Current Topics

New Zealand Tablet, 7 April 1910, Page 529

Current Topics

Ambiguous It is dangerous for an editor or sub-editor to write in a Hurry. Owing to the overcrowded condition of our columns this week, says an American exchange, in its Christmas edition, ‘a number of births and deaths have been unavoidably postponed until next week.’ The Catholic Press I* l s .. on f of the consolations of the Catholic journalist that, while he has often a good deal to put up with from armchair critics and chronic growlers, the hierarchy of the Church the men who above all are qualified to know and to declare what is best calculated to promote the true interests of the faith have always a word of encouragement and appreciation for the Catholic press. In his last Lenten Pastoral, his Eminence Cardinal Logue, after dwelling on the invaluable service rendered to the Church by Catholic journalism, makes a significant comparison, and utters a needed exhortation, in the following weighty words: We have often been reproached, and, it must be admitted, justly, with our neglect to encourage and support the Catholic press. This neglect has led to serious consequences in the past, and, if not corrected, will lead to consequences more serious still. The press is a power to be reckoned with. It influences, for good or evil, the thoughts and actions of men. This is a truth which is universally acknowledged; but while the enemies of the Church act energetically on their knowledge, we, her children, are apathetic and passive. While they put forth every effort to seize, even to monopolise, the organs of public opinion, by which they endeavor to sway men’s minds and nourish their prejudices against Catholic teaching, Catholic practices, and Catholic interests, our few periodicals languish or die through lack of support. Strangest of all, we often support these hostile publications; and support them lavishly, while our own few struggling prints are left to starve. Were we guided by experience, and by the repeated exhortations of the late and of the present Pope, we would pay more earnest attention to the spread and welfare of our press. Well has the Holy Father said that while his predecessors in the past blessed the sword of the Church’s champions, he blesses the pen of her writers. It is a duty, therefore, which we should not neglect, to give a generous support to our existing press, provided it be genuine, and to co-operate earnestly in multiplying Catholic publications wherever the need exists.’ The Orange Viewpoint That live, if not over-pious, weekly Bulletin —is rendering a service to the whole community by the vigorous way in which it smites the political bigot, wherever and whenever he shows his ugly head. It is the incredible smallness and pettiness of the Orange point of view that makes the red paper irate. In a recent issue a poet, signing himself ‘ 10-2-4/ thus descants on the congenial theme, taking as his text the following exhortation, quoted from Rev. Dill Macky’s paper, the Sydney Watchman :— ‘ Ladies, at this Eastertide, let us do each our share of political mission work. Say what we will, the coming election is but a contest for Protestant or Roman Catholic supremacy.’ The poetry does not come up to ‘ 10-2-4’s ’ usual level, but the subject is not one which lends itself to any very lofty flights. « Says the bard: The Noo South ‘ Lib’rals ’ present fight Is not against Protection’s might, Nor Socialism. Rather it’s A move to give the Romans fits. Granted that Labor strives to raise The worker’s lot in divers ways It only does it in the hope To raise the spirits of the Pope. Wherefore, all Labor Acts designed To help the lame, the halt, the blind, The Liberal must damn as bad — And thereby render Pius mad. The blight of land monopoly Widespread for all Noo South to see — Is something Liberals can bear, Since its existence makes Rome swear. It maddens Labor (also Rome) That we should not defend our home — ’Twere worth while (to give Rome a rap) To hand the dashed place to the Jap,

