Current Topics

New Zealand Tablet, Volume XXXV, Issue 48, 28 November 1907, Page 9

Current Topics

Catholic Schools ' Ah" ' important amendment ', says last Monday's 1 Evening Star ' (Dunedin), ' has just been made in the" ' Education Act, whereby children attending Catholic and Maori schools will come under the compulsory clause*. The truant inspector at Wellington, Mr. J. Dineen, reporting on this subject at the meeting of his Education Board on Thursday last, stated that the change would be welcomed by teachers in those schools, as well as by himself, for his inability to- take action in the "past had resulted in poor attendance. In several instances parents after receiving warnings from the -truant inspector had. transferred their children from the public schools to Catholic schools, and had thus been able to break the compulsory clause with impunity.' •Faked' Maori Relics Of the ' faking ' of Old Masters, old curios, Greek, Roman, and Egyptian antiquities, there is no end. And now . the process has come home to our own door in New Zealand. Some one has remarked that, to be deftly swindled, is not wholly without its joy. There ' is thus some modicum of ' compensation for the many who are ' taken in ' by false Maori relics, some of which} shown to us a few days ago, would almost deceive even the elect. The ' New Zealand Times ' states that the art and craft of producing spurious Maori relics and curios is apparently on' the increase. In- an- interview with a collector and vendor, our Wellington contemporary's representative learned that there is ' a large trade both in Birmingham and Germany in tikis, meres and other sham Maori « relics.". Allegedly genuine tikis, of which an immense number are sold, are made of specially-blown green glass, and those ornaments and weapons made of bone are copied with great exactness by the, skilled tradesmen of the places named. It is alleged that the bones «are duly buried to give them the appearance of age. Many of these curios are imported from the Old Land to New Zealand, where they find a ready sale among tourists, who, of course desire to show their friends some relic" which has historical associations. It is asserted that many curio dealers in New Zealand refuse to inform the public as to the genuineness or otherwise of these articles. At present . gun-locks alleged to have been found on Maori battlefields and having every "appearance of age are being manufactured in the Homeland and are selling readily, lickets bearing a time-w.om appearance are attached, and the antiquarian has to be particularly acute to distinguish between the real and the " fake." ' She does not Lose . ° The life of the toughest man or boy or hobbledehoy is so frail and sensitive that a child may drive it ' out with the ball-end of a knobkerry, the edge of-- -a lancet, or ,the point of a needle. But of quite different stuff and texture is the vitality of the Church of God. No might of fleets and armies, no poison of ancient or modern errors, no force known to man, and not even the gates of hell and the powers of darkness can destroy the, God-given life that, fortified by the Holy Spirit, is, to endure 'even to^ the end of the TT rr c + "»:° ad ° pt - ano * ber fi g ure of speech; the barque of St. Peter is . self-righting, uncapsizable, and unsink-able-atrue life-boat in the spiritual' sense/ And its capacity for ' keeping serenely right-side-up and sailing: gaily on, after the. hardest buffeting of wind and wave has many a time exercised the minds of observant nonCatholics. This, in a recent issue of the London 'Daily Mail', Mr. George Sampson says regarding the Papacy • victory rests with the side whose real weapons are

