THURSDAY, FEBRUARY 20, 1902. A RECORD OF PROGRESS. The New Zealand TABLET

New Zealand Tablet, Volume XXX, Issue 8, 20 February 1902, Page 17

THURSDAY, FEBRUARY 20, 1902. A RECORD OF PROGRESS.

The New Zealand TABLET

* To promote the cause of Religion and Justice by the ways of Truth and Peace. } LEO XIII. to the N.Z. TABLET.

§HERE is something peculiarly inspiring in the stately onward march of Catholic progress. The record of even the advance of the Church in mere numerical strength has in it something that is suggestive of the march-past of a con- . quering army. It differs in many points from such outward signs of progress as may be here and there visible in the sects. Ihey have no unity, no cohesion, and the tendency is to be broken into smaller and still smaller fragments as time goes on. The Church is truly one — one not merely by an outward verbal consistency, but one in heart and mind and spirit. Her 250,000,000 children of every race and clime and tongue are * careful to keep the unity of the spirit in the bond of peace.' While no degree of external pressure has ever been able to induce the semblance of doctrinal unity among the sects, the Catholic Church remains one in spite of all the efforts of political power to break it to pieces.

To this hour the Church is fulfilling, as eagerly as she did in the days of St. Patrick and St. Boniface, the divine commission to * teach all nations.' A series of figures published below, and taken in part from a recent issue of our valued contemporary, the New York Freeman's Journal, gives in broad outline an idea of the numerical results of this world-wide exercise of the Church's apostolate in many lands. In the Chinese Empire, for instance, in 1800, there were only 187,000 Catholics. In 1900 there were a full million Chinese in the unity of the Fold of Christ. During the same period the native Catholic population of India rose from 457,000 to 2,000,000, and the missionaries who g aided their footsteps heavenwards increased from 22 to 2000. In Japan, the marvellous results of the preaching of St. Francis Xavier were practically destroyed by the fearful massacres of native Christians that marked the various outbreaks of persecution in the land of the Rising Sun. * Japan,' says our New York contemporary, ' was lost to the Church. It was not until 1850 that a Catholic priest was permitted to land in Japan, where there are now five bishops, 130 priests, and 45,000 Catholics. In the numberless islands of Oceanica there were no Catholic missions 40 years ago. To-day there are in these islands 100,000 Catholics. Such is the splendid progress the Catholic Church has made in China and the adjacent countries.'

The dawn of the year 1800 saw no Catholic, and no white man, in New Zealand. In the little penal settlement or * convict hell * near Botany Bay — the only place in the Australian continent that was at the time pressed by the foot of the western stranger — a knot of desolate Irish Catholics, dragging their heavy irons for real or supposed complicity in the ill-starred but gallant struggle of 1798,

were the only representatives of the Old Faith in the southern seas. To-day there are upon the shores washed by the same seas about 1,000,000 Catholics, with an organised hierarchy of 30 prelates exercising episcopal jurisdiction. Looking back upon the changes that had been wrought in the Catholic life of Australasia up to their day, the Fathers who were gathered together at the Plenary Council of Sydney in 1885 could say : ' The prevalent impression on our minds during these days of our Council is one of intense thankfulness to God, Who has so blessed the mustard-seed of the Faith in the Church of Australasia. At a date so recent as to be quite within the memory of men still moving among us, there was not one priest nor one single altar in all these southern lands. It is not simply that the ministrations of the Church were poor and scant, but, as a matter of fact, it did not exist.' And then, having reviewed all the varied evidences of the progress of the Church in Australasia in 1885, they exclaimed — and we may, with even stronger reason and appropriateness, exclaim to-day : ' Such a contrast between the beginning and the close of a century is unexampled in history. Such a blessing of fruitfulness is unparalleled since the early age of the Apostles.'