And hence the ‘ Lib’ral ’ must oppose A decent navy all ho knows— Uplifted by the thought that thus He makes the Roman Pontiff cuss. Summed up: Stagnation, weakness, vile Rank sweating—all are well worth while, bo that an aged man’s theiebv Annoyed in distant Italy. Home Rule from the Tories in ,^ n View ° f , the Probability of another general election in the near future and of the possible return of the Conservative party to power, some speculation is being indulged m in English political circles as to the possibility of the noTiS^S I Tf the f ant of Home Rule a plank in their political platform Improbable as this looks at first sight, it is significant that of late more than one pilot balloon on the subject has been sent up by representative members of the party In the January number of the Nineteenth Century Colonel Henry Pilkington pleads frankly for the adoption of- a system of Home Rule as a plank in the Unionist programme. He says: — ‘l believe this to be the view which is gradually producing a powerful middle party among thoughtful Irishmen. The inclination to turn to the Conservatives for release, so unmistakable in Ireland, is remarkable. Yet surely the Parliamentary session of 1909 must have convinced most of us that our legislative machinery is no longer adequate to its task; that some devolution of Parliamentary work, from the scope of which Ireland could not well be excluded, has become, from the" purely British point of view, a pressing necessity.’ * The Fortnightly Review contains a still more outspoken article, entitled ‘Eyes and No Eyes/ by Mr. W. S. Lilly who is, in politics, an active Tory. The contention of the article is that no one whose moral sense is not hopelessly blunted will doubt that England will have to pay to the uttermost farthing the penalty of her centuries of tyrannical oppression and remorseless cruelty in Ireland.’ The reckoning has already begun. Who can predict where it will end ? Mr. Lilly maintains that anyone who will not close the eyes of his understanding cannot doubt that Home Rule is ‘ the consummation coming past escape.’ ‘lt is absolutely impossible, upon the principle which John Stuart Mill called “False Democracy,” to justify our ruling Ireland from Westminster, in defiance of the wishes of threefourths of her people, expressed by three-fourths of their Parliamentary representatives.’ » The latest contribution to this Tory Home Rule literature is an article in the February number of the Fortnightly Review on ‘ The Parliamentary Position and the Irish Party,’ written by a Mr, Elsbacher, who writes under the pen-name of ‘ Ellis Barker.’ This gentleman is a sort of literary henchman to Mr, Balfour, and it is stated that his utterances have a kind of semi-official authority. The article opens with the intimation that Irish Nationalists will now ‘ be able to exercise a decisive influence upon the Government. They will rule the nation and the Empire.’ After drawing out various ‘ arguments ’ in criticism and deprecation of Home Rule, the writer concludes with the following remarkable statement: — ‘lreland may obtain not merely Home Rule, but the fullest measure of political independence in a not very distant future.’ ‘ Commentators on this sentence;’ says the Edinburgh Catholic Herald, ‘ all concur in pointing out that Mr. Ellis Barker has already proved an authentic Balfourian oracle, and that this statement is a kite flown by Arthur James to see how the country is disposed to accept Home Rule.’ Another Correction The Living Church, the High Church Anglican paper of Milwaukee, U.S.A.,- seems to have never quite got over the transfer from Anglicanism and corporate reception into the Catholic Church of all the members of an Anglican religious order which took place in America some months ago. Ever since then it has kept grasping at any and every trifling incident -which seemed to give the slightest promise of any sort of set-off to the striking fact to which we have referred. Some weeks ago we republished from an American exchange a letter from "Father Luke Callaghan, of Montreal, riddling a report which had appeared in The Living' Church regarding the alleged withdrawal from the Catholic Church of a priest and fifty-six of his FrenchCanadian parishioners and of their reception into the Anglican communion. Those who circulated the fable now admit that there was neither priest nor parish, and such individuals as are alleged to have left the Church—at different times, but all sufficiently remote Archbishop and priests of the archdiocese are still unable to locate or identify

by means of the directory. Now the Living Church has come forward with a new story. In its issue of January 15, under the heading ‘ Bishop Atwill Receives Roman Church, Priest, and His Entire Congregation,’ the Milwaukee paper printed the following: —‘ The Roman Catholic congregation of St. John the Baptist, Kansas City, together with their priest, the Rev. Father Johan Marchello, have made application to the Right Rev. E. R. Atwill, D.D., Bishop of Kansas City, to be taken under his jurisdiction. Bishop Atwill has received them and placed Father Marchello in charge of the congregation.’ And elsewhere in the same issue the paper says: ‘ The Rev. Johan Marchello, of Kansas City, has passed with his congregation and church of St. John the Baptist from the Roman obedience to the Protestant Episcopalian.’ . * The facts in the case are very simple, and serve to show to what desperate straits the Living Church is reduced when it has to resort to the policy of reporting such bogus or inflated stories of ‘ conversions ’ from Rome. Marchello, as Bishop Atwill probably knows, and as the Living Church may or may not know, is a suspended priest. ‘That Mr. Marchello,’ remarks America, has come under any “obedience ” will not be easily believed by his Bishop in Italy, •who never could do anything with him, and is imfeignedly. glad to be rid of him. Neither was his congregation of St. John the Baptist ever under “Roman obedience.” Mr. Marchello came to America lawlessly, without papers, in defiance of Pontifical legislation. No Bishop received him; he never was authorised to officiate in Kansas City. Wherever he applied for faculties he received the only answer that could be given: ‘ Go back to Italy.’ He then gathered round him, not in a good church building, but in a tumbledown frame house, some Italians who never went to the Catholic Church nor received the. Sacraments, and called them the congregation of St. John the Baptist, claiming, it is said, to have authority to do so from the Baptist himself through a supporter to whom the saint was in the habit of making revelations. The congregation and its pastor’, therefore, had no place in the diocese of Kansas City. Bishop Atwill thought them good enough for his denomination, and received them under his jurisdiction, where they will stay as long as it is profitable. Meanwhile the affair gives much mirth to the Little Italy of Kansas City.’ The Anglican Bishop allows these • disgruntled Italians to use the full Roman Liturgy. ‘ The T talian priest said Mass according to the accustomed liturgy,’ say certain Scottish papers who have got hold of the incident, and are inclined to give some prominence to it. The new congregation are not good Catholics, because they are not in communion with Rome; but they certainly cannot be called Anglicans since they celebrate Mass, carry the Host in procession, invoke the Saints, and do sundry other things which the Thirty-Nine Articles expressly condemn. In this connection America recalls the story of the soldier who had disappeared from the outposts, ‘ Where are you ?’ cried the sergeant. ‘Here I am. I’ve caught a prisoner.’ ‘Bring him in, then,’ said the sergeant. ‘Faith, he won’t let me,’ was the reply. That represents with tolerable accuracy the nature of the ‘capture’ which Bishop Atwill has made. Doctored Photographs ‘For ways that dark and tricks that are vain’ the heathen Chinee is no longer ‘ peculiar,’ having been long ago out-distanced by his white brother. In this age of wooden nutmegs and sanded sugar, yet another, and particularly contemptible, form of fraud has been unloaded on a confiding and much-enduring public. At one time it was considered that the camera at least could not lie, and that photographs could be unhesitatingly and absolutely accepted as faithfully reproducing objects and scenes as they had actually appeared. The development of the art of the retoucher, however, has changed all that, and the practice of ‘faking’ photographs now threatens to become quite a settled industry. How easily and simply the thing can be done, and what a complete transformation a very slight ‘ retouching ’ will make in the character of the scene depicted are well illustrated by some of the incidents connected with the virulent and venomous anti-Congo agitation to which we have often referred. Here is a case in point,, mentioned by Professor W. T. Foster, of Bowdoin College, Maine, who himself personally inspected both the faked photograph and the original. We give the incident in the professor’s own words. ‘ It would be absurd,’ he charitably says, ‘to question the genuineness, of most of the promoters of the Congo Reform Association in America. Yet it must he admitted that reformers, both here and in Great Britain, are eager to give weight to photographs that indicate abuses in the Congo, while they pass by or distrust those that show the beneficent influence of the Belgian rule. Prince Albert (now King of Belgium) showed me, for example, a picture that appeared first in London, and was later repro-