not gross gains and Wayonets, though it has often availed itself of such worldly advantages. Its strength lies otherwise; and be it emperor or statesman or individual that finds something to challenge and attack in many-sided Rome, the end is ever the same— the world seems to wiiv but the Church does not lose; and the worldly combatant goes, after all, to Canossa.' [ Catholics can never- raise the cry : ' The Church in danger ! ' The winds may blow, and the billows may rise, and the Lord may seem to sleep. But in "His good ' time he has eyer^-as He did on' the Sea of Galilee long ago— commanded the winds and the waves, and after the storm came the calm. Self-protective Water-drinking ' Mr. Dooley ' spoke well when he. said :. « Whiskey ain't food, \ He declined to class it with lobster salad. 1 It has its place ', said he, ' but its place is not in a man's ,head. The • roinyit a man relies on it f'r a !- crutch, he loses th' use iv his legs ' ; and although it may be « a living f'r some orators, it's th' death iv, bookkeepers ». The horse, in Aesop's fable, sought and obtained the aid of man against his enemy the stag. But the upshot of the brief alliance was this : ,the horse became and remained the slave. of his human ally. In like manner, the man who invokes the aid of King ■ Alcohol against the onsets of such enemies as illness, affliction, lassitude, or ennui, too often finds himself, in the long run or the short, the bondman of his former ally, with an, .intellect dimmed, a heart corrupted, and a will enslaved. The strenuous as well as the simple life discards its adventitious and too often treacherous and dearly bought aid. Thus, the American business man has, perforce, to abandon ' fomented and speTichus liquids,' as Artemus Ward calls them. Mr. John Foster Frazer, the observant author of ' America at Work', was forcibly struck .by the abstemiousness of business men in the matter of alcohol. ' I have ',7, 7 says he, ' lunched in. a room with a hundred of the leading business men of New York, and I have not seen a glass of beer among the lot ; water was the only beverage used. A iran who took alcohol in the^ middle of the day would be looked upon with as much suspicion as\. a bank manager in England would be who was always "to be found in a state of fuddle.' A. friend once, remarked to the author : 'Yes, there has been a wonderful change in this respect during the past ten years. The strain of business is at times simply terrific ; the head must be kept cool and clear, and, consequently, he has no use for drink. - In| such bitter, ruthless competition— not only Americans against the world, but Americans against each, other— we have to be water drinkers in sheer self-piotection.' * We commend to our young men, and to all whom it may concern, this lesson regarding the potent but alluring liquid drug that (as the Genial Showman puts it) • tears so many people's innards to peaces, and makes their noses blossom like the lobster.' Te Whiti More things passed out of Maori- life last week than the spirit of Te -Whiti, the -pagan chief and ' prophet ' of Parihaka. And this was realised long before the last post was" called. At the great tangi or funeral feast and funeral lament, says a Press Association message in last Tuesday's daily papers, . ' The majority, of the speakers advised the Maori to bow to the inevitable. The dream of Maori nationhood had gone. The page of Maori history conceivedby Te Wftiti, that the Maori should be a separate, self-con-tained, and self-governing people; had closed with the passing of their chief. There has now been, an aw&kenmg, and the .old order must give place to the new.' Even in the method of Te Whiti's passing, and in the ceremonies with which he was consigned to motherearth, there was a marked departure from the customs of the old days on which his mind's eye loved to dwell.

No tohunga yelled into the ear of the dying chief the old mystic phrase : ' Kia kotahi ki te ao ! Kia kotatii Id tc po ! ' which Domett, in his ' Ranolf and Amohia ', Englishes as follows :•■— ' Now, now, be one with the wide Light, the Sun! With Night and Darkness, 0 t>e one, toe one ! ' The old-time wailing was heard around the dead, the ■ funeral songs, the speeches, the funeral meats, the long, delay of interment, the buried mats and other, treasures. But no longer did the chief mourners hack " themselves ■ with shells or with pieces of sharp obsidian (volcanic glass). No slaves were despatched to attend to the vanished chief in the Land of Night ; no birds were sacrificed to the gods ; the dead was buried reclining in a coffin, in Pakeha fashion, and not, as of ' old, in a sitting posture, with garlands around his temples, albatross feathers in his gathered' hair, and li'is ' face smeared with red ochr-e and 'oil.' Many of the.' other old funeral ceremonies were likewise omitted. And the passing of Te Whiti seems to be the passing of the last flicker of the old Maori order and the beginning of the new. , , Another « Referendum ' ' Some people learn, as some people joke, wi' deeficulty. The Bibic-in-schools people in Victoria 'have, .one 1 , way or another, been taught lessons, enough to fill a barn. But they have not learned them— yet. The voice 'of the electors, for instance, went in a solid majority against them on a plebiscite, and- at- the" 'last - general; elections scarcely a candidate who gave' "the Scripture, Campaign Council's programme prominence upon his policy was ' ilivated ' to a place in a Legislature of tlie State. The ' rout of the sectarians ' was complete. But they have not yet ' read what the electors" have writ so large across the State. We wear no crap 6 and weep no tears over the , defunct Brble-in-schools movement in New Zealand. But we lay this wreath upon its grave-: that it was generally marked by a restraint and a temperateness of utterance to which the allied movements beyond the water are strangers. Moreover, many of our Bible-in-schools clergy have had the saving Bense— a] though it was lon£ a-conring— to face "the facts of the situation and to gird up their loins to impart to the school-children of their various faiths the sectarian religious or biblical instruction which (as they -now realise), public opinion will not permit State officials to bestow at the cost of the State funds. For this relief, much thanks. But no such saving sense has come to those who are bent on sectarianising the public schools in Victoria. They are still, as ever, fog-horns in . political controversy, sluggards in the religious instruction of the children of their divers faiths in the public schools, and indeoently eager to abdicate, in favor of lay State officials, one of the elementary duties of the Christian ministry.

