ATTACKS ON THE HOME

New Zealand Tablet, Volume LII, Issue 16, 6 May 1925, Page 33

ATTACKS ON THE HOME

It is a grim satire upon human inconsistency that while everywhere there is a tendency to deify the State there also exists a. firm determination to degrade tho home. On every side voices are raised to demand that the State should displace God as the giver of human rights; that it .should regulate all our domestic affairs; that it should remove every cause of disagreement among men by reducing each human being from the status of a. rational free-willed creature to a kind of duplicate part of tho social machine; that it should pander to lust and inconstancy masquerading as freedom and progress by tinkering with marriage which God has proclaimed indissoluble; that it should unsurp the duties of parents and train the children itself; that it should consecrate each child at the altar of bureaucracy and instil into young minds all the fantastic rubbish with which unbalanced doctrinaires are obsessed; in short, that tho State should become responsible for everything which God in His infinite wisdom gave to each individual man the reason and free will to do for himself. The same people who demand unlimited State interference as an antidote for human ills fail to see that everything which strikes at tho stability of tho home must necessarily aim at the destruction of tho State. Divorce and birth control are two evils high in favor with modern State worshippers. The two things go together; for married people who feel that their marriage might be terminated at any time will not care to burden themselves with a family. It was thus in the ancient world from which many of our reformers seem content to draw their theories without examining the baleful effects of those theories as disclosed by history. Birth controllers use a megaphone to tell us that tho world is ever-populated; free lovers defend divorce on tho ground that married people find each other’s society unbearably monotonous, and that it were cruelty to deny them the right to sever their union at will. And now from the other side American papers tell us that Dr. A. S. Pinto, Health Commissioner of Omaha, Neb., is bringing a Bill before »ho State Legislature to annul marriages, that are childless after a period of two years. Thus, from all quarters at once. State worshipping fanatics conspire to, attack the only institution that can preserve the State from ruin. The Catholic Church

is often named as the enemy of the State, chiefly because she will not surrender to a collection of short-sighted and foolish men the rights and authority conferred upon her by Christ to be used for the rational uplifting of man in the spiritual and inter-, mediately in the material planes. Yet the Church to-day is the only staunch and rational defender of the State. She would preserve it from self-destruction. Her influeneo is always directed towards the preserration of the home, and the State is only a. collection of homos. The world directs its efforts towards the destruction of the home, and that is equivalent to attacking

the State. The Church regards man as a rational though infirm creature, and thus her teaching, when followed, has always made for a well-ordered society. The world, on the other hand, speaks of man as a god and treats him as a tool. Hence the chaos, hence die ghastly evils before which even those responsible for them stand back shocked and appalled. Yet, some day, when they have ruined the world beyond redemption with their quackery they will be heard blaming the Church for having failed to do what they prevented her from doing and reviled and persecuted her for attempting to do.