RELIGIOUS INSTRUCTION

Manawatu Herald, Volume XXXII, Issue 809, 8 February 1910, Page 3

RELIGIOUS INSTRUCTION

IN STATE SCHOOLS

CRITICISM BY CARDINAL

MORAN

CAUSTIC REPLY BY MINISTER FOR EDUCATION

Svdnky, February 7. Rkuoious instruction in State schools in New South Wales is apparently responsible for a certain amount of sectarian bitterness. A cable message slates that at Sydney last Saturday Cardinal Moran, in distributing prizes, made an attack on the Minister of Education, He said that the Scripture lessons given in public schools were not only irreligious but defective in literary merit. The Minister for Education had said that the lessons were the joint production of Anglican and Catholic prelates, Archibishop Whately and Bishop Murray. The statement, said the Cardinal, was a falsehood, and such a barefaced one that the Minister either made it knowing it to be false, and if so was unfit for the place he held, or he made the statement through inconceivable ignorance, in which case he was educationally not qualified to be Minister for Education. The Cardinal declared that non-sect-arian education as it was called was nothing more than a nondescript system of irreligious belief, which might be more or less conformable to Protestant principles and consistent with Protestant tenets, but as viewed by Catholics was a stereotyped system of infidelity and agnosticism. The Minister for Education, the Hon. J. A. Hogue, says ; —‘‘The Cardidal has broken out again, once more breathing out denunciation of myself. After a fortnight or so of muffins and meditation he has come forth spi.itually refreshed from his beautified retreat, and as a result of his commuuings with the Saints and the Prince of Peace he has invited me to tread on the tail of his episcopal coat. He keeps on damning our educational system with all the renewed strength cloister training can give him. Our system of nonsectarian education was ‘‘a stereotyped brand of infidelity and agnosticism,” They had heard nonsense of this kind before. It had been sufficiently convincingly answered, and it was enough to say that the system of education was based on the deliberately expressed will of the people. The Cardinal had charged him with deliberate falsehood. He had scarcely expected such language from one who had come clothed in the special sanctity of a spiritual retreat, and supposed that if he were to tell the Cardinal that such language was anti-Christian the latter would reply that that was a matter he (Mr Hogue) knew nothing about. He doubted whether the people would accept Cardinal Moran as an authority on the qualifications of an Education Minister. The Cardinal would wait many weary days and take many prayerful retreats before he saw Australian legislation so fast in the grip of his or any other Church as to hand over the work of education from the State to religious denominations. The Cardinal found faults with the books used. It might be very agreeable all round if, say, the history of Europe was treated without reference to the Reformation by Marlin Luther, the Huguenot massacres, the sale of indulgences, the Armada, the Inquisition, and such things, but it would not be a history. It might be agreeable if it were solemnly taught that the Reformation was unnecessary, that Luther was a crank, a sort of discontented strike agitator, that the sale of indulgences was a myth, and that the Catholic priesthood of the sixteenth century was as pure and spotless as those who went into retreat in the twentieth century, that the sending out of the Armada was«a defensive act, that the Church had nothing to do with the St. Bartholomew massacres, and that the Pope never ordered the striking of a medal to commemorate the butchery. Cardinal Moran declared he had no fear of Catholic children being proselytised. Then what did he complain of? He was constantly attacking the State schools. If his accusations against the schools were true would Catholic teachers remain in the service or Catholic parents allow their children to attend ? Assuredly not. They knew that the Eliminations against the schools were not justified. Such attacks did no service to Christianity and no harm to the State schools.”