Current Topics

New Zealand Tablet, 30 June 1910, Page 1009

Current Topics

The Queensland Referendum The final results in the referendum on Scripture lessons in the State schools in Queensland have now been published. The numbers voting 'Yes' are stated roundly at 68,000; 50,000 voted 'No,' and about 4000 votes were informal. The Labor Party, as well as Catholics, evidently regard the referendum as unsatisfactory and inconclusive. At a ; Labor convention, held in Townsville on May 21, the following resolution was carried:— That in view of all the circumstances surrounding the taking of the recent Bible in State schools referendum, this convention urges the Parliamentary Labor Party F to vote against any alteration in our present educational system.'

♦The Glorious Fourth' • Englishmen areby Frenchmen supposed to take their pleasures sadly. Americans take the pleasures of the glorious fourth' (Independence Day) sadly, too —the day after. But there is a fine delirium and hullabaloo while the heady celebration lasts. The trouble begins—as with orgies of alcoholic intoxication the country begins to add up its butcher's bill, and gets the bandages and splints and ; embrocations applied, and settles down to suffer a recovery.' The preparations for Independence Day (July 4) remind one, in certain of their aspects, of preparations for a pitched battle. The ambulance corps,' says the Philadelphia Catholic Standard, ' are got ready for the battlefield—for this is really what it is in the big cities. As the daily papers inform the public in the most matter-of-fact, nonchalant way, " hospitals are laying in a special supply of bandages and anti-tetanus serum for those who will be hurt by exploding fireworks." Here in the United States,' adds our Philadelphia contemporary, in the twentieth century of the Christian era, we sacrifice. our children to the god of fire every Fourth of July, • and we call it patriotism.^,. Over five thousand of the innocents were slaughtered in honor of Baal during the past five years. . ■■. Those who were not killed outright were in large part maimed for life. Of these the number was not far short of thirty-four thousand. Baal, Bacchus, and Mammon retain their ancient hold on us, no matter how their names have changed.' >. _ f | ■■'*■■ ■- •'= • ■- "- ■ - * - : - -."-. '',■■-- Mrs. Isaac L. Rice, who is conducting a campaign against the present murderous method of celebrating ' the glorious fourth,' furnishes a striking illustrationin an article in the March Forum of the comparative bloodlessness of actual war compared with the butcher's bill of celebrating victory. She publishes the following table showing that, the seven famous Revolutionary battles, namely, Lexington, Banker Hill, Fort Moultrie, White Plains, Fort Washington, Monmouth, and Cowpens, which did so much to win American independence, did not, all the seven, cost the Americans one-quarter as many killed and wounded as a single year's celebration, of the Declaration of Independence:

Mrs. Rice gives: an encouraging report as to the prospects of a more peaceful celebration on the coming ' fourth.' As to that, there is room for doubt. We are afraid the lady has left the Jeffries-Johnson encounter out of her calculations. ';-■*- -■;■■ '. .• '■ . . .".-.-"-.

Some Prize Blunders Mr. Morley in his Aphorisms, has said that ' excessive anger against human stupidity is itself one of the most provoking of all forms of .that stupidity.' It is, happily, sometimes easier to laugh at it than to be angry with it. We only smile, for example, at the honest and upright, though idiotic, follies committed in non-Catholic l reports or other descriptions of our ecclesiastical functions—at the ■well-meaning imbecile who described; a priest at a Requiem service as ' performing the ablutions by sprinkling holy water on the bier,' or who represented Archbishop Feehan (at Chicago) as entering the sanctuary. with a ' tonsure on his arm,' or who told all the world and his wife how Cardinal Vaughan wore; ' an asperges on his head,' and how his

master: of ceremonies entered ,the sanctuary swinging a thunfer in his. right hand.' -An English reporter—whose nam xi IS o unfortunately: -lost ; to - posterity— writing up the St. Augustine centenary celebrations at Ebbs Fleet, would have it that ' Cardinal Vaughan conducted the Mass, but the Consecration and Elevation were performed by Cardinal Perraud.' k That luminous pressman might well shake hands with the author of the following pen portrait 0 Cardinal Parocchi which found its way into a " Christchurch daily: 'During the performance of church ceremonies he sits beneath the baldachin stiff and motionless as a ' dies irae,'' his feelings s tightly held in by his firm and obstinate lips.' 'Dies irae 'means ' clay of wrath and is the ; title of a beautiful Latin hymn or sequence. A man who could look like a 'dies 'should certainly inspire respect. Such miraculous stupidities are on a par with the paragraph in a London morning paper, which assured a confiding public that Mr. T. P. O'Connor 'invariably wears a sprig of shillelah in his button-hole." These blunders are evidently unstudied and ingenuous, and, unlike the vagaries. of the cable-rigger—about which we have so often cause to complain contain no sting and are written in perfect good faith.