* A fresh and stormy effort on their part to submit a false issue to a plebiscite (-which they erroneously term a referendum) has drawn "from the Archbishop of Melbourne the following cleat nutshell statement *of the Catholic position :—: — '1. We are entirely opposed to a Referendum an a religious and conscientious question. • +'-u 2 ' J f there be a Referendum, its object' should be in the first place, to ascertain whether the people desire any change in the present free, secular, and- compulsory system of State education. . - ' 3. If the people manifest by their votes such a de55 e n ' 7 wil ] th ? n be , tim€ enough to determine the gent Stfte Sc" * reUgi ° US instructi - *° be nMiti' S H ch ins * r uction should be given only to the Srimp ? • Patei^ Who desire **• a * d «PW» their agieement in writing. This form was accepted by your deputatiomsts before,, -the last Referendum. 7 Scrintni n pv+ O r^f Se J^ould .that Volume of 439. pages! of the Bible o£ ? ?' a , k °" from tlie Pr otestant Version t: af the Bible, almost exclusively .Protestant hymns and Pro-

testant forms of prayer, which exclude those to which Catholic children are accustomed, be put into the hands of State School Teachers to be taught " like any other lesson." - ■ - ' ■ ' J

' 6. If this be done, the State Schools will become, to all intents and purposes, Protestant schools, anctin justice- Catholic schools should receive a State subsittjrl' j^lii his story of .' The Man with the Plums ', Doiiglas Jerrold prints an angry discussion between Mr. Benjamin and Mr. Ochre as to' the proper color for- painting) the sign of the Unicorn ' Inn. Mr. Benjamin hotly maintained that unicorns were ' grey, or mottled -grey '—or ' pink with spots of yellow '. Ochre, the sign-pain-ter, insisted on painting the unicorn ' true to nature '— ' the color of life, the only color ', namely ' a bright .white, with a dash of sky-blue V- for that was Jbhe. color of the King, of Indy's unicprns. The J3ontroycr-v sial temperature rose very high, and' each might have shivered the other's timbers, 'had not the. village schoolmaster happened -to come >hat^ way. ' What ! ', ( exclaimed ,he sarcastically, ' quarrelling about the colqirpf a. unicorn !! . And' then", he, reminded them tha.t jLtiey would , do well to get their unicorn . before they disputed aibiou.'t , the color of tlie creature. Parables, like metaphors, do not stand on all fours. But- we may say that the 'referendum' folk in Victoria, ' like tho r se of ljO-Od in New Zealand, forgot to. secure "their unicorn. In other -words, in the form of reference which they urged, they conveniently ignored the fundamental issue : ' Is the State school system of public instruction to remain secular, as at present ? , Yes, or .No ? ' They quietly assumed that this question had been already put to the electors, and answered in the affirmative. And before an amused and sarcastic majority of the public they raised a guileful clamor over a form' of reference which asked the elector merely to determine what . colpr the unicorn should be .painted— what was to be the particular hue, or complexion of the Protestant religious instruction that was to be imparted by public officials in the public schools at the public expense. The memorial quoted ""above injects some sense* into those clamorous unicorn discussions. A Catholic News Agency - - ; It was Robert Louis Stevenson who, in a moment of indignation, .volleyed at the daily press the hot-shot epithet which diescrib|ed it as ' the mouth of a sewer, where lying is professed _as from a university chair '. The indictment was far too sweeping — it requires to be discounted^ in the same way as" some of the fierce generalisations that issued from the 'point of Carlyle's pen on his ' livery ' days. But^ we have full many' a time and oft had occasion to point out- the extent to which the channels of newspaper - intelligence have been