CATHOLIC DISABILITIES BILL

New Zealand Tablet, 8 July 1909, Page 29

CATHOLIC DISABILITIES BILL

In the House of Commons on May 14 Mr. William Redmond moved the second reading of the Catholic Disabilities Bill in a well-reasoned and effective speech, whi^i made an excellent impression on the House. In the course of his introductory remarks he said : The Bill may be said to have two parts. The first deals with' the repeal of certain disabilities still attaching to Catholic religious Orders. These disabilities are remnants of the old Penal Laws, and 1 do not think that there can be any widespread objection to their removal. It is to the second part of my Bill, which deals with the declaration made by the Sovereign on ascending the Throne, that I fancy objection may be taken, but by, I hope, a very few members in this House. I will ask leave to briefly deal with this declaration or Coronation Oath, as it is sometimes erroneously called, and in doing so I can promise not to utter one word thai might be offensive to the religious convictions of any gentlemen here present. Indeed, the whole object which I have in view is to promote good feeling and kindness between men of all creeds by r.empving from the statute book a law which is generally admitted to be most insulting to the millions of Catholics in this Empire, and. indeed . : n the whole world. - '-'"- ' ' Mr. Kavanagh seconded the" motion, and said-. he spoke as a Protestant. He claimed to b*e as' staunch 'a Protestant, as loyal to his religion as anyone who would oppose this Bill. He spoke also for many Protestants. in his constituency, and he gladly joined hands with his Catholic fellow-countrymen in asking the House to pass this Bill. He did not think it should have been left to a private member to introduce this Bill. It was a matter that the Government should have dealt with long ago. Step by step, and little by little, all these religious disabilities hai been removed, and there only remained these few defects — he would not say they were not important. He would remind the House that it was a Protestant Irish Parliament elected by Protestants; that first brought in a measure to admit Catholics to a right to vote in the elections, and he believed that if that Parliament had continued to exist the work of Catholic Emancipation would have been carried out in its entirety by that Parliament. Unfortunately. that Parliament sold its birthright, not only for a mess of pottage, but for the Act of Union, which had been disregarded and broken by every Government in England. It was the Irish Parliament which laid the foundation-

stone of Catholic Emancipation. He objected to these remaining disabilities, because they aroused in him, as they did amongst his Catholic fellow-countrymen, a sense of injustice. A member of a religious order, as Mr. Redmond had just pointed out, was on conditions like those of a ticket-of-leave man. He (Mr. Kavanagh) knew there was an extraordinary prejudice among many people in this country against the Jesuits. It was unreasonable. It could not be put into words, and it was impossible therefore to argue against it. But as one who had lived all his life in Ireland, he would say this, that whatever there was of secondary -education in Ireland at the present moment owed its birth and a great deal of its growth to the Jesuit Order. He asked lion, members who had this feeling against Jesuits to put on one side of the scale that cloud of prejudice and on the other the facts of all the good the Jesuit Order had done in Ireland, and so decide. It might be said that these restrictions were obsolete; that they were not enforced. But they were there as a menace to the Catholic community and a disgrace to that Parliament. But here was one of these laws which was not obsolete — the law by which a Jesuit could not own or succeed to any property. That had been the subject of many law siiits, and a backdoor had been found out of it. He quoted the opinion of the late Master of the Rolls in Ireland (the Right Hon. A. M. Porter), himself a Protestant, who, giving judgment in a case before him, spoke of these provisions as ' a crying injustice ' when they were used indirectly to defeat the otherwise lawful intention of testators, and said the law could never be 'directly enforced.' As to the language of the Declaration, Mr. Kavanagh said 't was a blot upon the British Constitution. Why should the Catholic religion, of all religions in these Kingdom?, be singled out for such language? Mr. Asqaith congratulated the mover and seconder of the Bill upon the ability and the moderation with which they had presented their case. The Bill covered such a very wide area that hon. members would not be surprised to find that in regard to some points in it there were differences of opinion among those who were fully convinced of the justice and were ardently desirous of extending the application of the principles of religious liberty. In the few observations which he (the Prime Minister) would make it should be understood that he was speaking for himself, and he would confine himself to two provisions of the Bill. In regard to the clause which proposed to throw open the offices of Lord Chancellor of Great Britain and Lord Lieutenant of Ireland to Roman Catholics he believed it was highly desirable that the law, which was now doubtful, should be made clear. He spoke in that matter with a record of his own. He held in his hand a copy of the Religious Disabilities Removal Bill introduced in 1890 with the very object of carrying this clause into effect, and the names upon the back of it were Mr. Gladstone, Mr. Campbell-Bannerman, Mr. John" Morley, Sir Horace Davey, and Mr. Asquith. That Bill bore upon the face of it the hall-mark of Liberal principle. With regard + o the question of the King's Declaration, which Catholics regarded as a far more serious grievance, he thought there was a great deal of misapprehension in some quarters as to the effect of this Declaration as a security for the Protestant Succession. It was one of the flimsiest and most unnecessary safeguards of the Protestant Succession which could possibly be imagined, quite apart from the offensiveness of its form. The Protestant Succession was secured by the express provisions of the Bill of Rights. The Declaration dated from the very worst period of English history — the reign of Charles II. — and in its present form was merely a survival of what was a universal test applied for the purpose of excluding Catholics from all positions of trust. With regard to its language, he did not" see how it was possible to justify it, and speaking for himself — and, he believed, .for a majority of the House of Commons — he thought the time had come to put an end to the Declaration. He would like to gjee it abolished altogether; but if, as was possible, the preponderant opinion would favor its retention in some form, he suggested that a commission should be appointed in which all interests should be properly represented and which would seek by mutual arrangement to find a form of words to which no reasonable objection could be taken.