A contributor to the current issue of the London Tablet; in the course of an article on some late developments of the Presbyterian creed, incidentally quotes some similar recent blunders, the "last of which, at least, is too good to be lost. He writes: 'The Church of Scotland (let me explain for the ignorant Southerner) is Presbyterian, "not Episcopal in its government. Did I say ignorant " Southerner " ? I hasten to add the Northerners are often as bad. The Scotsman, which boasteth itself somewhat, commenting (February 8) on the death of Bishop Dowden, of Edinburgh, repeatedly called him the "Episcopal Bishop" of. Edinburgh, which is as if one should say a "marine fish or a feline cat." And this eminent journal of all things knowable, describing in the same issue the funeral of, a Catholic, informed its readers that at the grave the religious service was according to the rites of the Church of Pome, incense being burned, and -the coffin being sprinkled with hyssop." After this one can pardon (or, at least, -dismiss with an - admonition) the learned Sheriff in Ayrshire who (of course, it was at dinner) some years ago declared he had no objection to brighter services or more ornamental worship in the kirk, but he most decidedly objected to " ministers coming in wearing their reredoses." ' This judgment,' adds the Tablet writer, ' was never taken to a higher court for no one knew, and'up till the moment of going to press no one knows, what he meant.'

The Cable-Fiend Some fine day in the sweet By-and-by of scientific gardening we may gather grapes from thorns and figs from thistles ,and extract sunbeams from cucumbers. And some other fine daywhen the Ethiopian has changed his skin and the leopard his spots— may expect the plain and unadorned truth from the cable-fiend when he sets forth to furnish items of Catholic news to the Antipodes. If it is possible at all to give us gossip and exaggeration rather than simple fact, gossip and exaggeration we get. A fresh instance in point is furnished by the cables which came to hand some time ago regarding certain episodes connected with the Roosevelt incident. For example, the following two messages, dated ' Rome, April 20,' appeared in all our dailies • - , ; _.' M. Janssen, a Russian priest stationed in Italy, is said to have been ordered to resign his Vatican offices and "to retire to a monastery for three months because he spontaneously wrote thanking Mr. Roosevelt for his services to Catholics in America. ■;- _. cio at Vienna has been recalled for visiting Mr. Roosevelt when the ex-President was in that city.'

There is enough suppression of the truth and exaggeration in these two statementsand especially in the lastto turn them into glowing falsehood. From the letters of the Rome correspondents' of the London Tablet, Catholic Times, and others of our exchanges just to hand we learn that the simple facts are as follow: —On the day before the ex-President's departure from Rome Abbot Janssens, 0.5.8., called upon him at his hotel, and, not finding him at home, left a card, on which he had written a few lines thanking Mr. Roosevelt for all he had done for the Catholic Church in the United States, and the Benedictine Order in particular, and expressing the hope that he would soon recommence his glorious career _■ in America. Mr. Roosevelt immediately passed the contents of this card to the press, and the flaring intimations in the papers were the first the Vatican heard of the incident. According to \[Tablet correspondent, Abbot-Janssens acted not only without any authorisation, but probably in ignorance of the facts of the situation. 5-f On, finding what he had done, the Abbot at once

sent in his resignation as Secretary of the Sacred Congregation of Religious and: of the Biblical Commission, and it is stated that his resignation of the former office was accepted." Some days after his resignation the learned and pious Benedictine was proposing the health of the Pope—his eloquent tribute was recorded in our last week's issue—at a social gathering in the city, so that the yarn about his being ' ordered to retire to a monastery for three months' was evidently only the cable-rigger's attempt to round off his story with some little approach to the sensational. -■-■■--•■- ■ : - : ' *;" :■; ■:■--:•:'-•':';■- ■ As to the latter portion of the cablegram,, it is a question not of exaggeration or embellishment, but of sending to the ends of the earth a piece of gossip that was simply and absolutely false. The alleged reportthat the Nuncio at Vienna had been recalled utterly without foundation. The simple fact was that the Nuncio had yielded to the insistent request of the American Ambassador to pay him a visit after the lunch at. which the Nuncio had declined to be present, and during his visit he was, very naturally, introduced to Mr. Roosevelt. This explanation was sent to the Vatican, and the Nuncio's action was approved of. The cable vagaries in these two cases do not happen to be concerned with matters of any great importance, but they are interesting as showing the cable man's almost congenital inability to tell the plain and simple truth. . "■'

