The New Zealand Tablet THURSDAY, AUGUST 20, 1908. THE FAITH IN NEW ENGLAND

New Zealand Tablet, 20 August 1908, Page 21

The New Zealand Tablet THURSDAY, AUGUST 20, 1908. THE FAITH IN NEW ENGLAND

§HE American fleet has come and gone. '- -Its visit -has left nothing but pleasant memories; it has created a minor era from which many events in local' and personal 'history will for. many a 'year t> e dated; and it has broadened our political Tnorizon with . . what is for many the sudden realisation of the » mighty energy; making for the peace" and protection of the Pacific seas, .that lies alert and ready for action in the men and the ships and the guns that last week entered the waters of the Hauraki Gulf. . Both officers and men bore, themselves with the -dignity that "becomes the defenders of a great nation — even "' Jack ashore * (as our columns elsewhere show) won . encomiums for his general good conduct. And altogether the visit of the American fleet has been a happy incident in our history. Catholics especially will feel a pride in the fact that the old proportionate predominance of our co-

religionists where hard blows were "to be given and borne is still a live reality ; that thq creed which took so relatively large a shate in. winning American independence, and did ' the hoight of the figfrtin' ' to maintain the'Unionvin the sixties, is still, in" greater strength than ever, to the fore ready to defend both if the hour of trial should come. Nearly a third of the personnel of- the American navy is composed of Catholics— in fact, this first and, second and third and last and chiefest post of danger is rrow ' stuffed ' with our co-religionists, to an extent that surpasses even that which obtained during the struggle for Independence, or when * the handsomest thing in the- war ' of the sixties was done in the terrible ~ charges of Meagher's Irish Brigade up Marye's Heights. - ,'*.-■' The proportion of Catholics in- the American fleet is, in its uay, typical of the religious - predominance of- the Old Faith under the Slars and Stripes. There tire at present some 21,000,000 of our spiritual kith and kin under the star-spangled banner — about 15,000,000 of these (or near st)-being, according to latest and most probable" estimates, t on. , the American mainland. In no part of American territory_,bas ,the progress of Catholicism 'been, in all its circumstances, so striking as in the New England States.- There, for long generations, the.-practice of the Catholic faith was as rigorously penalised as it was in England or Ireland in the days of Queen Anne or the Second George. Kven within living memory a state of active persecution still existed in" somt» of the States; Catholic men are still "in" the prime of life who were flogged in a Boston public school for refusing to read the Authorised Version of the Bible; and in districts where Catholics are in numerically inferior strength' in Maine, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, the profession- .of- the Old Faith is to this hour a rigorous bar to employment as a teacher in ' the little red schoolhouse. ' The Puritans who settled New England were a sturdy and virile, if rather dour, race. The authors of the History of the Catholic Church in the New England States say of them :—: — 'Three virtues are never denied-them— a rare gift of -extracting values from land and sea, unrivalled genius for orderly government, and the high, evenly distributed intelligence of middle-class Englishmen. They were also, individually, virile scrupulous, and pure. They were not, however, a simple' blameless people, like the Acadians, whom they afterwards dispossessed, or the Tyrolese, or the ancient Galileans, or any othar of those gentle tribes, content with a bounded plot of the earth's surface for sustenance and a perpetual succession of ways and callings, from father to son, through many' centuries On the contrary, they were keen, restless, ambitious, and complex I hough they forbade much, the forbidden things were done among them/ Though the Bible lay in each man's hand", the ledger was never far out of reach. Not even the poets have ventured to represent their lives as idyllic Their loves were too deep, their hatreds too fierce, for the shepherd lays of pastoral romance.' For over a century this strong, forceful, deeply passionate race held New England, gave it their stamp, developed it along the lines of their own individuality, and— convinced that their competitors were the enemies of God— excluded other faiths (especially the Catholic) from their field. * • * There came, with time, more gentle thoughts even to New England. There came, too, the -great tide of Irish Catholic immigration that spread itself— deep here, a tricklet there, a pool yonder— over Puritan New England. The same authors last quoted say of the new immigrants*: — 'They were a forceful - people, though their forces lacked discipline- . They put their children to school with a passionate hope of repairing the prescribed ignorance of centuries and developing a mental facility j:om parable. J:o that of the Puritans, with the generations of reading and writing ancestors. They believed" deeply, and at" great cost set up the emblem of their faith-, bravtng contemptrin. its exercise,, and walking miles, if ji'eed be, to practise its consoling, devotions. . . ,' The people- lived, crowded in the large rooms of discarded mansions, amid conditions which, we are told, "forbid decency But they were decent. Thejr- had*- imported the virtues as well as the failings of" then*' stock— irsjoyalty and purity on the one hand;- its. pugnacity .and dreaminess on the other.' A .wall of. separation', long shut- o"ut Irish Catholics from human fellowship with native New England. F6r public and private positions ' no Irish "need , apply '; land was restricted to Irish purchasers; and as late as from 1888 .to 1895, even in Boston, t the A. P. A. (' American Protective Association ') — a society on Orange lines— was able to interfere with the rights cf Catholics in .education, and to . corrupt the -course of justice in the notorious case of. the murder o.f the * Papist,' John W. Wills, by -a fervent Ulsterman named John Ross.

These things, however, were, only what the old physicians would term 'growing pains.' Partly owing to race-suicide on the part of the once virile Puritan stock, partly to the solid reverence of the Catholic body for "the sanctity of marriage and the law of God, and partly to the great and later influx- of population from central Europe, New 1 England is now rapidly becoming a great Catholic land. The preservation/of infant life, and the protection of its sacred rights, are the special care of fly Church in every land. ". And in New England it is one of th,> factors that have contributed to make Catholics 'sit in -the gates.' In these days of race-suicide, young countries owe an immeasurable debt to the' agency that ensures, within its jurisdiction, regard for the God-given law of life. '