DIOCESE OF AUCKLAND

New Zealand Tablet, 7 March 1912, Page 23

DIOCESE OF AUCKLAND

r CATHOLIC MARRIAGE LAWS A PASTORAL INSTRUCTION IN THREE PARTS -- ■ " ' (Continued from last week.) PART I. Things more or less Fundamental. I. The Family in Relation to Society. 11. The Family Duty in the Home.. Grounds of such • Duty—(l) As furnished by pagan Greece and Rome (2) as furnished by ‘ modern ’ ■ Philosophies; (3) ‘ parasitic ’ Morality; (4) grounds of Duty in the Home, as furnished by Religion. 111. Religion and the Family—(l) The Church: her Mission and Authority in regard to the Family and Society. (A) Why the Church was founded. (B) The Church’s Teaching Authority. (C) The Church’s Authority: Legislative, Judicial, Executive. (D) The Church’s Independence in the Exercise of her Authority. (E) The Church’s Continuity. (F) Summary of Part I. HENRY WILLIAM, by the Grace of God and the favor of the Holy Apostolic See, Bishop of Auckland: To the Clergy, Secular and Regular, and to the Laity, of the said Diocese, Health and Blessing in the Lord. - 11. THE FAMILY: DUTY IN THE HOME. . The experience of ages, as set forth in the pages of Mommsen, Lecky, and other historians, goes to show ; that periods of decline of religious faith have also been periods of ‘ real abasement of the morality' of humanity,’ . / of greater or lesser degradation for woman, of greater or lesser disregard for child-life and child-rights, of disintegration in the home, of decay of national ideals and national strength. In our own day we are passing through one of those recurrent phases of widespread unbelief (with its usual accompaniment of increased credulity and superstition 9), which pass at times like an epidemic over the face of society. It is no mere coincidence that, in lands much smitten with unbelief, we see in their dire operation the forces that are most destructive of a clean, holy, and wholesome individual and family life. Such, for instance, are the crying scandals of the ‘ divorce-mills ’ ; the tendency to degrade matrimony into a mere temporary union ; the gospel of free love’ and the spread of coarse vices; 10 the organised war upon the family; the increasing disregard • for the sanctity of human life, as evidenced by the revived pagan teaching on suicide and the current proposals for the euthanasia or painless slaughter of the weak, the aged, the imbecile, and all that are called ‘unfit.’ In the whole range of the materialistic philosophy of our day there is not one principle which could, logically and consistently, condemn as violations of real moral obligation the early social conditions of Oneida, or the nameless abominations of the ‘white slave’ traffic, for which sundry standard-bearers in the atheistic war on religion in France were lately sentenced . to long terms of seclusion from a social life on which • they had long been a fetid cancer. ll To the domestic and social plagues already enumerated, add the new education in destruction that is sweeping deep and ; ,-- broad below the surface of the social life of our day, 'v,, and its foul results the wholesale slaughter of the innocents,’ and that other form of ' ‘ the sin of V the century race suicide. —’ ! • '

9. Lecky (himself a Rationalist) somewhere remarks on this accompaniment— have not the reference to hand as these pages go to press. ‘ " ' .. ■■ /. • - •, / 10. , Experience shows, and social ’science recognises, that the views and practices of a people in the matter of sexual relations form a good criterion of their general moral condition.; Sorel, ‘Le Systeme Historique,’ vol. ii., p. 159. _ . - ‘ x . v ; “ ; 11- A cable message said * The evidence (in the secret trial in Paris) is so shocking that even the French papers dare not publish it.’' Some noteworthy comments on the case appeared in the Sydney * Catholic Press ’ in January, 1312,

