Current Topics

New Zealand Tablet, Volume XXX, Issue 27, 3 July 1902, Page 1

Current Topics

A Contemptible Trick. One of the meanest and most contemptible of several recent attempts to deceive the public and poison the minds of the American people against Catholics in general and the Philippine friars in particular has just been exposed in the columns of a New York paper. It is a remarkable illustration of ' how history is made ' and of the difficulty — one might almost say impossibility — of completely overtaking a lie when once it has got a fair start. It appears that in ißq2 one John Foreman published a book in London on ' The Philippine Islands.' The book professed to be written by a Catholic and the words used by the author were certainly such as to justify the non-Catholic public in assuming that the work was really a Catholic work. The words we refer to appeared in the preface to the volume and were as follows : 1 May the love of veracity (a befitting attribute of a good Catholic) be sufficient justification for what adverse allusions may have fallen from my pen on that respectable body which has moulded the thought of generations of civilised masses and successfully brought them to embrace our most Sacred Creed.' It will be seen therefore that Foreman distinctly claimed to belong to the same ' most Sacred Creed ' as the friars themselves, and to be not only a Catholic but a good Catholic. * It was only to be expected, after such an intimation, tha l the non-Catholic public would receive the work as that of a Catholic and would place special trust and reliance upon it as being written by one who was himself of the same religious faith as the persons criticised— and that is precisely what did happen. One after another accepted the book as the standard work on the Philippines question. Thus a prominent Congressman, in an interview which appeared in the New York Post, said ' The best book on the Philippine Islands is that by John Foreman. I think it is the most dispassionate study of the subject we have had.' And the Chicago Interior, after making one of the usual slanderous attacks on the friars declared that the ' facts ' it referred to ' may be learned from John Foreman's " The Philippine Islands," London, 1892. Mr Foreman is a devout Catholic, and, writes after a painstaking study of the islands, their races and religious condition.' Even whole books have been built up upon the production of this self-styled Catholic. Of these, two have been specially mentioned, viz., 'The Philippine Islands, ' by Ramon Rayes Lala (Continental Publishing Company, New York, 1899), and ' The Philippine Islands and 'I heir People,' by Dean C. Worcester (Macmillan Company, New York, 1898). In the preface to the latur the author, who is a professor of Michigan University, says : ' I wish to say that I have drawn my historical facts 'chiefly from Mr John Foreman's excellent book, • The Philippine Islands ' ; and he asks his readers to bear in mind, while weighing his (Foreman's*) testimony the fact that he was himself a loyal Catholic' After a long quotation from Foreman he continues : c It is not from any lack of similar facts within my personal knowledge that I have quoted him (Foreman) so extensively in this connection, but for the reason that his religious proclivities place him above the suspicion of

prejudice which might attach to one not an adherent of the Catholic faith.' Thus not only the rank and file but the leaders of the people — politicians, editors, and professors — all pinned their faith to the testimony of this supposed 'loyal and devout Catholic' Was Foreman really a Catholic ? This question has been settled beyond all doubt by the investigations of Father Joseph Sittenhauer, O.S B. After reading the book, Father Sittenhauer easily perceived, from internal, evidence, that it was not the work of a loyal Catholic. A man who referred contemptuously to the Church as the Romish Church, who constantly spoke of Catholics as adoring saints and pictures, who called works of mortification follies, who referred to the unmarried state of nuns as an unnatural life, etc., had evidently received his ideas of the Catholic faith from other than Catholic sources. Father Sittenhauer, however, was not satisfied with the evidence of Foreman's fraud to be gathered from the book itself, but wrote direct to the publishers ordering a copy of the work, and requesting them to find out and inform him whether Foreman was a Catholic. The book came duly to hand with the answer as concise as the question had been : ' The author is not a Catholic' Thus the whole fabric of slander and calumny which had been based on this writer's supposed impartiality topples to the ground. So far as Foreman was concerned, the whole thing was a dodge to make the book sell, and sell it did, selling not only itself, but the people who swallowed the lie. Well may Father Sittenhauer ask : If such methods as Foreman's were necessary to give the cause of the anti-friars any semblance of truth, what must we think of their cause ? The Sorrows of Royalty. The heavy trial which the Royal Family have been called upon to bear in the King's sad illness serves to show how very little after all unlimited wealth and power can do to exempt its possessors from the ordinary woes and troubles of life. The sorrows of Royalty indeed are greater and more numerous than those of ordinary humanity. We do not know if the phrase, 'As happy as a king,' ever had much meaning outside the realms of fairy-tale, but it certainly has little justification in the hard world of facts of our day. Royalty has had in all Umes its full share of the great and petty fly-blisters that act as irritants upon the surface of human life. In 1759 — long before thrones became wobbly and royal heads began to have uncertain tenure of royal necks and shoulders — Voltaire Twho probably saw the drift of events; wrote to Lord Keith : — ' The more happy lam the more I pity kings.' In our days the anarchist, the lunatic, the fanatic — armed with dagger, pistol, rifle, pointed rat-tail file, or picrine bomb — have made royal lives worth shorter purchase than those of Whang the miller or Hodge the ploughman, or even than that of Mr, Thomas Atkins, although he belongs to . , . That noble trade That demi-gods and heroea madeSlaughter and knocking 1 on the head I And Samuel Butler sings : Ah me 1 What perils do environ The man that meddles with cold iron.

