for ever the s.irit of ths time wh n ' gentlemen ' might, without remar^, be ' as drunk as lords ' at social -funcfons ; when (as Connor Sydney says) ' hard drinVin? was quite th? fashion,' and when ' even members of Parliament found it difficult to keep sober.' We are still far, very far, ' from the things that the true temperance reformer hopes for. But we are on the way. We should, however; dearly like a little more pressure in Ih3 steam-chest, anda better pace. For the road is long and the grade n steep. The Anonymous Assailant There's a chiel- amang 'em' down in Bruce County who has lately taken to the ungentle art and craft of writing letters to the local council casting reflections ♦

upon, people that have a local habitation arid a name. But the Bruce County councillors very properly refused to allow the varlct's communication to be read. '.'lf, said the chairman, 'a ratepayer is not. man enough to put his signature to a document, the Bruce County councillors are men enough to leave such a communication severely alone '.^ 'And so say all of us', quoth the councillors, in effect. ' * The pagan Roman Emperor Trajan fed the Christians to wild beasts, by whose teeth they " were ground-noble wheat of God !-and had ' them slowly roasted to death in the Coliseum-beautiful glow-worms of the Most High ! He ordered torture and death, upon a large scale, but even" his -pagan heart refused to , tolerate the slings and arrows of the anonymous accuser. 'He drew the line there. In our own time, ' literary roughs ' is the epithet flung by ' Dr, Oliver Wendell /Holmes, the genial Poet of the Breakfast Table,- at the ill-conditioned masked men who huTl anonymous accusations at people through the columns of the newspaper press or the pages of the lampoon. «It is understood -in good society ', says Dr Maurice Francis Egan, ' that a man who writes a letter which he is afraid ' to sign with his own name, would he or -steal. And I believe he would 7 . -Disraeli had also a fine ."contempt for anonymous assailants whose lucubrations appear so often in the daily press. «An anonymous writer ', said he in his denunciation, of the ' Globe ' in 1836, ' should at least display power ; but we can .only view with contemptuous- levity the mischievous varlet who pelts us with m*:d as we" are riding along, and then hides behind a dust-bin '. 1 Anonymity ', said- Dr. Parker, of the- City Temple (London) .a few years ago, 'is not modesty, though it may easily be either impudence or cowardice '; And even that gentle soul, Cardinal Manning, granted that it is extremely difficult for - a man- to av,6id saying under a masV of anonymity what he would not say with an open face-. * *-. In June, lfO6, at the meeting, of the Waikouaiti Licensing Committee, the chairman (Major Keddiell) denounced, on biohalf of the Committee/ the practice of ' anonymous accusations and described'it as ' cowardly ' and ' contemptible '. And four months later the _pre- _ sent Prime Minister, Sir Jose] h Ward, from his plaxse in Parliament, described as l cowards ', ' worse than, assassins ', •' .villains ar.d reptil.es"' the many ' jwho ■endeavor to shield themselves in Vriting anonymous - letters to • public men ',"' reflecting on officers in different parts of the Colony '. _ "And we^are told that ' his remarks " were • greeted with general expressions of ap- " proval from members '. The,- anonymous accuser has been here and there, a social bane. Perhaps; after all, there may be a substratum of justification for the verdict of an American alienist, that ithis peculiarly, ' cowardly. form of attack "is an evidence of partial insanity. In any case, the best treatment for the disorder is apparently that which was adopted- by the Bruce County council and the New Zealand Parliament. Newman and Rome Falsehoods — old Satan's , thistle/down — are" carried abbut by every winid of heaven. It was inevitable . that a foolish tale about the late Cardinal Newman — — first set afloat by some Modernist® writer — should ini d*ue course be wafted over the seas vto New Zealand. Last week it lit upon a column in "a Wellington contemporary. ' Nobody"* the" story ran, 'is harder hit by the Encyclical* (on Modernist errors) than Newman'. Two correspondents^ promptly brushed tlie fairy tale aside. One of them- quoted the following words of the * great Oratorian in regard to the Holy See :>— . ' _'. It is the decision of the Holy See, St. Peter has spoken ;. it is he who has cn;oined that which seems" to - us so unpromising. H> h s spo-en, and has a claim cm us to trust him. He is no rccLise, no solitary student.