. , Writing of Herod s slaughter of the Holy Innocents of long ago/ Father Faber says:- ‘ We hear loud' voices and shrill expostulations, as of women in misery talking all at once, like a jargon in the summer woods, when the birds have risen against the hawk, and then the fearful cry of - excited lamentation, with the. piteous moaning of the infant victims mingled with the inconsolable wailing of the brave, powerless mothers.-’ . In our times a massacre of the innocents is going on night and day,-more widespread, more cruel far, than that of - Herod. And there is no wailing of ‘brave, powerless mothers, no ‘shrill expostulation,’ like a jargon in the summer woods for the new Herods are (by themselves or by their agents) none others than the mothers themselves . Many a fair-faced assassin of this kind * (remarks an American writer) stalks about, proud as a Modoc chief in feathers and war-paint, but the scalps at her girdle are those of her own unborn offspring When whole communities regard of chib dren, however winsome and hap|£ as a matter for gibe and censure, and when reduction of family becomes the great domestic ambition, it ought to be said and known that the desire and the fact are among the surest indications of the decline of races and nations . Here again we look in vain to the anti-Christian philosophies of our, day for so much as a solitary principle which can consistently condemn, as violations of human-duty, or obligation, this criminal degradation of marriage, this disintegration of family life and discipline and character this fount of the physical, mental. ~- and moral decadence of nations. ‘ That nation is the - richest, says John Ruskin, ‘which nourishes the greatest number of noble and happy human beings,’ The highest - values, both for the individual and the family and the nation, are moral values. A nation is great not because of its rich mines and its thriving farms and its fleets of formidable warships,-but because of the high ideals and virtues of its homes and of .those that dwell therein. And we must look-elsewhere than to a : modern ’ anti-religious philosophy for the principles that constitute high life-ideals as of obligation for the individual, for the home, and for the nation. 3. “Parasitic” Morality. In countries predominantly Christian, ’ many beneficial external causes l3 stand between . such teachings and the full calculable results which they would achieve in a more favorable environment. Chief of these happy hindrances is the restraining, refining, and elevating moral influence of Christian sentiment, which is woven into the very substance of our civilisation and ; social life, and which endures long after the beliefs, out of which it grew, have ceased to gain assent. ” ‘ The Key- - the World’s Progress,’ by Devas I '*, furnishes some illuminating reading in this connection. It is true of Christian sentiment, as of Moore’s attar-jar, that • ‘ You may break, you may shatter the vase if you will, But the scent of the roses will hang round it still.’ - In The Foundations of Belief,’ Mr. Balfour compares the examples of virtue (apparently) unsupported by religion to ‘parasites which live, and can only live, within the bodies of animals more highly organised than they.’ ‘ Their spiritual life,’ adds he, ‘is parasitic; it is sheltered by convictions which belong, not to them, but to the society of which they form a part it .is nourished by processes in. which they take no share. And when these convictions decay, and those. processes come to an end, the alien life which they have maintained can scarce be expected to outlast them.” ls The Christian code of morality has created a healthy public feeling which governs or influences even. those who reject Christianity. ‘Christianity,’ says Father >. Hull, S.J., ‘ has created . a state-of public opinion on matters ethical, which will long continue to survive when the grounds on • which it rested have disappeared. .The

330) ~ ameS * The New Womanhood (New York, .1894, 13. Several of these are stated in the present writer’s * Secular versus Religious- Education’ (Dunedin, 1909, pp. 38-9). • ; v 14. London, 1906, "pp. 18-58. . * ** ~ , 15 ; Pages 87-8. In plant-life, the climbing parasite known r as the dodder furnishes a very good illustration in point. ' w -V'-;V.

perseverance of this ethical instinct, as I may call it, can easily be explained—partly by mere-habit, partly by the pressure of public opinion; partly by the undoubted seemliness and beauty and ; attractiveness of the ethical ideal taken in itself. But as soon as men begin to think for themselves, they cannot help realising the absence of an. ultimate basis for their ethics, at least when regarded as an obligation or duty. Hence, even when they continue to practise morality, they do so merely because it is in the atmosphere, and not because it is a thing incumbent upon them in principle; and thus the real meaning and value of morality, in the theistic or traditional sense of the word, is lost.' 16 They live as the green branch —soon to wither and die — lives for a space when cut off from the parent stem. Their philosophies can claim no credit for the real soul of .good that exists in our personal, domestic, and social life. These are the triumphs of Christian teaching and practice, and of the Christian sentiment that is in the very atmosphere of our civilisation. 4. Grounds of Duty in the Home: as Furnished ' • by Religion. - It is sufficiently clear that, inside the shell of thisworldly ‘ modern’ philosophies, we look in vain for adequate grounds of, for an effective inspiration to, for moral duty (with its implication of daily restraint and ■self-sacrifice) within the circle of the family. For such motives and inspirations we must (as already stated) turn to religion, under its two following aspects: (a) religion is a body of truths or beliefs respecting God arid our relations to Him, and, flowing from these, a collection of duties, which have God for their primary object and (b) religion is also a special virtue by which we acknowledge our absolute dependence on God, and signify our sense of such dependence by an external sign. This recognition of our dependence and its external manifestation are called worship. All down the Course of human history religion has furnished the highest motives'to ordered conduct in the family and the social circle; it has ever been the motive-force at •the back of the nations and the people who have given the ; ' : fullest and most beneficent shape to actual life. Greece and Rome and Judea have left their mark deep in history. • All three had their respective notions of domestic and social life and duty —but (as we have in part , seen) of duty based upon very diverse motives. In and through Christ, the Messiah, Judea ‘ has given us the loftiest and noblest idea of duty the world ever receiveda view of duty that permeates the whole moral being— makes the true liver and doer, that makes all men who rise to it pure, upright, transparently truthful to the inmost recesses of the heart.’ l - The bankruptcy of moral codes independent of, and antagonistic to, religion, is sufficiently admitted in words already quoted above from French atheistic philosophers of. our day. The great variety and the ofttimes contradictory nature of the reasons such codes offer for personal, domestic, and social duty and selfrestraint also betray the difficulty which their authors find in establishing morality, without religion, on a firm foundation. A striking evidence of the futility of any attempt to build up a binding system of morals, without religion, is nut-shelled as follows by Garriguet in ‘ The Social Value of the Gospel’ (pp. 211-2 n) : ‘ The remark has been justly made that the three great minds which have pursued the methodical and objective study of human society the furthest; and have helped to found social science Frederick Le, Play, Auguste Comte, and Taineagree in declaring the social necessity of religious teaching and of belief in a divinity. At first all three professed an opposite doctrine, and yet all three have been obliged to the necessity of social fact.’, No sociologist,’ says the same writer (p. 211), ‘is so ill-informed as to be ignorant of “the effective share of quite tangible social products” which belief in God has furnished, and continues daily to bring forth.’ ‘To quote only one example,’ says Professor Paul

