Current Topics.

New Zealand Tablet, Volume XXXVI, Issue 10, 12 March 1908, Page 9

Current Topics.

Where Home is a Hell ' The man who turns his home into a hell ', says the ' S.H. Review ', ' need not be surprised if his children should develop into devils '. - The Sunday Dog A distressed correspondent requests our opinion on ' tine practice some people have of bringing dogs to church '. Our sentiments are of the same complexion as those of a saintly Redemptorist Father who, during Bismarck's Kulturkampf, was expelled from Germany, and for a time aided his Irish confreres -in giving missions through the land of the tear and the smile. Once, in a country church in far-off Wexford county, the good German Father's rugged sermon— in English that might easily have been ' more so '—was broken in two by the stately march of the village bulldog up the central passage of the nave. As soon as the preacher recovered from his first shock of surprise, he framed a sentiment toi suit the occasion. ' Make ' (i.e. put)' ' dat dog out ', he ordered'; c dees is de house of Gott, and not one stable for dogs '. Many a' priest besides that .holy old Redemptorisb .. has wrestled with the church-going dog, but, we fear, with inconspicuous success. For Sunday dogs are kittle cattle ; and there are so many of their owners who allow kindly exhortation on the subject to follow Uie path that good counsel took, in another connection, with Myles Na Coppaleen— ' in at warn ear an' out at th' other, like wather off a duck's back '. Counsel from Wanganui In the multitude of counsellors there may be, and often is, wisdom. A good deal depends upon the nature of the counsellors' experience aoid the make and quality of their thinking machinery. Besides his official counsellors, the Pope has, outside his fold, a multitude of officious advisers. So, in his day, had Diogenes the Cynic. Diogenes despised them — rather ostentatiously, for a philosopher ; the good old Pope, who is " no Cynic, probably finds, in the variegated tangle of unofficial advice that he receives from over his garden wall, a good deal that, if it met Ms eye, would add to the gaiety of his secluded life. Of this latter kind would be some rather angry counsel that has been addressed to him through the columns of the ' Wanganui . Herald '. One excited non-Catholic adviser who ' attends no church ', contributes a broadside against the recent decrees on marriage. There are two or three things in the papal decree that have got the unofficial Cardinal in Wanganui down and shaken him Hke a minor earthquake. In the. fust place, he is inexpressibly pained at the idea that the Catholic Church should be always the same ; he is likewise greatly shocked to find that she really does change. In either case— whether she alters or does not alter— she must feel the bludgeon blow ; after the fashion of the tipsy midnight rustic, in 1 Joe Miller's Jest-Book ', who was determined to larrup his wife when he got home, whether he found" her up "or found her abed. The good soul who spills his plaint over the ' Herald ' forgets the distinction between unchanging doctrine and varying discipline. And he is - pleased to regard as something new and unheard of, a decree which, in effect; does little more than make Catholic marriage laws uniform by extending to the whole world the enactments that have for centuries prevailed over a considerable part of it.

The canonical invalidity of registry-office marriages after Easter, and the efforts of the Church to save the children of mixed unions, likewise fill with bitter anguish the soul of Ihs Pope's Wanganui friend. And he darkly threatens dire things that 800,000 non-Catholics

may do to the 110,000 Catholics in New Zealand unless the Pope calls in that 'decree. This wise and" muchneeded legislation is, however, the Church's 'own domestic affair. It is, moreover, based upon a long Wsaddening experience; 'And. there is no compulsion whatever upon any of the 800,000 to place themselves 'within the circle of its opera lion. If" they do, they do ' so- with eyes wide open. And ..then— ipsi videri'nt';. they must abide by the consequences. . TQie recent decrees' affect the canonical nullity or validity of marriages— their nullity or validity, in the eyes of the Catholic Church,' which, for Catholics, stands as the representative of God on earth. She is*the guardian and dispenser of the Sacraments, and she does mot recognise any right or power in the Civil Government to determine in what circumstances marriage shall be valid or invalid.- She cannot, of course^ alter the civil law. And thus it may at times happen that unions which the civil law may regard a s legally binding (such as the marriage.of divorced persons while their partners are living) .iray be canonically null ; and, on the other hand, occasions may arise in which a union that is a true marriage in the judgment of the Church, may be civilly null and void. But such things have happened before a line of the recent decree was ever dreamed of.