no, dreamer about the past, -no doter^upon the' dead and gorie, no projector of the visionary. ""He, for eighteei hundred years, has lived in -the world ; he has seen all fortunes, he has encountered all adversaries, he has shayed himself to all emergen ies. If ever there was a power on earth who had an. eye for the times, who his confined himself to the pia^tioaMe; and has Icm happy in his anticipations, wlose words have be n facts, and whose commands proih cies, such is he in ths history of ages, who sits from general irn io generation in the chair cf the Apostles as the Vicar of Christ' and the Doctor of his' Church. . . . From the- first he has looked through the wide wor'd, of which he has Ihe burden ; and according 1o the nsed of the dav, and the inspirations of his Lord, he has set himself to one thins;, now to another ; but to" all in season, and to nothing in vain.' • ' There is not,' s id a Cardin 1 of the Roman Curii to the correspondent of th3 London' ' Tablet,' 'the least doubt a 1 out Newman's loyal'y to" the, Church. . . . There n no suspcioh as t'J his orthodoxy. . . . And take i f , to be a' solut. lv certain tii it neither in the decree of 1h? Holy Office, nor in .the Encyclical (against Mod.rni m) is th"re the most distxnt allusion to any of the works of Ncwma'a. 1 " Further (a!d-3 the other wiiter in our Wellington contemporaiy), ' quite recently the " Osservatore Romano " (the official organ of the Vatican) expressly declared that Newman was not condemned by the Encyclical and surely tho best interpreter of the intention of a document is the party who issues it.' There the controversy erne to a sudden halt. Fredcrick Bayliam, in Thackeray's ' Newcomes,' said of an acquaintance of his that, l on the whole, he would rather lie than not. 1 It would be obviously unfair to lay that imputation of conscious error to ih.su who spun in the ' Dominion ' the fairy tale f'om a far-off land which rractically plscrs Newman under the ban of the Church. They were in al! pro" ability the honest- and well-intentioned echoes (or .echoes of echoes) of more hotheaded and impulsive Modernists who, in this, as in certain other matters, "ha. e been evcl.ing argumentative matter out of thrir irner cmsciousn ss against the - late Encyclical, in the si kit of the man who fi-stgave to the world the motto, ' Tant pis pour les faits '— ' so much the worse for the facts,' if they stand in the way of our theories or o ur convenience. Revising the Vulg&te A vast deal of work Irs to be done on the floor of the sea and b.neath th3 tossing waters^ before pier or breakwater appears above th2 surface and is visi' le to the eye of the casual beholder. And in like manner a great amount of preparatory work h;s to be done before so great an enterprise as the re\ision of the Vulgate—the Church's official version of the Sacred-Scrip-ture—stands before the general reader in the form cf a printed volume or series of flumes. The Anglican scholars who were responsible for tho Revised Version' cf the BiMe, for in.ta.nce, began their sittin s at Westminster iri 1870. It too'c eleven years of thought and toil before they were ahle to issue the New Testament (1881) ; four yea's more before the Old Testament appeared in book form ; and twenty-five years elapse 1 from the date of thrir first sittings before a numteu of other boohs, included by Catholics in the canon of the Sacred Scripturos, were placed before the world by the Anglican schools' and divines in 1895. '•"''.'. i In the course of a r cent interview with a representative of the PhUdelphia ' Catholic S.tandard,' Ab- * bot Gasquet— the teamed Benedict^ who has been appointed by thb Pore to superintend the Comnv'ssion for the revision of the Vulgate— gave some idea of the vast preparations that are being made for this ' great work. Thus fir, the undertaking is in its preliminary stages. 'But,'- said Abibot Gasquet, * this much can be - stated plainly : The Holy Father could have chosen no

,-more opportune moment than the present for this work. Many hive got it into their minis that Pius X. is in-, clined prcsen ly to condemn every/thing savoring of modern research and new methods. This; arises from the re-, cent Papal documents. Now, we have orders to pursue or L.hois according to the very newest methods of re-, search. Our wor 1 -; shall be based upon purely scientific methods, and th:se of the most modern type.' '