A NOTABLE TRIBUTE TO THE CHURCH

New Zealand Tablet, 24 October 1912, Page 47

A NOTABLE TRIBUTE TO THE CHURCH

THE GREATEST MORAL FORCE IN THE WORLD •„.;•.. Coincident with the opening of the convention of the American Federation of Catholic Societies in Louisville, Ky., the Courier-Journal of that city, published on its editorial page a two-column article on the Church from which we take the following The convention of the American Federation of Catholic Societies represents a great .Church, which stands alone, among jarring sects and creeds, majestic, venerable, and invulnerable, which time cannot crumble nor revolutions change. With transcendent calm the Catholic Church requires of her clergy and religious Orders that they shall renounce home, forsake their kindred, labor without reward, and die without notice. The chosen ideal of life in Catholicism has always been asceticism, the standard heroism. A good priest or Sister of Charity is inured to self-denial and ready for self-sacrifice and expects to be found in some minority which wins by suffering. y.; The Sisters of Charity bind themselves to service by the triple vows, for life, of poverty, chastity, and obedience; they take needful food to the cottage hearth, attend the dying bed of the humblest, and administer consolation in life's extremest hour. Every one must respect and. revere the priesthood for ■ Their Learning, Their Talents, Their Piety, and their untiring labors in the diffusion of light, hope, and consolation; postponing all the gratifications of worldly pride to the severe but heaven-gaining glories of their poverty. ( In them there remains the consoling evidence that the simplicity of the patriarch, the piety of the saints, and the patience of the martyrs have not wholly vanished. Lamartine writes of the priest as ' a man of no family, but who belongs to every family; a man who belongs to all classes, to the lower on account of his poverty and often by humble birth, and to the highest classes by virtue of his culture and the exalted sentiments which his religion inspires and commands.' Americanizing and Christianizing of the millions who are coming to this country from all parts of the world, is one of the greatest problems to which the Catholic Church has rendered signal service. For long years she has been receiving, controlling, and assimilating, one influx after another, of foreign people. Under her fostering care come, it is estimated, fully one-half of the vast number of immigrants daily arriving at our ports. She has held them for religion, and Has Held Them for Good Citizenship. No one can soberly reflect upon this great labor of education and restraint without being convinced that it has been a potential force in our public life. Nothing but a venerable and universal institution, which has weathered so many centuries, always the same, could have taken her incoming children and done for them what the Catholic Church has accomplished. Under the same fostering care are the great majority of our working men and women, boys and girls, who worship in any church; for no matter how prosperous some of her members may be, this Church never desists from serving the laborer, the poor, and the friendless. . ~ Respect for authority, regard for personal and proprietary rights, and habitual submission to law, inculcated in the church, school, and home, among so many employers and employed, must necessarily make for tranquility and industrial peace. . . But few who do not recognise the Catholic Church as the greatest single moral force in the world. It is the religion of a puissant spiritual power, which legislates, prohibits, and punishes. It appeals to the imagination, the senses, and the heart, without too great a strain on the reason, and supplies the invigorating atmosphere which is necessary to strengthen character and adapt it to the usages of 'our present existence. There is no country where this. Church is not to be found, rewarding the hospitality that receives her;

every field of the Old World finds her defending the various flags of every faith and upholding law and order. " Froude, the historian; says: ' Free, from all prejudices in favor of any nation or any political form of government, she allies herself with .all the principles which successively prevail in the various organisations of society, accepts them all:; but 'her faith and principles unchanged and incapable of change.' In every work of civic betterment, in every expression of patriotic aspiration, in whatever has been attempted 'for .;:■'. ■■/ '■£ The Well Being and Uplift of the Human Race, ;: the Church and its clergy have honorably and effectively; labored in the foremost rank. Unquestionably during the terrible condition from the middle of the sixteenth century to the middle of the seventeenth century, when Europe became drenched in human blood, and after the downfall of the Roman, Empire, and the, so-called German Holy Empire had broken into discordant States the Catholic Church became the most potential organ for enforcing peace and law. Seated on the hills once occupied by the Caesars, representing supreme spiritual authority, great Pontiffs came, like the early Gregorys, Leos, and Innocents, who proclaimed at the various centres of Europe a true and beneficial law, of nations, and the spirit of the blessed Founder of Christianity asserted itself in efforts to check the medieval flood of cruelty and war. Catholicism was the religion of England's most glorious era, the religion of her most ennobled patriots. The body of the Common Law was given by the Catholic Alfred; he gave the elective system and that great bulwark of liberty, trial by jury. And Edward 111. gave perfection to the representative system, and the statute against constructive treason was enacted. All through the Middle Ages the Catholic Church was the mainstay of the weak and protector of the oppressed. It has always been predisposed to look, at the labor question in a light favorable to the laborer. For example in Germany the Lutheran clergy have held aloof, while the Catholic priests have taken a foremost part in recent social discussions. The Church manifested A Remarkable Genius in the development and reorganisation of public charities—charity in fact, is the triumph of the Catholic Church; but not a charity which is an encouragement to improvidence and self-surrender. In the eloquent words of Judge O'Doherty, 'The Catholic Church is charity in action; the tongue of an angel would be required to do even measurable justice to Catholic ideals of charity.' ... With American Catholics there exists the most perfect harmony between loyalty to country and loyalty to Church; they are not only good Catholics in the Church sense, but broadly catholic in the secular sense of the word. Catholic primates illustrate the perfect union of service to the State and service to God; they are a bulwark against atheism and anarchy against tearing down of morality and government upon which the foundations of a country depend. Catholicism makes way at a growing .rate in the United States because the Government lets it alone. Here the enthusiasm which works miracles finds free scope. Perfect accord, without a concordat, exists between the Church and State in free America, and in this fortunate country of ours liberty and religion are natural allies, and go forward hand in hand.