• The Wanganui papal adviser is likewise ' onaisy. in Ms mind ' at the thought that mixed marriages will be discouraged by the new decree. In this, we . pray that he may be a true prophet. The suggestion that- this legislation is a new thing, and opposed to ■ British -ideas, reveals some lackr of knowledge- of the British'law that prevailed in our time. He forgets, or is unaware, that until 1870, it was, in Ireland, a crime, punishable by two years' imprisonment, or by a fine of £500, for a Catholic priest to celebrate a marriage between Catholics, if one of the contracting parties had not been a Catholic for at least twelve months. The case against Father Patrick Campbell, at the perry Assizes, in < the fifties, and the historic Yelverton trial in the tfi-xtifes, proved that this relic of the old penal code was no dead letter. A Forgery A quotation given in a recent issue of the ' S.H. Review ' (Boston) gives a fresh point to Mark Twain's saying : the difference between a cat and a lie is 1 this, that a cat has only ninia lives. Our valued contemporary takes from the local ' Watchman ' (Baptist) the quotation in question, which is y attributed to Archbishop Ryan :— ' The Church tolerates heretics where she is obliged to -do so, but she hates them with a deadly hatred, and uses all her powers to annihilate them. If ever the Catholics should, become .a considerable majority, then will religious freedom in the United States come to an end. Our enemies know how she treated heretics in the Middle Ages, and how she treats them today, where she has the power. We no, more think of denying these historic facts than we do of blaming the Holy God and the" Princes of the Church for what they have thought fit to do.' • The ' S.H. Review ' rightly opined that ' neither Archbishop Ryan nor any other Archbishop, Bishop,, or priest of the Catholic Church ever wrote these words or any words conveying the idea above expressed.' And the ' Review ' was right. The alleged quotation was an impudent forgery. The writer of these lines was enabled to dynamite it in the early nineties. And the Philadelphia ' Catholic Standard ' says of it in one of the issues to hand by the latest 'a -ail :—: — 1 The most recomt exposure "of the forgery was in the editorial columns of " The Catholic Standard " of August 4, 1888, shortly after its appearance in a preten- • tious book on " Christianity in the United States ", by Daniel . Dorchester, a Protestant "doctor of 'divinity", who. quoted it as a " recent " utterance of Archbishop Ryan.'