oap-> tured by agencies hostile to. our faith, and the hopeless—we might say scaridaLous — unreliability of)a great deal of the Catholic ' news ' that reaches these countries from various countries, but especially from Italy and France. ■ ' *' ' - The absence of such cable-news monopolies as exist in Australia and New Zealand has left the United States better served than are we in these countries in the matter of transoceanic intelligence. - Yet even American Catholics feel the want of better treatment in this resp.ect. The organ of the Catholic Extension Society has been pleading for an association of Cath- . olic editors to combat the evil of ' faked ' 'or * adapted ' cable-news. Which 'moves the ' Catholic Columbian ' to write in _part as follows :—: — 1 Take the matter of Catholic foreign news, for instance. The Catholic press of this country is largely, if not entirely, at the mercy of the secular press for this class 1 of news, and the unreliability of the secular press dispatches, particularly those supplied, toy the European Continental press agencies and special correspondence bureaus, when dealing with Catholic topics, is notorious. " A combination between the Catholic editors of the country for a' correspondence bureau say in

Rome, Paris, atod other centres' of Catholic news, would, .we believe,, be. productive of great good both to the . Catholic publications receiving such service and to •the cause of Catholicity in general. While we do -aot Wish to speak disparagingly of the Roman and other European correspondence which appears from time to time, in some of our Catholic contemporaries, we mu&t s Ws .«*at we believe it could be greatly improved in themanner indicated, and, through co-operation, at a comparatively small expense. Its benefit to the publications by adding valuable news features to their columns and to the Church generally by correcting false impressions created through misleading, and faked V news " in the columns of the secular press, can hardly be esti- . mated.

.At one period— some five years ago— the International Catholic Truth Society (Brooklyn) developed along lifle's, which, if pursued, would have served all the purposes of a Catholic Press Association for We--English-speaking world." But the effort seems to • have ] been a very short-lived one. At any rate, so far as. our .', experience goes, even the most pressing inquiries to it , during the past few years in regard to current- slanders have failed to' elicis / even an" acknowledgment,- even, though we are a subscriber to the funds of the Society. % Curiously enough, 'we received, through' the courtesy of" a Protestant clergyman, full and detailed information regarding a matter which was right" under the eyes of the Society's headquarters, 'Nut for ' which" we had appealed to the Society in vain. We have been fbrjnany years advocating the formation of a Catholic hews agency for Australasia. ' And we still hold ' that an "active,' well-equipped, and well-organised agency of the bind— working by cable and by letter, and, if possible,, with the secular press associations— would be the best meansof mending, perhaps even of ending, the frequent misrepresentations of our faith, its persons, and its institutions, that have so long characterised the ' news '• sent to these countries by European— and especially by Continental—cable agencies. rt is 'easy— and" ehea,p— to patch this old grief with proverbs. Hard words may 4 indeed ' break no bones '. But the frequent ding-dong of misrepresentation intensifies or prolongs anti-Cath-olic ? prejudice ; it even misleads some of our own spiritual household, and pits their faith with unanswered doubts or rankling difficulties— occasionally, perhaps, undermines it with the beginnings of disbelief. There is great need and ample scope for the operations of a Catholic news agency in the Commonwealth of Australia and the Dominion of New Zealand