The New Zealand Tablet THURSDAY, DECEMBER 3, 1908. CATHOLIC DISABILITIES

New Zealand Tablet, 3 December 1908, Page 21

The New Zealand Tablet THURSDAY, DECEMBER 3, 1908. CATHOLIC DISABILITIES

, be sufficiently gathered from the reply made by him, a few weeks ago, to the interrogations of Lord Edmond Talbot and Mr. W. Redmond in regard to the Government's intentions in connection with the removal of the penal enactments against Catholics that still smudge the British statutebook. He had no present intention (he declared) of introducing such legislation, or of affording facilities for the introduction of ai y measure that is not of ' a wholly non-controversial character ' ; but he is graciously willing to give ' full consideration to any proposals to relieve Roman Catholics, or any other religious denomination, from legal disabi'ities which give rise to practical grievance.' Apparently, in the view of the Prime Minister, it is no ' practical grievance ' that the faith of Catholics should be stigmatised as ' superstitious and idolatrous ' by the Sovereign at the beginning of his or her reign ; that religious Orders in the United Kingdom may not inherit property, and that all the members thereof are liable to be sent at any time to penal servitude ; that Catholics (as in the case of the recent Eucharistic Congress) have not the same freedom of public worship as the adherents of other creeds ; that they are denied the full right of public procession that is accorded as. a matter of course to every other Christian faith — that would even be extended to Mahomedans, Shintoists, Fiji Islanders, or African fetich-worshippers, if they chose to march in religious procession through the streets of London. It is manifestly, in the Prime Minister's eyes, no ' practical grievance ' that Catholics are treated as an inferior and suspect brood — that they must be rigidly excluded by Act of Parliament from the office of Lord Lieutenant in that overwhelmingly Catholic country, Ireland; that their religion bars them from the positions of Lord Chancellor and of Chancellors of the Universities of Oxford and Cambridge.

True, the sentences of penal servitude against unlicensed members of religious Orders are not nowadays enforced. But, as Mr. Justice Kennnedy declared (in his judgment in the suit .promoted by the Protestant Alliance against the Jesuit Fathers) no law can be treated as obsolete until actually repealed. And (as the case of the Eucharistic procession amply, demonstrated) it apparently requires only the vociferations of a little band of intolerants — even though these be devoid of ability, and despised

§ANY and various are the modes of blocking reform and checking the advance of progress. One of these is the policy of ' masterly inactivity ' — . sitting doggedly still and arming one's' self against the point of the goad that invites to motion. This is the method adopted by the British Prime Minister to delay for yet a time the repeal of the last of the penal laws against Catholics. So much may

by the great body of public opinion represented by the greater part of the secular press, but with their lung-power and their No-Popery vehemence as their chief sources of strength — to move Ministers to put into full operation against Catholics those few provisions of the penal code which milder times have been disposed to treat as a dead letter. The difficulty which Catholics have experienced in securing the removal of these obnoxious laws, so alien to the spirit of our time, well illustrates the extent to which men are (in Cowper's words) dupes to an old and evil custom — so much so

1 That even servitude, the worst of ills, Because delivered down from sire to son, Is kept and guarded as a sacred thing.'

Catholics throughout the Empire have no objection whatever to the proper safeguarding of a Protestant succession to the Throne. This, however, can well be effected without the personal outrage upon the Sovereign and the savage controversial misrepresentation of that ' relic of barbarism,' the coronation oath. But it is high time that (apart from this matter of the Protestant succession) British and Irish Catholics should be placed upon a footing of absolute equality with their fellow-subjects of other faiths — Christian, Jewish, Mahomedan, and pagan — and that their civil and religious liberties should be so firmly secured as to be beyond the clamors of knots of organised lanatica. We hope the agitation will be vigorously and incessantly carried on, year in year out, until the last tattered rags of the penal code is torn from the British statute-book.