duced in the United States, aiming to exhibit the . awful carnage in Africa. It represented a group of natives sitting around a rude hut amid'- numerous human skulls. One of the women held one of these skulls in her hands, bending over it as if mourning the loss of a dear husband who had been cruelly wrenched from her by. the inhuman agents of Leopold. Beside this I saw the original photograph, in which. the “skulls” were earthern pots about the size of a human skull, and in the lap of the woman was one of these pieces of pottery upon which she was working. The photograph had been skilfully doctored. And yet on a pamphlet against the Belgian rule, widely circulated in .America, appears the legend: “Photographs do not lie.” ’ * - ; Another instructive example is afforded by the recent action of one of the best known of London illustrated papers. ‘ In its issue of December 11,’ says a writer in the Month, over the familiar, initials ‘ J.G.,’ the Sphere presented its readers with a page of illustrations, which purported to be taken from the life in a Carmelite convent, and which it was implied, if not explicitly said, had, by a very special and rare privilege, been allowed to be photographed from actual nuns for the benefit of this paper. The most remarkable of these pictures represented a young lady, not yet clothed in her religious habit, being borne by her future Sisters on a bier to her “open grave,” and there buried “ to the joys and pleasures of the world,” and although no explanation was afforded as to the precise meaning of this rite, it would no doubt be assumed by many to have some close connection with the notorious practice of which walledup nuns are the victims; or at least that it referred to the customs prevailing in many Orders, according to which the future professed, before divesting herself of her worldly apparel, and clothing herself in the “ habit,”, lies for a few minutes under an outspread pall, to signify that, according to the words of the Apostle, she is dead, and her life is hidden with Christ in Godalthough, it may be noted, she does not speak of renouncing the joys, but the vanities of the world— then follows a symbolical resurrection to the beatitude of Paradise.’ * ‘ Such are the pictures and a possible explanation of some of their features. The reality proves to be a good deal more remarkable. No one, of course, who has any acquaintance with convents could possibly believe that an artist with his camera would be admitted and allowed to take groups of the nuns who obligingly posed for his benefit. But, over and above this, it appears that, far from having been specially taken for the use of the Sphere, these same illustrations have made their appearance in London papers at least four times within recent years, from 1905 onwards. Moreover, to those who are personally familiar with the Carmelite habit, various inaccuracies of detail, as, for instance, rosaries worn on the wrong side, betray the fact that those who are made to represent nuns are not accustomed to wear it. Moreover, "in the Carmelite Order there is not, as in some others, any ceremony of mystic burial, or enshrouding under a pall, which might in some degree serve as an explanation of scenes imaginatively depicted. The idea is thus imperatively suggested that the figures have been; * faked,’ and scenes produced in accordance with popular preconceptions, ’ but having no actual connection with the realities of convent life.’. The whole set of these ‘ faked pictures have been already copied into a Melbourne Methodist paper, the Southern Cross, and if by any chance through editorial oversight or inadvertencethey should find their way into any of our high-class New Zealand weeklies our readers will know exactly what to think of them. ■ ~ . :