The Need of a Catholic Press in France.

New Zealand Tablet, Volume XXX, Issue 16, 17 April 1902, Page 6

The Need of a Catholic Press in France.

No argument has ever been advanced for the existence of a properly supported, vigoro is Catholic Press so strong as that which Mr P. Hugh O'Donnell casually makes in the London Tablet, in concluding his essay on the causes which have led to the present enfeebled state of French lay Catholicism. Mr O'Donnell remarks, in speaking of that grand figure of French Catholic journalism, the late Louis Veuillot, of the Univent, that a great many of the evils Veuillot sought to prevent or to eradicate might never have become a danger, if it had not appeared to be as a fixed piece of impolicy to deprive French Catholicism of lay journalism as of lay learning. ' The ab ence of the latter,' says our writer, 'no doubt leacted upon the former. At any rate, at no period since the French Revolution, any more than before it, has there been a Catholic Press in France, at once popular, polished, eloquent, and ' convincing.' Mr O'Donnell mincea few words in placing the blame for this condition of affairs.

' Though ' he says, ' even the dimmest vision might have apprehended generations ago that reading must take a place that hearing could never fill, and that the congregations of the thinker who addressed the eye must be millions as compared with the hundreds who could be reached through the ear, this most obvious of decisive facts remained as unregarded aa if the provocation of calamity was the first duly of the shepherds of the people. . . . The indifference of hostility toward the provision of a popular press, clean in thought, bright in execution, iascinating in treatment, judicious in guidance, remained, as it remains, a characteristic note of the dominant imbecility. If ever it could be said of any Christian nation that it was carefully neglected at every perilous turning point and ou every critical occasion, this can be said of Catholic France since the Revolution, as well as long before that landmark of destruction.'

'You coull obtain,' points out the Tablet writer, 'the means for a stone memorial to any of the saints, or all the virtues ; but the best meJiatn of Catholic civilisation and culture for an entire nation remained an unnoticed necessity, until the devil, that excellent man of- busines-s, had securely covered every access to the popular mind wich his dirtiest and hia largest circulations.'