Leze Majesty

New Zealand Tablet, Volume XXXIV, Issue 4, 25 January 1906, Page 2

Leze Majesty

The nuns that remain in the hospitals of Paris have been adjudged guilty of the crime to which the Germans give the formidable name of Majestaetsbeleidigung. Which^ being interpreted, meaneth leze majesty or treason. The pious women have been guilty of believing and practising the Christian faith, and of devoting their lives, without earthly fee or reward, to a whole-hearted service of the sick and poor. Such rank treason was not, of course, to be tolerated by rulers who (as the 1 Saturday Revliew ' recently said) are waging a war to the knife, not so much against Catholicism as against bare belief in God. And so the little ' traitors '—that served their country so nobly on the battlefield and in the pest-stricken cities — are to be bundled out penniless, and left to live or (starve or die as fate or circumstanca may determine. 'We have,' said M. Brisson, on& of the standard-bearers in the Freemason campaign against dented women, ' driven God out of the schools, the barracks, the navy, the hospitals, the asylums, and other public institutions, and it is now our duty to consum--mate our great work by turning. Him out of the State.' Here is the declaration of war, made for the twentieth time in all its brutal and blasphemous frankness. * Well, we can easily recall some interesting results that followed a similar course of hospital ' laicising ' that took place a few years ago at Marseilles. A fortnight after the nuns had been driven out, the mlicrobq of the bubonic plague got its microscopic fangs into the population of the city slums. The Ste Marguerite Hospital was transformed for the occasion into an institution for the treatment of plague patients. ' All the nurses of Marseilles,' says a report of the incident, 'refused to attend the patients, and the authorities were in the end compelled to apply to the Bishop of Marseilles, Mgr. Andrieu, for nuns for service in the plague hospital. Mgr. Andrieu selected eighteen among a large number who volunteered, and placed them at the disposal of the Prefect and 'of the Municipal llospitaLs committee.' When the present irreligious fury has passed, the nuns will also return to their beloved poor in the hospitals of Paris. We may apply to Australia and New Ziealand the remarks which the ' Saturday Review ' made regarding the attitude of the English press towards the war against religion which is being waged with such savagery in lodge-ridden France : ' It is remarkable that, "in a country which so ostentatiously boasts of its Christianity as England, the press should treat the effacement not only of Catholicism, but even of the bare idea of God, from a neighboring and just now favorite nation, with indifference or approval.'