Current Topics

New Zealand Tablet, 2 July 1914, Page 21

Current Topics

The Mails and the 1 Menace’ The New Zealand .Postmaster-General has come in for some slight criticism—mostly at the hands of one or two anonymous correspondents of some northern papersfor his action in banning the Menace, with its indecent advertisements, from distribution through the New Zealand mails. lie lias had, of course, no difficulty in vindicating his action. lie declares that he was quite uninfluenced by the religious (!) views expounded in the paper, and that ire did not even trouble to read its general contents, lie merely glanced at the marked advertisements, saw at once that they came under the statutory definition oi indecency, and, in accordance with the powers conferred upon him, prohibited their dissemination through the post. The Canadian authorities have bean guided by a still higher standard of duty; and.have not been at raid to say so. In a memorandum, dated Ottawa, Anri I 2, Dr. 11. M. Coulter, Deputy Postmaster-General, thus enunciates the policy of his department in connection with such matters: ‘Any paper discussing religion in an abstract way is responsible for its own opinions, and we do not in any way interfere with such papers. Men may be Protestant or Catholic in the extreme, and may hold their views in the extreme, and give pronounced expression to them in the most extreme way, and the post office department would not interfere at all. Put when personal abuse, reflecting on the honor and chastity of women, and on the clergy of an) denomination as a whole, is indulged in, or when women of a certain faith are reflected on, as has been done in tho Menace, then this department understands it as its duty not to allow such things to pass through the mails. This is the law which the department has followed in the past and intends to follow in the future. It has been and will be applied impartially to all papers, Catholic or Protestant, which may indulge in such things.’ ‘When this case was brought to the attention of the department,’ continues the memorandum, ‘ and when the columns of the paper were examined and the statements contained therein concerning many of the people of our country, there was nothing for the department to do but to live up to the law and debar this paper from the privileges of the mails.’ That is the proper stand for any cleanminded administration to take; and the Canadian authorities deserve the thanks and admiration of all good citizens for their firmness and outspokenness. A Question of Statistics : 4 The Decay of the Church of Rome ’ Mr. Joseph McCabe and his diatribes against the Catholic Church turn up in strange places. His work entitled The Dean/ of the Church of Rome., published in England in 1909 and already almost forgotten in that country, has been drawn upon by an enterprising but not very scrupulous Protestant writer in the North Island for the purpose of deceiving the guileless Maori, and of impressing him with the absolutely false idea that the Catholic religion lost its maun and that the Church of the nations is now a waning and declining force. In the Karr re o te Mono —or M esremjer of Truth ■ —a Protestant publication circulating in some of tho Maori districts, there appears, as we are informed, an article entitled the A t/oihoreian o te Haiti o Roma — * The Weakness of the Church of Rome.’ Our informant, a' Catholic Maori missioner, intimates that tho article follows McCabe closely, and that, in particular, the writer makes the following statements on tho authority—a somewhat strange one for a professedly Christian writer to followof the avowed agnostic ‘ln Italy there are now 26,000,000 Catholics; 6,000,000 secessions in 70 years. ‘ In Spain and Portugal there are 20,000,000 Catholics ; 4,500,000 secessions.

‘ln Spanish America, 50,000,000 Catholics; secessions, 8,000,000.

‘ In Germany, there have been lost to the Catholic Church 5,000,000 of her members : in Austria-Hungary, ■i ,000,000 in Switzerland, 500,000; in Belgium, 2,500,000 in Holland, 300,000 ; and in Russia, 0,500,000.’ Therefore,’ continues the writer, ‘in 70 years 80,000,000 members of the Catholic Church have separated from her. The total membership of the Catholic Church is at present 190,764,378.’

