AMERICAN LETTER.

New Zealand Tablet, Volume IV, Issue 210, 13 April 1877, Page 9

AMERICAN LETTER.

(We are not responsible for the opinions of our Correspondents.)

To the Editor of the New Zealand Tablbt. Str, — I read the Tablet regularly, thanks to my Christchurch friend " Rathkealensis," who is always prompt in sending me the best Catholic paper in the colonies. I see in Australia, as in this country, the great strides Catholicity is making in spite of the intense opposition that the secret societies and all enemies of the Church are now taking against her. I am not surprised at the Puritanic hate that lifts its feeble head at the Antipodes, for the same hatred is as rampant in this Republic as it was among the silly bigots that were imported into New England in the much Yankee-adored " May Flower." As this is what is called the " age of progress," and as America is a go-ahead country, so renowned for its great inventionp, shrewd Yankee notions, bogus elections, crooked whiskey, and wooden nutmegs, the latest progress is in the invention of new Protestantisms, which are springing up all over, making the number now, so far as heard of, 346. "The Watchers of the Coming Man" are the latest, and as they say the only reliable. But in spite of all this bigotry that is hissed through Beecherism and all of that ilk, the old Catholic Church, that has seen the ruin of its enemies in all ages, is to-day destined in this land to become the stronghold of its teachings, adding more | lustre and purity to the reality of American independence. The onward course our holy faith is making here is unprecedented. Twenty years ago there was in this city one poor priest, who said Mass in a shanty, which could* hardly accommodati the little band of Catholics on Sunday; to-day, we have eight churches, their noble spires towering over everything in the city, and whose interior magnificence can vie with some of the historic piles of Continental Europe, all having their fine schools adjoining, which can each accommodate seven hundred children daily. I see the school question causes discontent in New Zealand as well as here. An American Catholic must pay taxes for a system of education he is no sharer in. Not only that, if he sends his child to the public schools, before his studies, a long chapter from King James's Bible ia read for him as an introduction to the insult offered to the faith of his fathers. This sectarianism is a blot on the name of freedom, and until it is abolished will meet the undivided opposition of the Catholic Church, which already is felt, as some State legislatures have suppressed the reading of the Bible. The financial depression that this country is going through at the present time is new in its history ; dull times all over, and idleness everywhere but among the politicians, who are at the present time sapping the life out of the constitution of this beautiful country. It cannot be otherwise, when from the bigoted presenttakers, Grant and his Cabinet, down to the pound-master, the worship of dishonest dollars goes on, whilst State prisons and penitentaries often only lend enchantment to their view. From present appearances this injustice and robbery will go on, as Hayes is ndarly counted in by the dishonest party now in power, backed up by a commission of vile political shysters, who own their position on the bench to their bigotry, and Grant's mismanagement, and who have, to the Nation's peril, boldly declared that fraud, perjury, and murder are as nothing compared with the success of their party. But the future looks threatening, and Congress boldly tell those traitors that Tilden's great majority will not or cannot be set aside, as the people's voice, from Alaska to the Gulf of Mexico, and from the Atlantic to the Pacific, comes in all its might to undo this wrong and to leave untarnished the great honor of being free men, under that grand old flag, upheld by the Constitution so nobly won and framed by Washington and his honored associates. — Yours, &c., Jersey City, Feb. 20, 1877. T. J. O'Connell.