A year or two ago we gave a lengthy list of-tb^ European rulers, crowned and uncrowned, who fell beneath the assassin's hand during the nineteenth century. In addition to these attempts were made during the past forty years on the lives of Napoleon 111., Queen Victoria, the Emperor of Germany and Austria, the Czar of Russia, the present King Edward VII. (when he was Prince of Walesa, and the King of Greece. * But, independent of risks trom assassin or conspirator, many of the royal families of Europe have more than the usual share of the personal and domestic woes that fall to the lot of people in humbler station. Domestic bickerings are the canker-worm of the royal houses of Russia, Wurtemburg, and Prussia. Scrofula has set its mark deep in the royal house of Madrid; lung-troubles in that of Savoy. Insanity in a hopeless form is the woful appanage of the royal stock of Bavaria, and, to some extent, of that of Denmark. The poor insane ex-Empress Carlotta of Mexico still dwells in a palace in her native Belgium. The ex-Empress Eugenic is a lonely and heart-broken widow. The Emperor of Germany is the victim of a hereditary disease. Moreover, according to a contemporary, he 'now carries with him a small but serviceable revolver in his pocket, or in his belt when he is in full uniform. The threats of the anarchists have caused him to have recourse to this measure of security.' The late king of Holland died by inches of disease contracted in his youth. The royal family of England has had, even within the past few years, severe domestic trials ; that of Austria has been riven with a double grief within the decade. If the king and queen of Sweden have also their private skeleton in the closet, it does not appear in public. Plainly the mantles of kings Priam and Lear have fallen in shreds upon the royal palaces of Europe in our day. The Convents of Great Britain. One of the most striking evidences of the wonderful vitality and productive power of the Catholic faith in England is to be found in the extraordinarily rapid progress and spread of the convents and various charitable institutions throughout the country. In a new work just published in London, entitled 'The Convents of Great Britain,' Miss F. M. Steele tells the story of the rise and multiplication of these congregations of religious women, and the [extent and rapidity of their development is indeed amazing. In 1800 there were no more than twenty-one convents in England. In 1892 they had increased twenty-fold, there being nenily four hundred and twenty religious houses for w.mien. To-day, according to Miss Steele, tliere are over ninety distinct congregations of women, and the number of separate communities, nearly all of them possessing a chapel of their own, is over 600. Allowing an average of ten for each community this would give us, on the very lowest estimate, a total of at least 6000 nuns now settled in Great Britain. * In most cases these communities have developed from very humble beginnings. The common type is that which has its origin in two or three sisters being set down in a small cottage in some obscure village or town, where they steadily increase, until in due time there appears the full blown convent building, with its school, church, and gardens complete. Some of the establishments however are of quite an ancient lineage and have a varied and interesting history. Of all the ninety congregations now existing there is only one it appears that can be traced back to pre- Reformation times. That is the community of the Bridgettine-nuns, once at Isleworth, who were driven out and settled at Lisbon, whence they returned a few years ago to Chudleigh. An PZnglish Dominican House was established by Cardinal Howard at Vilvorde in 1661, and is now found at Carisbrooke. The oldest convent that has remained in its original primeval seat is stated to be that at Micklegate Bar, York. This was founded in 1686, scfthat it has now been two hundred and sixteen years in the one abode. Of this venerable building Mr. Percy Fitzgerald, in his Fifty Years of Catholic Progress, writes : — ' I recall visiting the place when a boy, having an aunt in the convent. It was then a modest but substantial dwelling-house of old pattern, with about a dozen windows in the front and a heavy porch over the door. Passing by many years later, I was astonished to see the change. Great buildings had grown up, stretching down the side, with a church, spacious gardens and grounds all overpowering the original ' Mother House,' which still seemed hardy and full of vigour.' * Full justice has not yet been done, and probably never will be done, to the part played by the convent institutions in the Catholicising of England. One thing at least is patent: the good nuns have lived down the odium and obloqjy which were the portion of the pioneers of the religiou, Orders in England, and have now gained a sure place in the favor and goodwill of even the non-Catholic portion of the community. The convents have come to stay, and marvellous as has been their