Fair minded Protestants Fair words, said Cardinal Wiseman, ' are like apples of gold on a bowl of silver.' It is a form of refreshment to which we Catholics are not very often treated by our non-Catholic friends, but on that account, perhaps, we are the more ready to appreciate it when it does come our way. During the past few weeks we have come across two or three notable instances in which sincere Protestants, in a spirit of fairmindedness, have come voluntarily forward to vindicate the Catholic body from unmerited aspersions, or have spontaneously paid handsome and striking tributes to the work and worth of our priests and religious. The first occurs in the course of a lecture, delivered recently in Edinburgh by Mr. W. T. Stead, on the subject of social purity. The lecturer, said that while he himself was a Protestant, and he presumed -_ most of those present were Protestants, there was no blinking the fact that if they took a Protestant family and a Catholic family, and put them into a London slum, they would find that three or four years afterwards half of the Protestant family had gone to the bad, while every member of the Catholic family had retained his or her virtue.' . Mr. Stead went on to say that it is the same with Catholics in Ireland; no matter what their circumstances are, they are virtuous. On this point, and perhaps on this point only, does the testimony of Protestant travellers in Ireland agree. ' I was astonished/ continued Mr. Stead, 'to see people in Ireland living in poor cabins, who, whatever else they might be, were most virtuous. This I attribute to the instructions of their priests in the confessional and in the family, and to their insistence on the duties of parents to their children and of children to their parents and towards one another. The result is a moral miracle at which we, as Protestants, Presbyterians, or whatever we are, have reason to bow our heads in shame.' '.---'

The second is taken from the correspondence column of the Edinburgh Scotsman. Some blind bigot had written to that paper pointing out, in a sneering way, that a particular Catholic church was situated in the most aristocratic quarter of the city, and insinuating that the priests cared little and did little for the poor people in the slums. The Catholic authorities : ignored the attack, but it elicited a spirited protest from some Protestant ladies, who gave the following personal and striking testimony to the work of the priest in slumdom: May a little band of Protestant ladies who have during the last four weeks been working in the cause of charity alongside of both Roman and other missioners in the slums of Edinburgh say a few words on this most unmerited attack Our efforts have been directed to the feeding of starving children, and that alone. Religious instruction of even the simplest description we have left to others more capable. Our opinions are based on the personal observation of five pairs of eyes two are Free Church, the others Established. That opinion is the way the Roman Church, both priests and Sisters, look after their own poor puts our Protestant missionaries to shame. These courageous men and women penetrate the worst slums and haunts in the city in search of their own people. I say courageous rightly, for only those who know something of the slums at night know whether or not nerve is needed. Ask the first soldier you meet whether the Protestant minister or the Roman padre attended best to the wounded and dying in South Africa; ask the first loafer you meet in the .Cowgate who best attends to his people

there; ask the police. The one works in the day; the other when he is more needed and much less seen—at night. A more unmerited attack has never appeared in' your pages. Brought up as I have been to hate the name of. Home, I and the other four ladies.associated with me in our little charity have been forced to respect the good practical work of the one, as we also do the work of the Salvation Army and the Church of England. Scottish Church work can, in our experience, hardly be accounted as seriously meant.— I am, etc., M.B.' , v " ' " :

Our third instance of the display of a spirit of fairmindedness towards us by those who differ from us in faith is taken from a very recently published book called Changing China (Jas. Nisbet and Co., 10s 6d net), by Lord William Gascoyne Cecil. The book has one insistent China is Awake. 'For centuries,' writes Lord Cecil, ' China has been the land that never moved.' But to-day it is moving at a great rate. What has awakened China ? ' There are two chief causes. The less appreciated factor that is causing the regeneration of China is Christianity; the larger and more. obvious factor is the new national movement.' Turning, then, to the higher side of the awakening of China, Lord William Cecil refers to the influence of the various missions. We take the following from a brief notice of the book which appeared in the religious column of the Dunedin Evening Star: —'One of the most valuable chapters of the book is that on Roman Catholic Missions. Of these also he writes from personal knowledge. After examining the history of the Roman missions in the Chinese Empire, he says: " The Roman Church is growing stronger, not weaker, now that she has lost the support of French diplomacy, and the missions have entered upon their third epoch, when they are preaching Christianity without any special support of a foreign Government, and are succeeding. For there are few bodies of people in this world who are more heroic and devoted than the Roman missionaries; they have died of fever, have been massacred, they live on a miserable pittance. I was told that one enlightened missionary, once a professor in Paris University, lived on £l2 a year; and their heroism and self-denial reaps a large reward." The author speaks with hearty praise of the Roman Catholic orphanages, in which poor and outcast girls are trained with infinite care and kindness. " Many a life has been laid down so that these children might be Christians." . • _ . .".;; r. .We have printed these tributes, not because the facts referred to are in any way new to Catholics, for we have always known and been proud of the virtue of our Irish peasantry,- the zeal and solicitude of our priests, and the apostolic labors and sacrifices of our devoted missionaries. But we have published the foregoing in acknowledgment of the spirit of fairness of our non-Catholic friends as shown, not only by their recognition of the facts, but by their readiness also to freely and voluntarily bear public testimony to them.

Killed and July 4th Killed and Battles, Wounded. Celebrations Wounded. Lexington 83 1903 4449 Bunker Hill 449 1904 4169 Fort Moultrie ... 37 1905 5176 White Plains ... 100 1906 5466 Fort Washington149 1907 4413 Monmouth ... 229 1908 5623 Gowpens ... 72 1909 5307 1,119 34,603