Catholic Press Association

New Zealand Tablet, 4 October 1906, Page 9

Catholic Press Association

Bogus Vatican ' news ' ; malevolent, mendacious, or misleading anticlerical despatches from Paris ; sham Irish agrarian ' outrages ' ; and the rest of the fraudulent ' Catholic ' items that are sent to the ends of the earth by the cable-demon : we have had a surfeit of them for some months past. Catholics have thus been made to bitterly realise the extent to which the fastest-flowing channels of newspaper information in Europe have been captured and held by agencies hostile to the Ancient? Faith. A thoughtful lay writer in the latest issue to hand of the Adelaide ' Southern Cross ' advocates, in substance, the adoption of our scheme of a Catholic Press Association. By the same mail we received from an eminent Australian Prelate the expression of an earnest hope that Catholic newspapers in these countries would make a united effort to promptly expose those lying cable-messages that so often are dumped upon our shores from anticlerical and Masonic and other such-like hostile sources in Europe. Another devoted Prelate— poor as to shekels, but a Croesus in zealous and successful effort for the Kingdom of God— offers the munificent contribution of £10 a year to a live Catholic Press Association. There is in this matter the sluggard's tendency to patch our grief with the comforting proverb that 'hard words break no bones.' But are we to wait to be beaten black and blue by the cable agencies before we take steps for effective self-defence ? And how long shall we continue to let the cast mud dry and -harden upon the fair face of our Mother, the Church, before we raise a hand to wipe it away ? Grave misrepresentation by cable would he mended or ended by an active, well-equipped, and well-organised Catholic Press Association, working in, as to these countries (if that could 'be arranged), with the secular agencies, and with the various Catholic Truth Societies and such organisations as the Auskunftstelle der Katholischer Presse of Germany. We have for years advocated this means of meetitig and worsting careless^ or malevolent European cable-agents on their own ground. And we ' are confident that such an organisation will be in beneficent operation before many years are past.