16. * Why Should I Be Moral : A Discussion on the Basis of Ethics,’ p. 102. Ethics may be defined as ‘ the science of the moral rectitude of. human 5 acts in. accordance with the first principles of natural reason.’ ,> . _ 1. 1 Duty,’ by Rev. William Graham, p. 2s,

Bureau:- ‘ Who would venture to deny that, \n our time, the idea of God is the true and only rampart 1 for the triple principle of purity in the young, conjugal fidelity, and the fruitfulness of marriage ? Who can say into what muddy depths we should plunge, were religious sentiment no longer present to maintain, on these three points, a firm doctrinal barrier ? How would society fare if we were to eliminate the religious principle of action in the moral struggles which the growing disorganisation of conduct, renders each day more heroic?’ The ‘three principles’ set forth above are essential conditions for the moral and material wellbeing of the individual, the home, and the nation. The standard of duty external to us (and independent of us) is the moral law—the law of nature and the revealed law of God. The internal and personal standard of duty is conscience—God’s appointed guide of man’s free actions, great and small. God has traced upon our understanding His natural moral law and the rudiments of our duty, in characters sufficiently clear to enable us, to an extent, to guide and regulate our conduct. The most perfect epitome of the natural law is the Decalogue or Ten Commandments. It is the expression, in substance, of what He had already impressed upon right reason, but set forth in a form that gives to the multitude a brief, clear, working law of duty. But history amply proves that the moral law, merely as revealed in reason, is insufficient to impress greatly or to lift up men for long to high standards of duty in the home and the nation. As someone has well remarked, our nature craves and needs the contact and force of personal authority of the Divine Will, of which all law is, at least remotely, the expression. Hence, in God’s gracious Providence, ‘ the light of revelation has always supplemented that of reason in teaching our race its duty.’ For Christians, that duty is based upon two fundamental beliefsbelief in a Personal God, and belief in .the obligation of obedience to His law, ..whether natural or revealed, and in all human laws' built thereon. God’s supplementing revelation of duty (as we know on grounds that bear the test of reason) culminated *in Christ, the true light ‘ enlightening every man that cometh into this World.’ ‘ He was, and is, the final Teacher of duty, its Alpha and Omega, in whom ethical truth, gradually unveiled in the : Old Testament, finally culminated. And, as true God, He has made due provision for its preservation and application to the complex, everchanging moral problems of the daywithout losing any of its fulness, beauty, and splendour—in the one holy, world-wide body called the Catholic Church. She holds up, without fear or favour, the highest, holiest, purest standard of duty of any # teaching body in the world. Even those who dislike her dogma are compelled to admire the loftiness, reasonableness, and speckless purity of her teaching on the vital subject of duty. . . No recognised school of morals even claims to uphold a higher or holier mode of living. By listening reverently and attentively to her teaching, we easily learn what our duties are in all the various relations of life. The heads of what we owe, by of duty, to God, our neighbor, and ourselves, are briefly and clearly set forth in the Catechism put in the hands of all children. Indeed, in what are called the “essentials”— what every Catholic is bound to know, viz., the Lord’s Prayer/ the Ten Commandments, and the moral dispositions of heart needful for worthy reception of her chief Sacramentseven the lowest in the kingdom of

2. The law of nature (also called the natural law) is so called because it is demanded by the nature of things— by the nature of God and His relation to man; by the nature of man and his relation to God, to himself, and to his fellowmen. It is a real law. God, the Author of nature, is its Author also. It is (so to speak) .written in man’s reason, whose dictates (through conscience) declare its existence and its enactments, and tell us what it commands, forbids, approves, or allows. God’s revealed law is also known as the divine , positive law. 3. Conscience is a practical judgment which passes a verdict on an act, before we perform it, as to whether such act is right or wrong. _ Under the name, *an act,’ are included a thought (which is an internal act), speaking, and an omission, which, in , moral matters, is equivalent to an act. Conscience itself, as a: practical judgment, is, strictly speaking, itself an act (of the mind), .and lasts only while-it is being produced. But it is also, and not without reason, spoken of as a permanent thing, as its judgments are formed by a permanent faculty, and belong to a special department of .the understanding. „ - .