We have time and again detailed the advance made by the Catholic Church to the premier position in numerical strength among the several hundreds of religious organisations that exist in the United States. 'In the last year of President John Adams' administration ' ("1801], says the New York Freeman, * there were only one bishop, 30 priests, and 30,000 Catholics in the United States ; in the last year of President McKinley's Administration there were 18 archbishops, 82 bishops, 9000 priests, and over 10,000,000 Catholics. Across the border in Canada during the same time the number of Catholics had increased from 63,000 to 2,000,000. In another English dependency, Newfoundland, the Catholic Church did not exist in 1800 ; to-day there are 72,800 Catholics there. If to the millions of Catholics here enumerated we add the 40,000,000 in South America, it will be seen what a vast audience on this side of the Atlantic Leo XIII. addresses when he speaks as the Supreme Pastor.

As far back as 1882 a non-Catholic writer gave evidence in the Edinburgh Revieiv to show that ' Germany, the cradle of the Reformation, has become the grave of the Reformed faith.' Some time ago we quoted Rev. Dr. Williams, Rev. Baring Gould, and other Protestant writers who gave testimony as to the wonderful and varied activity and progress of the Catholic Church in the Fatherland since the days of the Kulturkampf. A recent issue of the Philadelphia Catholic Standard takes from the Lutheran Observer, of the same city, a series of statistics which disclose a rapid falling away from Lutheranism, and a marked movement towards the Old Faith, in Luther's own land. The figures referred to are taken from the Kirchliche Statistik — an authoritative work by Dr. Pieper, a Lutheran ' pastor emeritus ' — and they give the respective percentages of increase of the Catholic and Protestant populations in Germany from the year 1871 (just after the beginning of Kulturkampf movement) till 1895. The first table published by our Philadelphia contemporary 'shows a total increase for the 24 years on the Evangelical side of 153*65 per cent., and on the Catholic of 265*98.' Prussia, commonly called a Protestant State, had ten and one-third million Protestants and eleven million Catholics in 1895, and (still according to Pieper's figures) 'from 1871 to 1895 the Catholic increase was 33 per cent., and the Protestant increase 26 8 per cent.' In certain of the Prussian provinces transformations of population have taken place which are described as ' simply stupefying in their extent.' Here, for instance, is a table showing the respective percentages of increase in the following provinces :—: —

The Lutheran Observer publishes an alarmed editorial comment on Dr. Pieper's tables In order to bring out the significance of the learned Lutheran pastor's tables, it asks its readers to remember : — (1) That Prussia contains about two-thirda of the entire German population, and in many of its separate States and great cities has been regarded as the veriest stronghold of Protestantism. Yet in the space of twenty-four years the Catholics increased in that territory more than six per cent, faster than the Protestants. (2) That in the Kingdom of Saxony, which was almost the very cradle of the Reformation, and in Hesse, which was its valiant defender, the Catholic per cent, of increase is in the one case nearly four times, and in the other about one and a-half times as great as that of the Protestants. (3) That the Protestant excess in Bavaria, where the Catholics are nearly twice as numerous as the Protestants, and in Wurtemborg, where the Protestants are more than twice as numerous, and in Baden, where the Catholics have nearly twothirds of the population, is relatively less, and is both relatively and absolutely less significant. As for the much larger Protestant increase in Elsass-Lorraine the excess is due to the removal of the French, that is, the nonProtestant, elements of the population after 1871 ; to the presence of the fifteenth army corps drawn mostly from Northern Germany ; and to immigration from all parts of Germany. 'To get a great nation back again into the fold of Boniface would be,' says our Philadelphia Catholic contemporary, ' a glorious achievement for the twentieth century to inscribe on its banner. And to such a sublime hope indeed the index finger of an eventual time seems surely pointing.'

last Prussia ... Vest Prussia ... Berlin trandenburg ... 'omerania ... 'oeen ... iilesia ... lazony iohleswig-Holitein I Evangelical 175 18*7 186*6 42-05 11-9 139 182 35-5 373 1. Catholics, 27-9 35-8 418*4 377-8 120' d 33-4 42-4 49-9 1109-2