The New Zealand Tablet THURSDAY, SEPTEMBER 17, 1908. SOME SOCIAL SERVICES OF THE PAPACY

New Zealand Tablet, 17 September 1908, Page 21

The New Zealand Tablet THURSDAY, SEPTEMBER 17, 1908. SOME SOCIAL SERVICES OF THE PAPACY

MGHT made an over-sweeping statement yw//w/K ■ ? ®? ' ,m, m his Essa Vsj>n the Middle Ages, 'TmIWI& v de ? lared history to be 'nothing more %g*J2>afi than legend and romance.' • There is, ViaSSKif? ?■ course .> a certain ' impressionism 'in hlstoi T— in so far as the scenes described are given, at. best, rather with the idealised touch .of the artist's memory « . . . ~, tnan ™ th the microscopic fidelity of the biographic film. Or (as Rufus Ghoate puts it) his! Tory shows you prospects by starlight, or by the waning moon. But even an impressionist sketch may be true and the starlight or the waning moon need not distort the landscape that they half concea" and half reveal. History, however, as it is written gives at times, not portraits, but caricatures as gross as- those of the distorting mirrors that constituted so uproarious an attraction at the Christchurch Exhibi-

tion. Especially has this been the case,, in regard to the Catholic Church, during the past three and a half centuries. It. has been well described as, to an extent, ' a. conspiracy against truth.' The publication of ' the in the Record Office has resulted in the reversal or. revision of many verdicts that had come to be part and pfarcel of the great Protestant tradition in England. And the throwing open of the Vatican Archives, on August 18, 1883, to persons of every creed who are competent to explore those mines of historic wealth, has resulted in the further dynamiting of full many a crusted legend and -cherished tradition that had clustered around the stormy period of the great religious revolution of the sixteenth century.. In the course, of an editorial article on August 29, 1883, the London Times granted ' that Pope Leo has cause of complaint with the^ treatment of popular writers of the place of the Papacy in history.' 'That history,' adds the Times, 'contains ample grounds for Pope Leo's boast that, when the Roman Empire decayed, the Papacy stood as a bulwark against the flood of barbarians and barbarism, that the Church stored, up fragments of Greek and- Latin literature, fostered art and refinement, withstood the inroads of the Mussulman, raised its voice on. behalf of Christian unity andpe^ace, and gave Europe-a centre.' The Papacy did all this, and much more. We do not here dwell upon its place 'in the* Christian economy as the rock-foundation, .the unifying, teaching, and ruling centre of the Church of God. We do - not deal here with the manner in which, even in the days of the catacombs, rt wrought to animate paganism with a new life, to spread throughout the Roman Empire the Gospel spirit of universal fraternity — that distinctive mark which (as Tertullian tells us) filled people's minds with amazement, and led them to exclaim : ' Vide uf invicetn se diligunt ! ' — behold howJLthese Christians love one another ! ' We propose to touch in- a summary way upon a few of the conspicuous social services which the Papacy has rendered to mankind. At the dawn of her history, we find the Papal Church — in the heart of pagan Rome, and in the midst of bitter persecution— in the full flush of charitable activity, caring for abandoned pagans-curing- the great pestilence of the reign of Gallus and Volusianus, rescuing infants that were exposed in accordance with the provisions of the cruel laws of the time; providing them with mothers, nurturing them with the tenderest care, and regenerating them in the saving waters of baptism> Through the exertions of the liberated Church— after the day* of persepution had passed— the sanctity of the family- was secured ;. woman was gradually raised from the position of a chattel to her place of honor as the queen of the household; polygamy, foeticide, infanticide, arid child-exposure and childsale were abolished ; arid parents were deprived of the power of life and death over their offspring. The exhibitions of the circus brutalised and degraded the people in the early angT helpless - days of the Church Thus, the defeat of the TJacians by the Emperor Traian was celebrated for one hundred- and twenty-three days during which some ten thousand gladiators were slain upon the blood-stained sand of the Coliseum * to make a Roman holiday.' On his conversion, Constantine suppressed these sanguinary games opposed to Christian teaching and practice. On their partial renewal at a later date, they we're strongly - condemned by Popes Hononus and Anastasius, and (says . Baluffi) they were, never revived, and , Catholic charity won ~-ar brilliant and decisive victory. ' - In its slow and toilsome reconstruction of social r-if ° n u / aSIS ? f f . Christian teaching and charity,- the Church (and with it the Papacy) found itself face to face^with~a barbarism in war and^with a- widespread slavery both of which, to the pagan mind, scenSd to . be rooted in Ac nature of things. Vcb victis !-W to the vanquished ! - was the motto of the pagan warrior of those tunes. William said in 1640 that 'a day of battle is a day of harvest for the devil ': and " f h6r J aid m ? is Tahl& -Tolk. that 'any scourge "s preferableto war. . Famine and pestilence,' added he , become ag nothing m comparison with it' But this

