PAPAL INFALLIBILITY.

New Zealand Times, Volume XXX, Issue 4338, 13 February 1875, Page 4

PAPAL INFALLIBILITY.

TO THE EDITOR. Sir, —Strong of my right, and trusting to your impartiality and justice, I ask an obscure corner in your columns for a brief reply to your remarks on infallibility, which you have brought prominent in a leading article. I beg your readers to whom those questions would be unpalatable to be patient and forbearing to their Catholic fellow-citizens, because they arc forced to come forward by a multitude of unfair observations and copious extracts from anti-Catholic journals in the colonial Press. Besides, silence would be construed into defeat, and might bring scandal. Let me now enter in the subject. In your long article I find you do not disprove a single sentence of mine. I still maintain, and it still remains true, that a Catholic ceases to bo a member of his Church if he refuse to submit to its decisions. Well, on the question of Papal infallibility, the Church, Bishops, and Pope defined that doctrine, as being contained in Divine Revelation. From the rules of that Church, as well as from a sacred ’ text, —Matthew 18c. ITv. —ii follows that those who refuse to submit, place themselves out of the pale of the Church. Here do not speak of majority or minority, because the Pope has decided, the Council having been almost unanimous on this point, mind ; also those bishops, who were against it, opposed not infallibility itself, but simply its definition, as being inopportune. But, sir, what do you do? After having exaggerated the number of the opponents, you represent them as acting against their conscience, and you make them play the part of knaves and hypocrites, by commanding to their diocesans to embrace cordially what they disbelieved most heartily. What idea must your readers form of Catholic bishops? Were they not free to disbelieve and proclaim their disbelief? Would* they have not been richly recompensed by parliaments and statesmen? Did not Prince Bismarck make to the whole of them most blandient advances. Sir, I thank you for admitting that at first there was an active minority in the Council on this great question. It shows there is a great liberty of debate in her bosom. You extractfrora documents of Professor Freidrioh. But I must toll you that those documents arc very suspect, because put together by a renegade, and their publication is the fruit of perjury. In those documents are made quotations from parliamentary evidence of Archbishop Murray, Dr. Doyle, and others. I know not the exact words made use of by those prelates whilst giving evidence, but I know that besides their having spoken long tune before the definition of the doctrine

of infallibility, they must have expressed themselves very cautiously, and as liberally as possible, before the Government Commissioners ; otherwise . they would have compromised the cause of eight millions of Catholics whom enemies of the Church had kept in bondage, and out of the pale of British Constitution for 300 years, and who, after almost superhuman aspirations for freedom, were at last on the eve of having burst open for them the doors of British Parliament. Here I admire how the Lion of St. Jarlath’s is praised and caressed. That is an exception ; for Archbishop Tuam is the constant target for all obloquy and insult on the part of the Press. But besides Irish bishops, there is the English laity who resist the dogma of infallibility. How many of English Catholic gentlemen who are stubborn against the Church’s decision ? Many, you say. Kamo half-a-dozen of them. I hear principally of Lord Acton,- Lord Camoys, and Mr. Henry Petre. On this" subject I will quote the London Tablet, Nov. 21. “ We, in common with the Protestant Press of England, can only interpret the letters of Lord Acton, Lord Camoys, and Mr. Henry Petre as an act of apostasy. Deeply as we regret their conduct on their account, we cannot affect to regret that the Catholic Church should be purged of those who had already inwardly apostatised, and were not of her. Some of the London and provincial papers profess to be astonished at the divisions thus exhibited among Catholics. We, on the contrary, see no sign of division. That three man, whose religious position has years been regarded with suspicion by their co-religionists, should at last openly declare themselves, and go out from amongst them, far from being a sign of division, is a proof of increased unity. Two of these persons are known not to have approached the sacraments for years, and one is said to be, a Freemason, while two are shockingly ill-instructed on religion, not knowing even upon what basis of certainty it is founded. The third had been notorious from his boyhood for a cold pride of intellect, which long since gave cause for grave anxieties to his friends, as to his future course. ’* To complete these informations, I will add that Lord Camoys is the peer who, by his single rote in the House of Lords a few years ago, carried the Divorce Bill and legalised adultery in England. He is advanced in age and had been Chamberlain to his Highness the Prince Consort; the atmosphere of the Court in which he breathed must have deteriorated his Catholicity. Those men should be listened to by The 2'hnes as mouthpiece of Catholics, and not Lord Petre and the Catholic Union. Sir, I coincide with you perfectly, when in point of resistance you put the Arlans of the fourth century and the Antifallibilites of our days quite on the same footing. - But you astonish me when you maintain that despite their obstinacy. and the excommunication of the Church, both remained members of the Catholic Church. With such views all are Catholics except the Catholics themselves. However, here is the climax in your editorial article. The Church is a tyrant, because she requires submission from her children to the doctrine of infallibility. Well, many will smile at that, knowing that there is no physical compulsion on the part of the Church to enforce that belief. What need have Catholics to be protected by* the Protestant Press ? If they choose to leave the Church, the door is quite opened. The Church a tyrant I Strange assertion amidst the co-temporaneous events. • All religious orders plundered, banished from Germany—over a thousand parish priests in prison ; bishops fined and imprisoned, because, forsooth, Bismarck is not allowed to appoint parish priests, to regulate clerical * education, and to govern in God’s sanctuary. The same 1 scenes are being re-enacted in Switzerland, the Bam.© * in Turkey, the same in Brazil. In Italy the GovernV ment make havoc of the Catholic property. Monks - and nuns are expelled from their houses, which are converted—some into ministers’ residences, some into theatres, and others into the worst places of debauchery : while the father of Christendom—the Pope—despoiled of all, a prisoner in his palace, is obliged, as it were, to stretch Ills hands for assistance. Sternly refusing the pension offered by the robbers, he rejoices at the acceptance of alms from his children. The real Catholics know who are the tyrants of our days. Lord Ripon and not a few of illustrious Protestant converts know it. All men of sense know it. But it is kept out of sight for those who are wilfully blind.— l am, &c. Catholic.