A Vigorous Protest

New Zealand Tablet, 26 January 1911, Page 139

A Vigorous Protest

At St. Joseph’s Mount Novitiate College, Bathurst, Catholic education was discussed at a conference of seventy Sisters of Mercy gathered from all parts of the diocese. His Lordship Dr. Dunne, Bishop of Bathurst, at the close of the conference, addressed the gathering, and said that about a generation ago the Government of this fair young country, faithfully following the traditions of olden times, designed the suppression and death of Catholic schools, not by open violence, which would excite the indignation of a free people, but by the more ingenious method of discouragement and starvation. , Yet after thirty years’ experience of the starving-out principle their teachers had largely increased and their schools had prospered and multiplied, so that now in Australia their schools numbered about 1400, their teachers about 6000, and the children receiving Catholic education about 126,000. That surely did not look like death to the calling of the clergy. If, however, the effect of penalising Catholic schools and teachers had been only to increase their number and efficiency, of what service to the various States and Governments was the withdrawal from them of hundreds of thousands of pounds (oyer £200,000 annually) during the last thirty years, to which they were so justly entitled, except as a colossal monument, of their folly and injustice, a lasting testimony to the Catholic community of their fidelity to their educational principles? Their iniquitous treatment of that which was dear to Catholics might doom their schools to suffer somewhat materially but certainly not to die; rather to prosper in numbers, efficiency, somewhat materially, but certainly not to be impeded by man’s impotency and fruitless opposition.