It is a shame to seek thus to impose upon the manly, honest, and trusting Maori, who cannot, of course, be expected to know how matters stand in regard to such questions. It will be sufficient for us to say that Mr. McCabe’s statements arc either sheer assertion, pure guess work, or merely personal estimates, arrived at by methods that arc not only unscientific but in some eases absolutely ridiculous, and that his figures are in flat contradiction to accepted and authoritative statistics on the subject. As an' illustration of Ins methods, we may take the absurd process by which he reaches the assertion that in Italy there have been 6,000,000 secessions from the Catholic Church in the last DO years. First, he quotes Dom Roinolo Murri—himself a. suspended priest—as saying that the educated classes arc hostile to the Church : and then be proceeds: ‘As one-ha,lf of the population over the age of six (that is to say, about 14,000,000) arc now literate, tbs reader may draw his own conclusion. For mv purpose modesty is desirable, and I assess the loss to the Vatican in tho last fifty years at 6,000,000. That is where and how the author gets his six million * recessions.’ The first statement in this syllogism—if wc can dignify this argumentation by such a name—-is the mere unsupported assertion of a. suspended priest ; the conclusion is a piece of pure guess-work ; and it is by such absurd methods as these that a man who poses as a scientist attempts to make the world believe that the Church of the ages is on the way to extinction.

Put let ns take Mr. McCabe’s statements one by one, as they are above set forth. In Italy, according to the Statesman's Year-book (1908) —universally recognised as a high and absolutely impartial authority—the latest census returns show that 97.12 per cent of the population profess the Catholic faith. The actual figures given in tho census returns are 31,539,863 Catholics, out of a population ox 32,475,253. Mr. McCabe ‘guesses’ the number of Catholics in Italy at 26,000,000 ; (lie actual census returns show them to be 31,500,000. And the Statesman's Year-book adds: ‘Scarcely any other positive creed as yet exists (in Italy) but Roman Catholicism.’ So much for Italy. In Spain, ‘ the national Church,’says the Statesman’s Year-book (1913), ‘is the Roman Catholic, and the whole population of the Kingdom adhere to that faith except about 30,000 (Protestants, about 7000 ; Jews, about 4000; Rationalists, etc.).’ The total population according to tho census of 1910, was 19,588,688; and deducting the total noii-Catholic population as above given—30,000—we have the number of Catholics as 19,550,000. In Portugal, prior to the revolution of 1911—and Mr. McCabe’s figures arc for that period—the Catholic faith was the State religion. The Statesman's Ycar-book gives tho number of Protestants in Portugal in 1900 as 4491, and that of Jews, 481. The total population was 5,423,132, leaving the Catholic total at 5,418,000. The total number of Catholics for Spain and Portugal was thus just on 25,000,000, or 5,000,000 more than Mr. McCabe’s ‘guess.’ As to Spanish America, Mr. McCabe, in his book (p. 98), practically admits that out of a. total population of 65,000,000, there are 60.000,000 who ./profess the Catholic faith; and his principal criticism is that some of these are only nominal Catholics, and that a very large number are illiterate. For the present we are concerned only with the numbers : and Mr. McCabe’s admitted total of professing Catholics —60,000,000 —may be allowed to stand. The ‘ loss ’ of seven or eight millions is proved in the same ridiculous and unconvincing fashion as the falling away of six millions in Italy was established.

