Catholic Progress in Australia

New Zealand Tablet, Volume XXXIII, Issue 24, 15 June 1905, Page 19

Catholic Progress in Australia

A PROTESTANT EDITOR'S VIEWS.

The editor of the ' Imperial Review ' is a Protestant.^ Brt he l.ceps his eyes pretty wide open. And this is what he has to say in reference to the solid pfoRies that is being made by the Catholic Church in Australia >— ' The demise of Bishop Moore, of Ballarat, affords a text for some remarks on the much greater progress of the Catholic Church in Victoria and New South Wales' as compared with that of any, or all, of the Protestants. The Catholics are oily about a fifth of tlie population, vet everyone allows that they outweigh the four-fifths in rclisious influence, so far as that can be brought to bear in a, secular way, and their almost universally crowded churches, on Sunday mornings, as compared with the meagre average of the Protestants, is a proof that their faith is very much livelier. Protestantism

clings to the mean skirts of the rich, while Catholicism) and the Salvation Army are drenched with cash from the working classes. ' Let us go to the very fundamentals, and declare that clergy celibacy is the main explanation of the superior progress, in certain new countries of the Catholic Church. The married man cares for his wife, the single clergyman is absorbed in his Church. He has a great deal more) influence, and is received with a great deal more confidence, in family life, because there is always more or less dread of the clergyman's spouse, be she good, bad, or indifferent. The married clergyman is always iiu'ddling and hustling for a rich city billet Then look at the horrid poverty endured by most clergymen's wives, while the luxurious ones are contemptuously indifferent, and the public says . " It is just a trade with the doctrine adapted \o what will take." ' Archbishop Carr and Bishop Moore are very similar men, but Moore, although it was impossible for him to accomplish a tithe of what the Archbishop .has done, bad the more pleasurable task of building right up fiom the foundations. 'He was the constructive ecclesiastical statesman, not only in his fine Cathedral and numerous churches which he made out of nothing, except generous souls, mostly Hibernian, but also in launching off young men's clubs, with his St. Patrick's Hall, which gave the impulse to Archbishop Carr for his plucky establishment of the Melbourne Cathedral Hall, and our suburbs are well following suit in a determination to have the Catholic young men for God, while the Protestant efforts in that line are miserable trickles in comparison ' Archbishop Carr, one of the greatest men of his generation in the Catholic Church, dropped upon the Melbourne archdiocese in succession to the timid but sufficiently dogged G'oold, who required to have his hands held up by such laymen as O'Shanassy and Duffy. Carr haa towered abo^\e every layman in bold initiative, and triumphantly breasting the adverse current of one of the most terrible financial crises in the world's history, a cyclone centred upon Melbourne. Out of this nettle of danger what a flower of safety he has plucked, not merely holding his own, but easily beating all the other denominations put together in chi'ircn building, with'such a maze beside of stone, brick, and wooden edifices^ the outward and actual denoting the inward and spiritual, as Carlyle would say. ' Nor has Sydney lacked a general of high capacity in Cardinal Moran. ' It was a mistake to place an Englishman there, e\en such a noble one as Vaughan. The Irish rose to Moran like trout jumping out of the LiFey, and he has not been afraid to declare himself an Australian Republican, while .Archbishop Carr leaves Caesar alone.'