FRENCH CATHOLICS AND THE PRESIDENCY

New Zealand Tablet, 3 April 1913, Page 19

FRENCH CATHOLICS AND THE PRESIDENCY

Poincare has been elected President of the French Republic, his rival Pams has been defeated, and the • result has been mildly welcomed by the French Catholics and even- by the Osservatore. Romano, not because Poincare is likely to be in the least friendly to religious liberty, but because Pams was the candidate of Combes and Freemasonry, and one is thankful for such small mercies in the political France of to-day as even the triumph of Tweedledum over Tweedledee (remarks Home). Poincare or Pams or Fallieres or Loubet, it really does not matter whichas Presidents they are figure heads for a few years and nobody thinks about them afterwards in France, or elsewhere. What becomes of them? A man who b'ves in Paris has written this little story in the Giorno of Naples. 'The other day while I was smoking a cigarette before the door of my house I saw approaching on the sidewalk among the few passers-by a little man. He was walking slowly with his hands in his pockets ; nobody noticed him; now' he stopped to gaze at a shop window, now he looked round him as if half afraid that someone might recognize him or half astonished that nobody did. As he passed me 1 noticed in his button-hole the faded red of the rose of the Legion of Honor. Curiously attracted, I studied him. from head to foot. The velvet on his collar was somewhat worn, his trousers were somewhat baggy at the knees. I followed him some distance we met many State employees, we met a number of persons wearing the same decoration as his, we met several policemen, but nobody saluted him or showed him any respect, the passing citizens did not raise their hats, the policeman did not stop the stream of carriages to enable him to cross the thoroughfare, and at last the little man went down a side street, crossed it, and disappeared in the crowd. The little man. was Loubet.' Yet it is only a few years since he might have been seen one day in the streets of Rome, seated in a carriage with the King of Italy, and tens of thousands of troops lining the way to do him honor because the Freemasons had sent him here to flout the Pope. Another day you were standing under the colonnades and the same carriage passed, quickly by. There was just a moment to recognise him —under those great walls of the Vatican he looked not merely small but microscopic, his passing was like the buzz of a summer fly, and as you turned to leave the

spot you instinctively raised your eyes to the dome. That evening the papers were full of the Presidential visit, what it meant for Italy, for the Pope, for the world, but you 'could hardly read them. They all seemed to tell in different words a new Aesop's Fable: The Fly and the Dome.'