God possesses a code and standard of duty immeasurably higher than was known to all the sages and moralists of /antiquity or their would-be restorers in our own day.’ 4 The difficult but highly social virtue of self-denial (so necessary in family life) was constantly practised and preached by our Divine Redeemer. It is the dominant note in the Sermon on the Mount it -is the measure of, faith in the soul it lies at the foundation of Christianity. Said Christ. to His disciples: ‘lf any man will come after me, let him deny himself and take up his cross and follow me.’ s The men who have carried to its highest point the perfection of the individual life are (in Brunetiere’s words) those whose moral and social doctrine ‘ is closely linked with deep religious sentiment and intensely powerful spiritual convictions.’ 6 The teaching, the example, the love and grace of Christ exercise a great and intimate influence upon individuals rightly disposed. Through, individuals it touches and moulds the hearts and wills of men collectively. It is, in fact, a might social force. .‘ Who,’ asks the Protestant statesman and historian, Guizot, ‘ will • deny that Christianity from the first was a great crisis in civilisation? Why? Because it changed the internal man, the prevailing principles and sentiments; because it regenerated' the moral and intellectual man.’ 7 ‘To reject God, to reject the brotherhood of Christians . is to cast aside the most powerful instrument for perfecting the individual, and perhaps the most solid cohesive force in human society.’ 6 The well-known words of the distinguished non-Christian historian, philosopher, and critic, Taine, will bear re-quoting here ‘ says he, after eighteen centuries,- in both hemispheres, Christianity is striving, just as it did in the workmen of Galilee, to change love-of self into love of others. It still forms the strong wings necessary for lifting man above his lowly condition and limited outlook. Through, patience, resignation, and hope, Christianity will lead him to the haven of calm. It will carry him beyond the boundaries of temperance, purity, and kindness, to the grandeur of self-devotion and sacrifice. Always and everywhere during eighteen hundred years, so soon as these wings have drooped or were broken, the standard of public and private morality has been lowered; narrow and calculating selfishness has regained the upper hand; cruelty and sensuality have displayed themselves; and society has become a cut-throat and an evil nlace. Nothing but Christianity, then, can preserve in society gentleness and kindness, humility, honesty, and justice.’ * Christ Himself is the incomparably perfect ideal for the individual and the family. The personal love of Him is the highest inspiration to self-sacrifice. Weak hearts and feeble wills draw strength from the Saviour’s founts of grace. ‘ Christ, by the grace He has won for us, the light wherewith He has enlightened us, and the liberty of the children .of God which He has purchased for us, has put new life into duty (or the moral law), He has made its observance possible and feasible. From a dead and lifeless,, theory, duty under His magic touch, has grown up into a living force. From a mere department of human law, it has become glowing, vital, personal conduct. Duty elevated and sanctified by grace . . ■• , brings us into close personal union with the living God, making us His true children. “Whosoever are led by the spirit of God, they are the children of God” ’ 9 His Church ever seeks to move her children to high and holy endeavour by pointing to the example of Him and of the multitude of His saints who, in every age, have trod with courage the highest and most arduous paths of duty. The moral life of the community depends in a very great measure upon the religious life of the family. God may, indeed, so act by His grace upon the individual soul as to produce the fair fruits of virtue in the poisoned atmosphere of an evil home. But in the

4. Duty,’ by Rev. William Graham, pp. 33-4. ' -V- 5. Matthew, xvi., 24. .■ • '• ’, • - f • - • - • . 6. 1 Revue dea Deux Mondea,’ Feb. 13, 1903. 7. ‘History of Civilisation in Europe,’ vol.-i., p. 31. 8. M. Anatole Leroy-Beaulieu, ‘Le Christianisme et le Socialisms (lecture). < < : ■. ■ .. 9. Op. cit., p. 28.

ordinary course of His Providence, the school of solid virtue is the home, however - humble, in which pious parents practise the lessons taught by the Holy. Household at Nazareth. ‘lt is religion,’ says Gasquet, ‘ which must bind the members of the family together ; and no ties are secure, or will bear the stress of life, which are not strengthened by prayer and: the faithful practice of religious duties.’

(To be concluded.)