That ' Religious Revival'

New Zealand Tablet, Volume XXXI, Issue 15, 9 April 1903, Page 2

That ' Religious Revival '

You may hope to extiact sunbeams from cucumbers, r.ut you must not expect much that is creditable in the sort of alleged ' 1 ol'ormation ' or ' religious revival ' that is being carried on by the excommunicated aboriginal cleric Aglipay in the distant Philippines NonCatholic religious papers in Austialia and New Zealand have, with indiscreet haste, espoused the cause of the discredited ex-cleric, crowned him with a Bvummagen halo, and forgptton his cruelties as a Filipino military leader, simply because he is knocking his head like a battering-ram against the walls oi ' Home.' In our issue of March 19, we described his ' movement ' as ' almost wholly a political one, both in its methods and its aims.' The justification of our statement is coming in at the rate of a mile a minute. A special cable-mes-sage to a recent issue of the New York ' Sun,' for instance, has the iollowing to say legaiding Aglipay and his tag-rag and bob-tail following ol ne'er-do-wells and Katipunero fanatics — ' E\ idence is accumulating,' says the ' Sun ' message, • whuh practically confirms the belief that ' Bishop ' Aglipay 's schismatic movement is degenerating into a triangular political combination with the Worl.mgmen's Ijnion and the Nationalist party, and that it is absoibmg a majority of the n reconcilables in the Nationalist party r lhis combination is a natural result of the necessity for widening the field of Independent Catholicism The demands made by the leaders of the movement ior subscriptions for the r support and for the rent of chapels are gi owing onerous. Recently the entne movement has shown signs of weakening. r J he initial excitement is vanishing The problem of welding the schismatics b a files the so-called reformers. "Bishop"

Aglipay has practically made no change in the doctrine of Catholics beyond refusing to recognise the Pope. The future of the movement will probably be largely political.' • It Is well that Catholics in New Zealand should know the facts of Aglipay's ' remarkable religious revival,' as serious misstatcments concerning its nature and extent have been copied from certain non-Catholic Church publications into the columns of several of our New Zealand daily papers. The collapse of tho idle stories about the alleged ' levolLs lrom Rome ' m Aubtua, France, and England, will be fresh in the minds of our readers. A Protestant correspondent writing a shoit time ago in the London ' Daily Chronicle ' says ot the puny leaders of those so-called ' revolts ' : ' These gentlemen can generally be classed under one or two headings : (3) Persons who afterwards become a credit to no one ; and (2) persons who return sooner or later to the Roman obedience,'