Notes

New Zealand Tablet, 19 November 1908, Page 22

Notes

After the Congress ' Most beneficial,' said the Archbishop of Melbourne, will be the results of the recent Eucharistic Congress in London. 'It will,' added he, ' mean the beginning of a new age of fervor and devotion amongst Catholics, and will open the eyes of Protestant Englishmen to the position which the Catholic Church once held in their country, and it will show them the vitality and strength she still has, notwithstanding all that she has suffered since the revolt of Henry VIII.' Tohungas, Brown and White A Canteibury contemporary flails heavily the ' superstition ' of the Maori, as disclosed by two recent deplorable cases that have figured in our criminal courts — one of them in connection with tohungaism. We turn "to the advertising pages of ourcontemporary, and we find (as we had expected) that it is making itself the sounding-board of tohungaism — of fortune-telling charlatans, and of quacks that are more heartless in their way than the benighted brown medicine-man whose father" was a cannibal. We have not an abiding faith in the consistency of newspapers that denounce tohungaism, whether brown or white, in one column, and blazon forth its tinselled virtues in the next. Religious Equality The movement for the. abolition of the last of the penal laws against Catholics gathers force day by day -in -the British Isles.- Mr. W. Redmond, M.P., has intimated to the Clerk of the House of Cojnmons his' intention to introduce a bill for the removal of penal enactments against Catholics. -And there are other indications of troubled times in store- for the Government unless it is prepared to yield to the Catholic demand for equality before the law. Evil is often wrought by want of thought. And good is also done full many a time where evil was intended. The fanatical outbreak of a smair extreme and noisy section of the public on the occasion of the recent Eucharistic Congress may result, in the near future, in a statutory equality being accorded to our co-religionists which will give the rinderpest to the ' handful of obscure bigots ' (as the Radical Star calls them) of the Protestant Alliance.