'(' The most recent exposure ' referred to above was, of course,, the most recent within the "knowledge of our esteemed^ Philadelphia contemporary). ■ ■ * . In moral, guilt, there is little to choose between forgery land serioue- garbling. And there is« a strong fairily resemblance between the forged quotation- given above and a garbled extract from the ' Shepherd of the Valley ', a Catholic newspaper published in St. Louis in 1851. In this case also, the quotation was variously attributed to Archbishop Kenrick and Archbishop Ryan, of that city. We agree with the 'Standard' that Dr. Dorchester's quotation is merely ' a greatly enlarged and newly coined version ' of the ' faked ' and ' adapted ' extract from the ' Shepherd of the Valley '.- This was published by an Orange clergyman some fifteen years ago - in the 'Maryborough and Dunolly Advertiser. (Victoria) and ran as follows :— ,. . „ . 'If Catholics ever attain," which they surely, will, though at a distant day, an immense numerical majority in the United States, religious liberty will be at an end for ever.' By request, we got into commuriicatian with Archbishop Ryan (who denounced the ' fake '), and, through him, with the writer of the very article from which the quotation given above professed to be taken. The writer ' was Mr. Bakewell; who, in 1851, was a recent convert, and editor of the ' Shepherd of the Valley \ At the time of our communication, he was a Judge of the Court of Appeals and one of the most distinguished citizens of St. Louis. From him_ we received the genuine extract, from which the words given hereunder in capitals were torn by some controversial magsman :—: — 'If Catholics ever attain, which they surely 'will, though at a distant day, an immense numerical majority in the United States, religious liberty, AS AT PRESENT UNDERSTOOD, will be at an end. SO SAY OUR ENEMIES '. The ' faked ' and the correct quotations from the ' Shepherd of the Valley ' were in due course published in the ' Maryborough and Dunolly Advertiser '. But such stories seem to be like Virgil's inexhaustible tree— ' Uno avulso, non deficit alter Aureus, et simili frondescit \irga metallo ' — pluck up one shoot, and presto '. another appears -in its place. Few of the Rawheadrand-Bloody-Bonesanti-Catiholic stories of the past half-century have been dogged with more persistent exposure than this. Yet it; reappears in this year of grace with a new frill here and a gewgaw there. The life of the political lie may be that of the ephemeris fly, which ' passes out "'in four-and-twenty hours. But the controversial lie may ramble round the earth for ages, like the Wandering Jew. A Poster Propaganda There is a peculiar form of somnolence which has been studied by Loewenfeld «*id others. It is marked by (among other symptoms) enfeebled consciousness, incajpacity for sustained mental exertion, and long periods of heavy sleep-ing. A condition somewhat akin, to this seems to have long pre v a'led among a. large body of' French Catholics. And It has required a strong, and violent stimulation— that of active and searching persecution—to wake them- up. They fell into this narcoleptic statte (if we may so term it) chiefly through neglect of their religious press, which consisted for" the greater Part of petty diocesan calendars— too often mere 'logs' for the entry of parochial records and local news, without strong support, without influence, a nd devoid^ of a grasp of larger Catholic topics or on interest in great roavement-t beyond the limits of their various Little Pendletons. Now,, under the stimulus of repression,

they are here and there waking up to a sense of some of tine opportunities which they have lost. In some places they have even' begun to utilise the press for educating public opinion through the useful medium of attractive posters. A committee- of -poster-propaganda . has, for instance, its centre at Ivry-sur-Seirie, and it lately 'decorated the town and the surrounding ■districts with a ' taking ' placard bearing the following words :— •'.War on the Parochial Clergy ! The Nuns have been expelled from the hospitals. ' That costs more. Are you better cared for ? 'They have' closed the Catholic Schools, -which cost them; nothioig, and where ' only those went that wished to go. Are your children better treated now ? . Are they better educated ? ' They have suppressed the Budget of Publx Worship; 40' mi licai frames ' (£-1,600,000) ' net saved per year. HaVe your taxes decreased .? • 'The war ; against -the" Parochial -Clergy . tarings in nathiin,g, to, the, people-;, .but. tJbajlf, keeps them, busy ■wih/le the true social reforms have to .wait ;,' that a>- f lows^ especially, our senators and; deputies to make to themselves the-presentof 15;000 francs' (£500) ' each a year.' ' > . . y - ■ - . .- ' - ... -••;* So far, so good. We are not among those" who revile the man. who locks* lfis stable door after the steed has -.been stolen." That belated' precaution will not re--cover the steed, but it may. save the" collar aUd' hames. How Prejudice Passes . ' - - ' '-" ; In article on ' The Priest in Caricature and: Idea', a writer in- the February issue , of the Catholic World' (New York) say& : ' Prejudices die hard; but they die. Contact with the actual— which is God's way of ' helping Truth— kills them, as by a quiet .excess, of daylight, in the end. The simile is an apt one. The bacillus of tubercular consumption is so tenacious of life that it will stand boiling water for- some time before you can be sure thafc it is killed 'fatally dead. But 'Before ' a quiet excess ' of God's blessed daylight, the parasitic thing soon sickens and dies, and its work j of distilling a subtle poison comes to an end. Time and the wider light that comes from education and extended human intercourse— 1 contact with' the actual ' — have, in like manner, killed off colonies of the antiCatholip prejudices that in a darker day poisoned social life in many a land. • Dickens, for instance, for all his kindly heart, hugged many bitter prepossessions against the old, faith. They spotted, as with an eruptive rash, the crude-cari-catures to which , he . gave the inapt title of ' Pictures from Italy '—the book which,, "of" 'all he- wrote, the. world made greatest haste to consign to its lumberroom of things- forgotten." Harriet- .Mar tineau tells of two occasions on which he declined to publish tales of hers in ' Household Words ', solely because they spoke in -kindly terms of the virtues of Catholics. That, -his soul could not endure. Had the gentle soul that created Little Nell lived in our time, he would, no' aoubt, hav6 rejected many .of his prepossessions— they • could not, with him, have welf endured ' the quiet excess of daylight. Even for many years after the daisies might have grown upon his grave, a great part of the' JCnglish press lay so far within the shadow of the olden prejudice that they were •> childishly afraid ' (as -the' ■' Spectator ' said on March 24, 1877) 'of saying anything that appears to favor a Catholic cause; Jiowever clear may/ be the justice of that cause. • Well; otiher times, -.other manners. 'It is not', says- Newman, 'the true that- tells against us, but the .false,. In thirty years the British press 'has advanced far -.in enlightenment and in the better knowledge of us that has led them into the gentler paths of tolerance. We in New Zealand, too, have got worlds away in spirit, thouchonlya generation in years,- from the time when this "journal was started to voice a defence -which* could not be made in the columns of the secular press.

