The Great Robbery

New Zealand Tablet, Volume XXXV, Issue 15, 11 April 1907, Page 10

The Great Robbery

The French revolutionaries of 1789 despoiled fthe Church of much ;- the atheistic Christ-hunters' of 1907 are stripping her to the bone. On ' page 11 of this •Issue we . reproduce the calm, and sober analysis which a learned American Protestant judge makes of the great act of wholesale plunder which the enemies of religion are now perpetrating in- unhappy and distracted France. A similar-, verdict as •to the illegality of the French spoliation wias given a few weeks ago in a Baltimore paper by the Hon. A. Leo Knot!, Professor of International Law .in that city. Two eminent American judicial authorities, tihus, unite in declaring, in effect, that the spoliation of the Church in France is a rank illegality, and on the :-&.me moral level as a vast case of 'organised highway robbery. ' Mr. "Knott ', says the ' Aye Maria !, ' cites opinions of Chief Justice" Marshall and Justice Story on .questions of sin Alar import that came up years , ago . in United States courts, and concludes his article with this statement :—

' " It will be thus seen that on this great question of the indefeasible rights of property, and the incompetency either of the King or the Legislature to annul them, and also corporate franchises when once granted, there is no difference between the Common Law of England and of this country and the Civil Law prevailing in France. Both of these systems of jurisprudence therefore condemn and reprobate the flagrant violations of tn'ese rights now being perpetrated by the French Chambers in their war against Christianity and the Church in France ".'

In Virginia there long existed a union between the State and the Protestant Episcopal Church. Churches, schools, and ot/her institutions were built for that' denomination by taxes levied upon citizens of every creed. Disestablishment came in due course,. In 1789 and 1801 the State Legislature passed a law to seize this property and devote it to other uses. This gave rise to the historic case Tennett e't al. vs. Taylor et al. The case was t ultimately decided by the United . States Supreme Court, .which declared that the Virginian Legislature had no .power to enact such laws, and that they were void and -of no effect.

When disestablishment took place in Brazir in TB9O, and in the Philippines a' few ago, the Church was in each case left in undisturbed possession of her property. No robber hand was' stretched against her eHher by Brazilian revolutionaries or by American conquerors.- Nay, in the case of the' Philippines, the Supreme Court ordered the restitution of the Church property which had been seized by the usurper Aglipay and devoted to the uses of a schismatical cult. Between' the years 1800 and 1844 the Protestant Church in Ireland received - (according to Godkin's * Ireland and Her Churches ') in grants from the public Treasury the enormous sum' of £2,301,725. Aubrey de Vere shows in -his ' Church Settlement of Ireland ' that the~ same religious organisation— the Church of -one-tenth of the peopler-received from Parliament and church and parish rates £1,710,134 for the erection of churches and of residences for the clergy. The vastly greater part of the church rates and parochial taxation was picked out of " the unwilling pockets of Catholics, often at the point of the bayonet. . Yet no Irish Catholi6 suggested, when Disestablishment was coming, the con-

fiscation of this vast property created out of the public purse. And such an idea never once knocked at the ante-room of the governmental brain, The Anglican Church in Ireland was- disestablished in 1869. The Act which severed its connection with the State left it (in full possession of "all its property, of the estimated value of £8,000,000 sterling, with an annual revenue of ,£,616, 840. / To "this was added the gift of a vast Commutation Fund given by the Treasury in order to secure vested interests and enable the existing clergy (whos^e* ranks had been hastily and largely increased in view of this provision) to receive the customary handsome revenues lor the - term of thtfcr natural lives. Such, in briefest terms, is a statement of how disestablishment, or the separation of Churoh and State, is carried out by Governments ihat are not bent (asMinister ' Briand declares the French Government is) on ; ' making an end of Christianity ' and ' hunting Christ ' • out of the country. -