The Catholic Protest

New Zealand Tablet, 31 December 1908, Page 22

The Catholic Protest

Our -valued contemporary, th-3 Ota go Daily Times, «s apparently under the impression that New Zealand Catholics have ceased io protest against tho injustice under which they are laboring owing to their conscientious objections to the hard secularism of cur system of public instruction. As a matter of fact; Catholics are protesting

'...at. least as vigorously as ever. The. protest might' be, with great advantage— and, we believe, ought to be—made far more frequently in the spoken and written word, such as that which appears at times in our columns and.that which found an emphatic voice a, week ago in the mouth of the Administrator of St. Joseph's Cathedral, Dunedin. But, for outsiders, a sufficiently eloquent and convincing protest is the _splendid system, of. primary and secondary instruction which, at .their ; own sole expense and at immense sacrifices, the Catholic body is maintaining from end to end of New .Zealand. ■ After the battle of Inkerman, in the Crimea, a slightly wounded soldier made a great "hullabaloo in the rude field hospital. Near him lay an Irish private, with face drawn and pallid — desperately wounded, ' but stoically silent. A young surgeon ripped open the poor fellow's tunic and almost fainted at the sight that he witnessed. 'Good God!' exclaimed he ' why don't you cry out, too?' ' Cry out!' said the sufferer, as he gasped for breath ; ' isn't the bleedin' stump of my left arm cryin' out? Isn't my bleedin' cliest, half torn away by a Russian shell, cryin' out ? What sort of cryin' out do you want?' The bearing of this observation lies in the application on it. If the heavy bleeding — if the eloquent sacrifices, the treasure in thought and toil and money poured out by Catholics for the sake of savino; their children from a godless secularist system of public instruction, for which they are nevertheless compelled to pay — if all this isnot an eloquent ' cryin' out,' then, with the wounded Irish private of Inkerman, we want to know ' what sort of cryin' out ' our critics demand ? None the less, we strongly hold that, in this grand protest, the word should, in season and out of season, back the work.