TWO NOTABLE PASTORALS

New Zealand Tablet, 13 June 1918, Page 13

TWO NOTABLE PASTORALS

Two notable pastorals were lately published in Spain, the one by the Bishop of Saurander, famed for his spiritual insight, the other by the Bishop of Barcelona, the storm centre of Spanish anarchy. The Bishop of Saurander is certain that the war is a divine visitation on the people of the West for their manifest wickedness, and he strongly inveighs against cinemas, theatres and dances as highly unbecoming, especially in these days of world sorrow and affliction. It betrays unspeakable callousness to frequent such places for amusement while fellow-men are dying by hundreds, and thousands are suffering excruciating pain. The Bishop of Barcelona, formerly a distinguished civil lawyer, then one of the formost jurists in Home, devotes his pastoral to a study of the social duties of the day. “True charity does not so much consist in giving bread to the needy as. in removing the cause of the necessity ; not so much in alms-giving as in procuring work for the unemployed.” A just salary includes “what is required by a father, with moderate co-operation of the mother, to bring up three or four children, and to allow of saving something for the contingencies of the future.” It is one of the sins crying to heaven for vengeance, not to raise the wages of the working men when it is clear that the increased cost of living weighs heavy on them.