BISHOP CLEARY’S PASTORAL

New Zealand Tablet, 16 March 1911, Page 484

BISHOP CLEARY’S PASTORAL

The Right Rev, Bishop Cleary’s first Pastoral Letter, treating on The child in the home and the school,’ has just been issued, and on the question is a document of considerable importance (writes a contributor to the Auckland Observer). The proper training and upbringing of the youth of this young country are surely matters which must claim the attention of all right-minded persons; and although our system of education has been in existence since 1877, it has not yet been accepted as satisfactory by many of our fellow-citizens. True, a majority amongst us favors the system, but that does not render it either fair, as it most assuredly should be to all, or the most salutary that could be devised for the attainment of the ends aimed at : The moulding or fashioning of the character of the generation that is soon destined to bear the responsibility of Nationhooda responsibility that it will discharge befittingly if swayed by proper ideals, but not otherwise. But we must now turn to Bishop Cleary’s Pastoral Letter. Regarding ,the child at home, occurs the following striking paragraph; — ‘Before Christ’s coming, the child was, except among God’s chosen people, little better than a chattel, even in the most advanced pagan civilisations of old. In republican and imperial Rome, for instance, the authority of the father over his children was without limit, or reserve, or legal restraint. It included the power to torture, sell, enslave, and slay; and even such enlightened philosophers as Plato and Aristotle proclaimed infanticide as, in certain circumstances, a social and patriotic duty. The slaughter of the innocents went on shamelessly as, and more openly than, it does even now under the revived paganism that is a cancer upon the social life of our day ; and the. historian Tacitus expressed his astonishment that the Jews did not ,in this respect, practise the sanguinary barbarities of the other nations of his time. Outside the chosen people, there was little knowledge of, or thought for, the eternal destiny of the child in the life beyond the grave.’ In the next paragraph the parents are admonished that upon them falls the duty of the forming of the consciences, and the moulding of the wills of their offspring ‘ from the very dawn of the little ones’ capacity for such instruction and training.’ Then' there appears a very interesting chapter on the school, which is defined as an extension or auxiliary of the family.’ . ‘ All true education, _ it is stated, ‘ demands unity of concentration in teaching; should be a vital and continuous process; there should be unity and harmony in the chief agencies of education, the home, the school, and the church and that as this present life is but a probation for the higher and wider life to come, religion, and its sweet and ennobling influences should enter into all the processes of education.’ c e P IS^IO P very clearly points out that the present system of education which excludes religion, or, as he-expresses it, quarantines Christian teaching,’ is, on that account, very defective; and he goes on and says that while Catholics do not expect or require any payment for religious teaching 111 their schools they ‘ demand a just proportion of the taxes which they themselves pay for the secular educational results which their schools achieve as testified to by the State inspectors ’ —a demand which is both reasonable and fair, since through making at their own cost, provision for achieving such educational results, they must have saved to the Dominion no less a sum than about two millions sterling. Clearly, the last word has not yet .been heard on the question of education.