progress in the past, it is, after all, only an earnest of still greater things to come. The eloquent words of Cardinal Manning on the future of the Church in England apply with special force to the future of her conventual institutions : ' The Church is now seen, and heard, and known. Englishmen have now for more than 40 years been with us in our worship ; they hay« heard our preachers ; they have seen our colleges, convents, and schools ; they have laid aside suspicions, fears, hates ; in the open light of day these old superstitions are gone to the moles and to the bats. Educated Englishmen know us better. The poor in England have no animosities against the Faith of their Fathers. Our people are mingled with them ; and they labor together and live together. They are accustomed to see with no wonder our clergy and our Sisters visiting convicts. They were then in the first beginnings of our restoration. The walls were raised; but the mortar yas yet mo ; st> an(J fche structure had not yet hardened into its solidity. We have now a system covering the whole land. The Church in England is now so rooted and so fruitful that it needs only time to grow to its fulness.' A Boer Tribute to the Irish. Now that the war is over we shall probably get more than one history of the struggle from the Boer point of view, and in due time the public will have some chance of seeing the war in its true perspective. So far as we know, the first authoritative Boer version of the contest which describes the war with any detail is the volume entitled 'With Steyn and De Wet, 1 which has been just published by Methuen and Co. It is written by Philip Pienaar, an educated Boer, who himself took an active part in the fighting, and who contributed some remarkably graphic sketches to the Nineteenth Century during the earlier history of the struggle. The present volume — judging from the lengthy extracts from it which we have seen— is full of interest, and should be a very welcome addition to the literature of the war. The book has not yet reached this Colony, but our contemporary the Sydney Freeman gives a very full account of it, and we take from the columns of our contemporary one or two brief extracts from the volume which throw an interesting light on the Boer feeling for the Irish and their unbounded appreciation of the Irishman as a fighter. 'Sometimes,' says Pienaar, 'the merits of the different commandoes would be discussed. The palm was generally awarded to the Irish Brigade and the Jonannesburg Police, two splendid corps, always ready for anything, and possessing what we others painfully lacked— discipline. The burghers used to relate with much relish a story of how one day the British shells came so fast that even our artillerymen did not dare leave their shelter to bring ammunition for the gun ; how two of those devils of Irishmen sprang to the task, and showed how death should be faced and danger conquered. Erin for ever ! ' Again he says : 'In the camp they had six Connaught Rangers— a captain, lieutenant, and four men, about four of the lot wounded. They alone of all their regiment had managed to reach the bank of the Tugela Bridle Drift, about 200 yards from the trenches of the Swaiiland commando. Finding no shelter in the river bank, exhausted, wounded almost to a man, they ceased firing, whereupon our men left them in peace until the end of the fight, when they were brought over and complimented upon their pluck.' 1 he author has evidently a clear grasp, too, of the ' Irish Question,' and a full appreciation of, and sympathy with, the feeling which the Irish in Ireland have toward England, as the following passage will show : • On crossing the railway near Honingspruit we captured a train. From the newspapers taken out of the mail-bags we learned that we were being closely pressed, and that hopes were entertained of our speedy capture. We did not grudge the papers the pleasures of hope ; what we objected to was the crocodile tears over us poor misguided, ignorant burghers, who were too stupid to see the beauty of becoming exultant British subjects, like the Irish. 1 Father Thurston's Challenge. Some time ago we gAve. particulars in this column of a challenge recently made by Father Thurston, S.J., with reference to a disputed point regarding the moral teaching of the Jesuits. A writer in the London Referee, signing himself ' Merlin,' had trotted out the well-worn fable about the Jesuits teaching that ' the end justifies the means/ — a doctrine which they have over and over again denied and repudiated. Father Thurston then publicly offered to have the whole question submitted to an independent committee of expert scholars to be nominated by ' Merlin ' and the editor of the Referee, and challenged the commission to produce one single Jesuit theologian who taught such a doctrine. The offer and challenge were accepted, and there was every prospect of an inquiry being held which would settle the question to the satisfaction of even the most bigoted anii -Jesuit. Unfortunately however the

proposal has broken down. * Merlin,' the writer who started the controversy, states that he has for some time refrained from making any allusion to the proposed inquiry, because he has been hoping, in spite of many disappointments, that the matter 4M <ht be disposed of on the lines suggested by Father Thursslon, and accepted by himself. But he now announces definitely, as we learn from the Catholic Times, that it has not been possible to form such a committee of enquiry as was desired. Eminent scholars to whom the editor of the Referee and 'Merlin' appealed declined, with onejeonsent, to be burdened with a discussion which would, they held, be purely academic and unproductive. We confess to a feeling of regret that the proposal for a commission has come to nothing, for we are heartily tired of exposing this hoary old fiction about the Jesuits, and the finding of a non-Catholic committee of experts would surely be accepted, even by our enemies, as conclusive.