THURSDAY, APRIL 10, 1902. THE ARCHBISHOP AND BISHOPS' PASTORAL. The New Zealand TABLET

New Zealand Tablet, Volume XXX, Issue 15, 10 April 1902, Page 16

THURSDAY, APRIL 10, 1902. THE ARCHBISHOP AND BISHOPS' PASTORAL.

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.

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HE Pastoral Letter recently issued by the Archbishop and Bishops of the Colony and published the other day in full in our columns will no doubt by this time have been read by all with the interest and attention which, - both for its own sake and on account of the

source from which it comes, it assuredly deserves. The Letter, it will be noted, is devoted entirely to a discussion of what is known as the ' Education Question,' a fact which will of itself be a source of extreme satisfaction to all who have the true interest of the Church at heart. There can be no doubt whatever that the educational difficulty is the one great obstacle to the Church's rapid progress in this Colony, and so long as the proper settlement of this question is delayed, so long as the crying injustice involved in the present state of things continues, we are working against a dead-weight that handicaps and hampers us at every turn. It is certain, too, that there is a reai need just now for a word of exhortation on this matter. As the Letter says, ' Public opinion in this country is not yet, prepared to redress this great grievance, and seems callous to our efforts to bring it to a sense of the glaring injustice which the present public school system inflicts upon one-seventh of the C olony's best and law-abiding citizens ; ' and this callousness on the part of the general public has tended to produce a certain amount of hopelessness and con - sequent indifference amongst Catholics themselves. It is well, theretore, to have the whole subject brought freshly and fully before U3, and to have from ' those who Lave the rule over us ' a fall and adequate statement of what the the Church wants in this matter, why she wants it, and how we may hope to obtain it.

The Fathers of the Council begin at the very beginning by pointing out the one radical and fatal defect of the present system and by explaining precisely why it is that Catholics do not and cannot accept it. That defect is, of course, the failure of the secular system to recognise the religious element in man and the lop-sidedness and absolute irreligion which are t: c necessary consequences of this omission. 'We clearly perceive,' write the Fathers, ' and emphatically affirm the fact that all men need education, but we steadfastly hold to the principle that a system of instruction which fail.'i to recognise that religion is essential both to right thinking and right living, is necessarily defective, and may, in a given set of circumstances,- be a curse rather than a blessing.' And again they say ; ' The originators of the public school system of this Colony had, we would fain believe, no irreligious intention. But this does not affect the necessary tendency of such instruction to produce religious indifference, and consequently to destroy the power and influence of religion ; and hence, be the intention or purpose of the upholders of this system whatever you please, they are in point of fact the most effective allies of the propagators ot unbelief.' And the serious and absolutely baneful effects of the system are finally summed up in the following striking passage : ' Let us state the unvarnished truth. The homogeneity brought about by these godless schools is a homogeneity, a sameness of irreligion, a practical negation of all Chiistian beliefs during five consecutive days of every week of the child's life, with nothing adequate to counteract it on Sunday. It is the cancelling

<*)£ Christianity from the life of the nation.' These are statements to make, but that they are indeed ' the unvarnished truth ' the Fathers prove bj an effective appeal to contemporary history, particularly in the United States, and to actual admitted fact in the present condition of our own Colony.

There are certain regular stock objections which are commonly and constantly urged against -the Catholic demand for justice in educational matters, and these are considered with a patience and fulness to which their intrinsic merits certainly do not entitle them. The idea that the secular system is 'democratic' is shown to be entirely erroneous, the truth being that religion is the real Palladium of our democratic liberty ; the notion that the public schools are in some mysterious way 'superior' to the Catholic schools is proved to be an assumption and a delusion ; and the defence of the present state of things on the ground that we must have a homogeneous or uniform system of education is shown in its true colors as absurd, undemocratic, unchristian, and irreligious. But by far the most practical and most persistent of the objections put forward by those who refuse to endorse the Catholic demands is the plea that these demands are not feasible. That is, in particular, the favorite refuge of the politicians. * We admit the injustice you suffer under,' they will say ; 'we cannot help feeling sorry for you, and if we could do anything for you we really would, but, you know, what you ask isn't feasible.' Well, the Fathers of the Council have pricked that little bubble and shown clearly and unmistakably that State aid to denominational schools is entirely practicable, and has worked smoothly and admirably wherever it has been fairly tried. ' Such a fair distribution to us (of the taxes levied for education) is,' say the Fathers^ ' quite feasible. England and Germany, Pi-otes-tant nations, have denominational schools supported by the public purse. AVith them education without religion is in- ' conceivable. In the several hundred neutral or mixed schools in Germany religion is part of the curriculum. The same holds good for colleges, or gymnasia where religious education is obligatory.' And again they say : 'It is beyond all question that the establishment of separate religious schools is feasible ; for the most intensely Protestant nations in the world insist upon them ; have no difficulty in adjusting themselves to the diversity of creeds ; arid have found by experience that instead of dividing the country they weld it together, by permitting men to have their dogmatic differences, and. thus inciting these very divergences to send from every direction their multitudinous streams that pour down from a thousand different sources, and swell each in its own way the great common current of morality, which thus reaches every condition of society.' For the future Catholic electors will know exactly how much reliance to place on any politician who again attempts to fool them with this ' not feasible ' nonsense.

