CHURCHES AND STRIKES

Sun (Auckland), Volume III, Issue 813, 6 November 1929, Page 15

CHURCHES AND STRIKES

| MINISTER’S INDICTMENT CRITICISM IN AUSTRALIA The attitude of the Churches toward the coal dispute in Australia was severely criticised by the Rev. Sydney Herbert Cox in his address as chairman of the Congregational Union of New South Wales to the annual session of the union in Sydney recently. “The long tragedy of the northern coalfields, strike remains as a permanent indictment of the Christian Churches, Roman Catholic and Protestant, for their inefficiency and lack of weight in the long-drawn-out struggle.” said Mr. Cox. “It is doubtful if any more terrible verdict upon the organised Christianity of New South Wales has ever been passed in the century and a-half of the history of this wonderful State. “It does not matter whether individual members of this assembly blame coal miners more than coal owners, or seek to scourge the Cabinet more than Parliament as a whole. The fact is that the whole of our citizenship is to be held to blame. The prosperity, wellbeing, and honour of Australia’s oldest State have been held in derision before the civilised world by a small minority of the industrial community, and to the shame of a naturally progressive people.” Most of the newspapers had preached a fairly sound doctrine of fair dealing and commercial morality, but in the nature of the case no newspaper should be used as a pulpit. Newspapers could not be Roman Catholics 4>r Protestants, or act as Christian prophets, because they were always conscious of the mixed multitude of their readers. But the duty of the Churches was to seek an answer to the question, “What does Christ desire?” Mr. Cox continued; —“Before this spectacle of misery, greed, confusion, the vast Christian community of this great State had stood almost in a hopeless paralysis. The Anglican Church represents nearly half our population, and the Roman Catholic Church almost another quarter of the people of this State. The Council of Churches in New South W'ales, not including either of the above bodies, made a belated appeal for a conference with owners and miners. The owners declined, and the miners did the same. Could they be blamed? For long months the two largest Christian bodies, representing 70 per cent, of the people, had made no concerted effort to bring the shocking struggle to an end, and present a Christian solution to self-seeking opponents.

“Very late in the struggle the Anglican Churches were called upon to offer ‘special prayers’—merely a selected form of words uttered in

allegedly consecrated buildings. Does it add to the dignity of our conceptions of God to try and place on His shoulders the responsibility for the settlement of an industrial warfare, when the processes of settlement are clearly within our own hands, and can it necessary be deposited in a ballotbox? In four years there had been 1,97 S industrial disputes, of which New South Wales alone had had 1,640. Each year £20,00,000 was spent in Australia in horse-racing, not to mention other and almost equally powerful phases of the gambling mania. “A day ought to be set aside for laymen to talk to ministers, and sessions arranged for church secretaries j and deacons to talk about their problems. An American observer had declared that the world was at the end of a cycle of Christian history, and That denominational machinery had been exposed on every hand as incompetent. It was necessary to grapple with the world problem of the new generation of youth, and, among other things, with a scientific programme of sex education, which was a religious problem.”