was war a hundred times refined .and sublimated compared with- what war was in .the 'days when the Church took in hand the difficult task of reforming it and robbing it, one by one, of its avoidable horrors. Even as early as the days of Constantine, she succeeded in abolishing the wholesale massacres that followed victory. And a new spirit — the spirit which Jound its best expression in the courtly days of Christian chivalry — entered into war when the first Christian Emperor offered a reward to the soldier- who brought his prisoner alive from the field of battle. ' Let us call to mind,' says Montesquieu, ' the massacres- committed by kings and by Greek and Roman generals, the ruin -of cities and nations, the ravages of Timour and Genghis-Khan who devastated Asia ; then shall we discover to what extent we are indebted to -Christianity for beneficial .changes in government, and in rights of war, so rudely and inhumanly defined by the law of nations. • The debt of gratitude which society owes to the Church is immense, were it only for mitigating the evils" of war and securing to the vanquished their lives and liberty then- laws, possessions, a«d religion. ' Some' time ago we dealt editorially with the services which, during the middle ages, the Popes rendered to the cause of humanity and international peace by the Truce ofGod by the pressure of ecclesiastical penalties, and by the free use of the power which vested in the Papacy as the central court of appeal and of arbitration for the Christian world. It would be difficult to over-estimate the benefits which the Papacy has conferred upon Christian society by freeing the slave and raising the dignity of honest labor to the height which it enjoyed in its golden age that of the mediaeval guilds at their best period/ It would not be easy to overstate the physical and moral evils of the system of slavery in vogue during the pagan days of the Roman Empire. In his History of Slavery and Serfdom, Dr. John KellsMngram says that, 'on a moderate computation, the "slaves in Italy, m the hey-day of the Republic, reached the enormous total of 21,000,000 to a free population of only 7,000,000. The system then pursued brutalised the slave, cast a stigma upon honest labor, tiegraded<> and impoverished the poor that' were free The Church altered all that.' ' Her course of action,' says galuffi, was measured, not sudden nor revolutionary ' bo broad and deep and festering a social sore naturally took time to heal. The Church's action on behalf of the slave resolved itself into three kinds: (1) Sfic abolished the distinction of classes, and proclaimed the'" equality and fraternity of all men-in the sight of God : (2) she (especially through her monastic Orders) raised the moral dignity of labor; and (3) she gave an unexampled impetus to the movement for enfranchising slaves. Not alone the priesthood, but the episcopate' were open to manumitted Slaves in , the early Church. The noble church of St. Vitalis (Ravenna) was dedicated to the memory of a martyred slave. The monks were the pioneers of modern free industrial life.- They removed the stigma of contempt attached to labor, worked for work's sake and the love of God and neighbor, and softened and sweetened everywhere the lot of the tiller of the soil. In over forty Councils Popes and bishops enacted laws for the protection of slaves, for their, gradual emancipation, erected schools and asylums for them, sanctified their manumission by solemn religious services, and excommunicated all who attempted to deprive them of their liberty. Both m the Epst and the West the monks emancipated tbv slaves on lands given to them. Alms were collected for the enfranchisement of slaves, and the practice of manumitting them, as an act of devotion, and of leaving them their liberty by will, was encouraged by the Church everywhere. The result of all this is stated by Lecky : In the twelfth century ' slaves in Europe were very rare; in the fourteenth" century slavery wL almost unknown.' - It had been mitigated into serf^' dom and villeinage. And these, in turn, gave way to the absolute liberty of the free and untied laborer. * Th. n^ far back as the seventh .century, Archbishop Theodore, the Pope's Legate, denounced slavery in

England. Among the numberless ottier ecclesiastics' who, with the encouragement of the Popes-, strove for the slave or serf were Las Casas, Cardinal Ximenes, Sot o , Suarez, the Doctors of the Sorbonne, Cardinal Oibo, the Papal Nuncio Consalvi, the great apostle of the negroes (the Blessed Peter Claver), and; in our own time, Cardinals Lavigerie and Ledochowski. Two great religious Orders— those of the Trinity and- of Uur Lady of Mercy— were founded, and blessed by the Popes, the one in the twelfth century, the" other m the thirteenth for the redemption of Christians enslaved by the Mabomedans. Among the numerous Popes who issued special fulminations against the enslavement of fellow-men were St. Zachary, St Symmachus, St. Gregory the Great, Alexander Ill.iwhom even Voltaire honors as. the subverter of slavery) £"!* VT^ Paul ill^.i ll^. Urban VIIL ' innocent XL, BerK diet XIV., and Pms VIIL The remonstrances of the last-mentioned Pope to the European Powers contributed in no small measure to the abolition 6i the. African slave-trade and the nameless horrors of the middle passage. ' ~> > * With the great religious revolution of the sixteenth century the worker dropped back, into dishonor. In England, slavery was restored at the Reformation, Aid a peculiarly terrible form of child r servitude* existed fR the English coal-mines till the nineteenth century was fe « an f d * In . Scotlan 4> af ter the Reformation had ' Bfcen firmly established, free laborers were turned in large numbers into slaves by the Acts of- 1579 and 1597. The odious, function was entrusted to the Kirk Sessions. A learned article in- the Edinburgh Review for January, 1899, shoAvs that ' about six hundred little ecclesiastical courts ' were, in- 1597, empowered to reduce to perpetual slavery ' perhaps a tenth of the inhabitants of Scotland.' In the coal and salt mines of Scotland slavery existed till the year 1799, when it was abolished by Act of Parliament. British and German workers are now, in the dawn of the twentieth century, slowly winning back the eight hours' day and other rights and privileges which the Catholic Church had won for the sons of toil as far back as the Guild days of the middle ages.