( In Germany, Mr. McCabe is pleased to place the Catholic decline ’ at 5,000,000 souls. Authoritative statistics on the contrary show that the Church is not only increasing, but is increasing at a faster ratio than the general population. We quote from the Statesman's Year-book lor 1913: Catholics in Germany in 1900, 20,327,913, or 36.1 per cent, of the population; Catholic population at census of 1910, 23,821,453, or 36.7 per cent, of the total population. Thus at the verytime that Mr. McCabe was writing his book, the Church in Germany was gaining in numbers at the rate of more than three and a-half millions in ten years. Regarding Austria, Mr. McCabe says in his book (p. 233) that in 1900 the Catholics were returned as 23,796,814, or 90.99 of the population. As usual, no authority is given; also as usual, the statement turns out to be an utter misstatement, made presumably for the purpose of creating a fictitious ‘ loss in the later years. The actual census figures for 1900, as given in the Statesman’s Year-book, show the Catholics to be 20.655.000, or 79 per cent, of the population. The census returns for 1910 give the Catholic total as 22.530.000, a gain of nearly two millions in the decade. Hungary, in 1900, according to the census figures, had 9,919,913 Catholics, forming 51.5 of the population. In the census of 1910, they numbered 10,888,338, and were now 52.1 of the population. In Switzerland, according to the census of December 1, 1900, Catholics numbered 1,379,664. At the census of December 1, 1910, they had risen to 1,590,792: and the progress of Catholicism in this little country during the century is shown in a table given below. Coming to Belgium, the Statesman’s Year-book for 1908—the very time Mr. McCabe was writing his book—remarks: ‘The Roman Catholic religion is professed by nearly the entire population of Belgium. The Protestants number only 10.000, while the Jews number about 4000’— this out of a population of 6,693,000. Yet the fertile imagination of this statistical Ananias is able to discover a ‘loss’ of no less than 2,500,000.' In Holland, the Catholic population at the census of 1899 was 1,790,161 : at the census of 1909 it had risen to 2,053,021 : and the remarkable growth of the Church in the Netherlands during the century is shown in the table given , below. In Russia, according to the census returns of 1897, published in 1905, the ‘ Roman Catholics ’ numbered 11,467,994. They now amount to 13,000,000, and form 8.9 per cent, of the population. In the brief space of four years (1905 to 1909) there were no less than 230,000 conversions to the Catholic faith. We may add that Father 11. A. Krose, S.J., whose book, Kirehllsrhes J/andbnrh far das Kafholische Deutschland, is recognised as an authoritative publication, places the total number of Catholics in the world at 292,787,085. Even if we were to accept McCabe’s absurd under-estimate — l9o,ooo,ooo — that figure would still leave Catholics the largest individual body in Christendom.

So much for the particular statements of Mr. McCabe that have been submitted to us. Questions as to the number of adherents of the Catholic Church, or of any other church, are not to be settled by guesswork or by the absurd ‘ estimates ’ of biassed partisans, but by appeal to actual facts and figures ; and this appeal the high-priest of Rationalism invariably shirks. It is to be noted, moreover, that the question at issue is not whether there have been occasional leakages or losses, from special causes, in this country or in that, but whether the Church’s losses have in the aggregate outAveighed its gains. Viewed from this broad standpoint, the fact is beyond question that the last hundred years have witnessed a spread of Catholicity, and at the same time an intensification of Catholic life, almost Avithout a parallel in the whole history of the Church. In this connection the following list of the conquests made by the Church during the past century will be found both illuminating and inspiring. We have prepared it partly from figures published by the Abbate M. Stradelli, of Bologna, and gathered by him from

the most reliable sources, and partly from the returns (published in the Annuls of the Pi'ojKiyutiun of the, faith for January, 1913. The figures tell their own tale of marvellous all-round advance, and show that there has been no pause in the steady onward movement of Catholic progress.

* Including the Philippine Islands.

With figures like these before them, Catholics can .allord to laugh at the ponderous and portentous volume in which Mr. Joseph McCabe so solemnly preaches The Decay of the Church of Home.’

No. of Catholics No io. of Catholics in 1800. in 1900. England in 1800. in 1900. 120,000 2,180,000 Germany .. 6,000,000 20,321,441 Holland 300,000 1,822,000 Switzerland ... ... 420,000 1,300,000 Roumania 16,000 150,000 Bosnia-Hcrzcgovina 25,000 398,000 Bulgaria 1,300 28,000 Servia 6,000 20,000 Greece 15,000 44,000 Africa A few thousands 850,000 Asia 9 f ... 4,600,000 United States of ” 4,600,000 America 40,000 22,587,079* Canada 160,000 2,250,000 Australasia — 1,270,000