Clerical Celibacy A specific instance of the gentler controversial spirit of our time Is furnished by the attitude even of- the non-Catholic religious press towards clerical celibacy. De Saussure, the Swiss scientist, found living fish disporting themselves in hot springs with a temperature of 113 Fahrenheit ; and the naturalist Broussonet found by experiment that there are some fish which could endure for days on end water so hot that a human being could not keep his hand in it for a minute. The Catholic discipline of clerical celibacy was long hosed with the boiling invective of the cruder controversial days. But, like the fish of Broussonet and De Saussure, it came through the ordeal._ And now we find a measure of celibacy strongly urged by many earnest Protestants, for their clergy upon the foreign, mission field. This_ is; for instance, strongly 'urged by Dr. Needham Oust after fifty years' experience of missionary' organisations ■ to the heathen. . And in a recent issue of the Philadelphia 'Catholic Standard* '', we find the, 'JLamp.' (Anglican) quoted as follows on the wider subject of general clerical celibacy :—: — 'The Catholic Church "is inspired by ! the Spirit of all- wisdom. , And in, requiring Jier . priests to be celibates, slie ..does . it not only because it is the highest state, but because that state creates a certain psychological attitude in the priest which Us necessary to the effective accomplishment of the work. of the Church. The conjugal state, on ; the other hand, in addition to its hampering responsibilities, brings about a condition of mind which, more or less, unfits the .man to sympathise with the sacerdotal life and to enter perfectly into its spiritual responsibilities. Compare the religious influence of the Church of England before the Reformation with her influence now. Will any Catholic ' (Anglican) ' undertake to say that the Church' of- England to-day, with only a fraction of the Englishspeaking people attached to her communion, is the spiritual power she was when all her clergy were unmarried and unreservedly devoted to the exercise of their priesthood ? No doubt her married ministry has produced many great men from among the children they have begotten according to the flesh. But, oh, at what a price I Where is the flock that was given thee by Pope Gregory the Great— thy beautiful flock of the English race ? Alas ! lit is scattered among a thousand heretical sects which have sprung up because of the neglects of thy married priests, who fed themselves, and their families , and fed not the flock.' Our Reformed friends are gradually discovering that the rouighnspoken old assailants of clerical celibacy were cracking the wrong head.