Here and There

New Zealand Tablet, Volume LII, Issue 7, 18 February 1925, Page 45

Here and There

Catholics in New House of Commons,— There are 18 Catholics in the new "House of Commons, as against 23 in the former House.* The number of Catholic candidates was 39. _ • Mr. P. J. Hannon (Tory) polled the greatest ■ number of votes —24,333, and three— Harney (Liberal), Sexton (Labor), and J. McVeagh (Labor) —the former Irish Nationalist, polled over 20,000 each. Air. McVeagh was defeated. Two of the Catholics forfeited their nomination fees£lsohaving polled less than one-eighth of the votes. The 18 members consist of 10 Tories, 6 Labor, 1 Liberal, and 1 Independent. The most notable among the Catholic members of the new British . Parliament are Sir Gerald Strickland, a former Australian Governor; J. Wheatley, ex-Minister for Health E. A. Harney, a former West Australian Senator; J. Sexton, the Dock Laborers’ secretary; Jack Jones, the irrepressible member, for. SilvertoAvn; T. P. O’Conner, J. F. Hope, brother of Mrs. Wilfrid Ward, and one of the Hope-Scott family; F. N., Blundell, sou of “M. E. Francis,” the novelist Lord Colum Crichton-Stuart, brother of the Marquis of Bute; and Sir N. Grattan Doyle, director of the. Northern Newspaper Syndicate. . Among the defeated candidates were Sir M. Archer-Shee, the bitterest of anti-Irish Diehards; Jerry McVeagh, Pat Collins (Liberal), the showman; W. A. S. Hewins, one of Lloyd George’s minor Ministers; C. Diamond, the militant journalist; and M. McCartan, the Irish Republican. * * * Millionaire .Becomes Trappist. —Recently at the Trappist Monastery of Soligny, the solemn profession of Father Mariz Marie Albert was received. The new religions was, in civil life, M. Van der Cruyssen, formerly entrusted by the Belgian Government with important economic missions to the United States, Germany, Italy, and Holland. Before entering Holy Orders, M. Van der Cruyssen, who was a millionaire, left his entire fortune to the Belgian Association of the Catholic Middle Classes and to the club 7 lieu et Patrie which he had founded. The profession was attended by AI. Maurice Pirmez, first Vice-President of the Belgian Chamber and former President of the Catholic Youth, by tAA’o other Belgian deputies and many prominent citizens of Brussels. Cardinal Alercier sent a telegram of felicitations, and a message was also received from M. Van de Vyvere, in the name of, the middle classes. M. Van der Cruyssen, who enlisted at the age of forty, brought back from the Avar the rank of captain, six medals, and the French and Belgian War Crosses. He was cited in Belgian army orders as “seeking and carrying out intrepidly the most audacious undertakings and the most- perilous reconnaissances.” He laid his decorations in the „ chapel of the Abbey near the altar of' the i Sacred Heart, with the decorations of the twenty-two French Trappists who were ; mo- ! . bilised. The collection includes seven Croix de Guerre , a Cross of the Legion of Honor

(that of the ' brother porter, an ex-captain of colonial artillery), seven palms, eleven stars, and six medals of various kinds. O * • , Passing of . a Noted French Scientist.— Death has robbed Catholic France of one of , her most distinguished scientists. This is the Abbe Rousselot, who was for many years a professor at the College de France and at the Catholic Institute. Abbe Rousselot was the inventor of the science of experimental phonetics, and during the war he rendered very valuable services to the Allied cause. One of his inventions made it possible to locate the enemy battery positions by sound ; another device detected the presence of moving enemy submarines. For these services he was nominated Chevalier of the Legion of Honor. * ff 9 Cot His Chance. —“Arthur Rubinstein — whom I should have mentioned among the best raconteurs 1 ever met —was talking to us of the jealousy among great singers,” says Mrs. Asquith, in the London Magazine. “He said that two tenors were chosen to take the same part on alternate nights in a new and arduous opera which was being produced in Milan. The first had such a dazzling success that the manager had not the courage to put the other on the stage, and the second tenor remained for ten days in obscurity and despair. In the last scene of the opera the hero encounters a bear. He kills the bear, and standing on its dead body sings the final aria, which invariably brought down the house. The part of the bear was played by the theatrical hair-dresser and one day the second tenor persuaded the good-natured barber to let him take the part. When the final scene arrived, to the amazement of the audience the bear refused to be killed, and sparred with the hero to such good purpose that he felled him to the earth. Standing on his prostrate body he flung off his disguise and sang the aria to a perplexed but enraptured audience.” * * * Jacobite Ancestry of Lord Mayor.— don’s Catholic Lord Mayor, Sir Alfred BoAver, will learn with much satisfaction that Cardinal Gasquet celebrated his jubilee Mass in Rome wearing the vestments- once used by the Cardinal Duke of York. For the Lord Mayor comes of an ancient family that staked its all on the cause of the Catholic Stuarts, and lost. The Bowers have been English for nearly two centuries now. But the family goes back to pre-Reformation ; days, when the Bowers were merchants of Dundee. The great grandfather (as well as ■ his father, too) of the Lord Mayor of London > were out in 1745 on the side of Prince > Charles Edward Stuart, styled the “Young ■ Pretender” by the valiants of the Protes- ; taut Succession. When the Hanoverians tri- • umpired the Bowers fled to England, first

to Yorkshire and later to Hampshire! ; The Lord Mayor thus boasts of belonging to a family that has never harbored a Protestant among its members! 'X\- v \ * * * Mr. Chesterton on Lourdes. recent great Lourdes demonstration at the Queen’s Hall, London, was quite the most imposing meeting of the kind that England has ever seen. Cardinal Bourne was supported by the former King of Portugal, and a considerable cluster of ambassadors and diplomatic Ministers, commonly looked on as a hard-faced tribe, shocked sophisticated Londoners by publicly attesting their belief in Lourdes. The star speakers of the evening were the incomparable pair, G. K. Chesterton and Hilaire Belloc. Mr. Belloc spoke on Lourdes and the Modern Mind, while Mr, Chesterton, in speaking on Miracles and the Supernatural, had many , a dig at the modern sceptics. Anatole France (Mr. Chesterton said) guarded himself against the “dangers of Lourdes” by announcing beforehand that even if a miracle happened he did not propose to believe it. “Even-if a man lost a leg, and another grew in its place, he would not say it was a miracle, but would say it was a manifestation of the power by which crabs and lobsters grew new limbs for old ones. He was prepared, to. believe that the thing had happened naturally. And then they say he was a sceptic ! I wish we had a tithe of that colossal faith.” * • * Traces of the Ancient Faith. Despite the somewhat bitter Puritanism of modern Wales there are still (says a Home paper) strong traces that the Wales of old was second to no country in her devotion to the Blessed Virgin. These traces are most strongly marked in the prevalence of prayers, hymns, and practices which attest in a most remarkable manner that Wales was at one time intensely devoted to Our Lady. Many Welsh people to-day are accustomed to - say in Welsh, the “Hail Mary” in its medieval —without the - final invocation. These people, would be greatly astonished if told that the same words are in common use by Catholics.