Having thus cleared the ground by pointing out the essential defects in the present system and by disposing of the objections commonly urged against the Catholic demands, the Fathers of the Council proceed to lay down, in a pointed and altogether admirable passage, what precisely these demands are. 'As far as our schools are concerned,' they say, ' we have often indicated an easy course for the Government to satisfy us. It would be to acknowledge our schools as public schools, paying them, under Government inspection and examination, for their results in purely secular instruction, leaving their religious training entirely to ourselves. By this proposal we claim "an equal wage for equal work " ; we claim that public moneys contributed by all classes of the community, from whatever source they come, shall be paid equally to all schools which fulfil the standard educational requirements ; we claim that no one should be compelled to pay taxes in support of schools of which he cannot conscientiously make use ; .that no one should be fined by reason of his religious opinion ; that schools doing the common work of the nation must be .placed, as far as secular instruction .is cuncerned, on the basis, and not^be fined because they give instruction in one extra subject— religion.' That is "terse, clear-cut, unambiguous. To add to it would be to spoil it, and to attempt to explain it would be superfluous. It is essentially

a statement that says what it means and means what if says. It is the whole Catholic position in a nut-shell, and so clearly and admirably put that he who runs may read.

Then comes the grand crucial question, How is the desired result to be obtained ? What are the means and method we are to adopt in order to secure the redress to which we have established so good a claim and for which we have waited so long ? The recommendations of the Letter on this head are certainly sufficiently temperate. There is nothing violent, nothing aggressive, nothing that 'could offend the most fastidious ' in the injunctions laid down. ' We enjoin our Catholics,' says the Letter, • to be registered \ and to be ready to take an intelligent interest in all public matters ; we enjoin them to exercise most faithfully and conscientiously their rights snd discharge their duties as good citizens.' So much in a general way. As to the particular exercise of these rights we have the following :— ' Any candidate of our faith who by word or act opposes our just claims in educational matters is wholly undeserving of our support, and should be treated as an enemy. As for non-Catholic candidates, many earnest-minded men recognise the injustice done to the Catholic body, and are willing to redress this injustice without interfering with the present Public System of Instruction ; we exhort all Catholic voters to give their support to such honorable and fair-minded men.'

That is good so far as it goes, and if all the Catholic voters in the Colony did faithfully and conscientiously discharge their duty in this respect such united action would no doubt have an appreciable effect. But to us it seemsclearly evident that something more is needed before we can indulge in any reasonable hope of final success. Even if our Catholic voters did manage to return a number of friendly members and if we did succeed by any lucky accident in securing a snatch victory in the House we would gain no real or permanent benefit from it so long as the public opinion of the country is against the measure of reform. For our own part we have the most assured conviction that there is one way, and one way only, to ultimate success, and that is by educating public opinion to the justice and reasonableness of our claims. It would not be by any means such a difficult or hopeless matter as many , think. Let Religious Education Leagues (consisting of Catholics and all non-Catholics who would join) be established in all the chief centres of the Colony ; let suitable leaflets be prepared and distributed ; let lectures and discussions be arranged ; and we venture to say that after three years of honest energetic work in this direction the Catholic education question would have ' a great • deal more vitality in *it and be a great deal nearer settlement than it is to-day. We have neither time nor space to say more at present, but may return to this matter again. In throwing out the foregoing suggestion, we do so, we need hardly say, in an entirely non-committal and non-official way, but, for our own part, we are convinced of this, that unless some Forward Movement of this kind is m ide, the Catholics of the Colony will have to carry their heavy burden for many a long year to come.