UNWHOLESOME READING.

Taranaki Daily News, 10 April 1920, Page 10

UNWHOLESOME READING.

RISK OF MORAL INFECTION. RESPONSIBILITY OF PARENTS. "The spreading plague of unwholesome literature" is the principal subject of the Lenten Pastoral issued by the IRoraan Catholic Bishop of Auckland. Dr_ Cleary addresses a word of caution to "the heads of families and to young people in regard to the "insidious class of" unwholesome magazines and works of tietion which are calculated to stain the fine flower of innocence and to inject the germs of moral infection into souls," and urges that it is the duty of parents to raise a family customs-barrier against the introduction of such moral infection among tiieir growing children. "Such fiction plays a more deadly part in the home than the germs of typhoid and of influenza," says Dr. Cleary, "and against it the Catholic house-father and house-mother should raise a merciless barrier of moral quarantine. The same remark applies to those unhappily large classes of magazine and book fiction, which advocate racial suicide, throw a halo of romance around violation of conjugal fidelity, and gloss over crime and vice as something for which the individual is not personally responsible, but for which the whole and sole blame is to be found in lack of free will, in heredity, economic determinism, or human society. Besides these there is yet another and poisonous class of fiction. It brings itg- readers—sometimes mere youths and maidens —into contact with the foullest thoughts of bad men and corrupt women, and with scenes and incidents such as those which (as St. Paul says) should 'not be so much as named among us.'

EDUCATION IN DEPRAVITY. "All these various-classes of unwholesome reading constitute collectively a liberal education* in depravity; they create mental pictures that may haunt the minds of youth for many a year; they are spectres of evil which are easiiv evoked but with difficulty laid. There is. a delicate and sensitive bond between faith and morals Such literature tends directly of itself to undermine good morals; in its indirect action it may gradually corrode and destroy that pearl of great price, religious faith itself. And this double danger is further aggravated by the too common lack of in regard to reading matter: by the" practice of promiscuous reading; and by the habit of rushing for thp 'latest' sensation in fiction as for the latest fashion in gowns and hats.

SYMPTOMS OF SOCIAL DISEASE. "These moral landslides in certain classes of fiction, of stage plays and of moving pictures, are so many symptoms Df social disease in our time. At root, this disorder is the result of a lack of moral restraint. And this lack of restraint is so widespread as to furnish a profitable market for the purveyors Of unwholesome literature. And, with the promiscuous reading habit of our time, demand and supply, supply and demand act and re-act upon each other and get us into a social 'vicious circle.' The contagion is spread among the untainted young, chiefly by the failure of parents to realise that books and magazines must be regarded as intimate company, and that "children need to be as carefully safeguarded from the contamination of the risky or unclean or suggestive printed page as from the defiling presence of men and women of evil life and abandoned character."

Dr. Cleary concludes with advice to parents as "the preventive moral hygiene and remedial measures" to be employed, and snegests as great a vigilance over the reading matter as over the visitors that are allowed into the home.