RELIGION ALONE

Manawatu Herald, Volume XLI, Issue 2015, 14 August 1919, Page 1

RELIGION ALONE

WILL SAVE THE WORLD FROM RUIN. A TRENCHANT ADDRESS. In the course of an address at the opening of a new Catholic school at Wellington, on Sunday, Archbishop O’Shea said: “The truth is that most of the politicians, and nearly all the States of our time, are frankly pagan and materialistic in their public policy, at least in peace time. During the war they pretended to be different. Then they believed in religion. They had it in the camps and on the battlefield, and they paid public money for it, too, since they gave military rank and salary to the chaplains, and financial help to religion even in other ways. When there is no war it is different. One is tempted very much to quote the old saying: ‘When the devil was sick, the devil a saint would be. But when the devil was well’ —well, you know the rest.

DANGER OF COMMERCIALISM. “Commercialism and success in business is their god. They are calling out for more efficiency, in our education, but it is not spiritual efficiency that they are asking for. It is not something that will make men more virtuous and happier. It is not even something that will give each one a fairer share of the world’s goods, and enable the masses to live in greater comfort. It is only something that will enable us as a nation to capture more of the world’s trade, and smash any rival who will dare to dispute our commercial .supremacy. Of course, if this is the ideal to he aimed at by each nation, then secular education is good enough for the business, for its conception of man’s purpose in life is no higher than, say, that of the Japanese, which is a purely pagan and materialistic one. But we Catholics will have none of it, for we hold that man is the lord of creation, and that all the products and resources of the earth, all trade and all commerce, as well as all our institutions, are for him, and are merely means to enable him to reach his last end, which is happiness here and hereafter. And we believe, too, that if this spirit of commercialism is persisted in, it will continue to engender rivalries and wars, and lead inevitably to the destruction of our present civilisation. It would not be the first time that commercialism injured civilisation. Whole civilisations have been destroyed and wiped out even in historic times by the same canker. And what has happened before may certainly happen again. The power of wealth brings with it a kind of mental obscurity, and men who make the pursuit of it their chief object in life are blind to everything except their individual self-interest. A sort of golden fog prevents them from seeing the precipice to the brink of which the nation may be hurrying. NEED FOR RELIGIOUS EDUCATION. “Religion alone will be able to save the world from ruin and civilisation from destruction, but you will never be able to restore God and religion to their rightful place in the minds and hearts of men without religious education. Thank God, Catholics are doing their part, and will continue to do it on behalf of Christian education, and if the Christians of other denominations would do likewise the world would all the sooner return to its faith of

a few centuries ago, when things went better, and the youth of the country had not to wait for their first lesson of the difference between moral right and moral wrong until they received it from the lips of our Supreme Court Judges. But, no matter what other people may do, we arc determined to keep the flag of religious education aloft in this country, and more and more schools like the one we have just opened will continue to dot the land, and the leaven of true education will be spread amongst the people for the greater good, greater happiness, and true prosperity of this Dominion.”