DIOCESE OF DUNEDIN

New Zealand Tablet, 27 November 1913, Page 35

DIOCESE OF DUNEDIN

His Lordship Bishop Verdon administered the Sacrament of Confirmation in Queenstown on Sunday. The annual' entertainment by the pupils of the Christian Brothers School takes place in His Miajesty’s Theatre on Thursday evening, December 18. As usual, an excellent programme, _ consisting of vocal, dramatic’ an d gymnastic items, will be presented, and patrons can rest assured that the entertainment will be well up to the standard of past years. On Saturday evening the members of the St. Joseph’s Harriers met in the St. Joseph’s Hall for the purpose of making a presentation to Mr. Claude M. Collins on the occasion of his approaching marriage. Mr. J. A. McKenzie, in asking Mr. Collins’s acceptance of a handsome spirit stand and kettle, referred in eulogistic terms to Mr. Collins and to the high esteem in which he is held by all members of the club. Several other members of the club spoke in the highest terms of Mr. Collins, and wished him every success. Mr. Collins suitably replied,, and thanked the harriers for their most valuable token. Preaching at the 11 o’clock Mass at St. Joseph’s Cathedral on Sunday, Rev. Father Coffey, Adm., dealt in a general way with the present industrial crisis. In some quarters, he said, it was urged that the Church should interfere, but there was a certain unreality in this demand, for the Church was blamed if it did interfere, and it was also blamed if it did not interfere. The Church was not a political organisation, and it was not her place to interfere as a partisan in such disputes. Her function was to teach , people the moral law and the Christian principles applicable to social problems. These latter had been admirably and fully stated in Leo XIII.’s famous Encyclical on Labor/ and if the principles laid down in that remarkable document were only known and applied, the present condition of things would not exist in our country to-day. The rev. preacher pointed out that Leo XIII. was the first to

propound the principle of arbitration and conciliation now so widely adopted, and the constitution of the courts, as suggested by him, was the most democratic conceivable. Father Coffey also quoted the Pontiff’s remarks on the subject of strikes, and pointed out that if they had been written in our own time and country they could not have Been more apposite to the state of things prevailing here. He emphasised the points that the extreme socialistic ideal was utterly visionary and impracticable ; that no one body of officials should have the right to call on large bodies of men to down tools, and that a strike should only be called as the result of a secret ballot of all who were affected, and that it was his duty as a Catholic priest, while earnestly anxious to do everything possible for the furtherance of peace, to protest against the irreligious and blasphemous utterances to which some of the strike leaders were giving expression. He explained fully the principles of the Encyclical, showing that every worker had an absolute right to such wage and conditions of work as would maintain him in health and comfort; that no man, or body of men, had any right to a monopoly of land or other means of production; and that both employers and employed were bound to observe the eternal principles of honesty and justice.