CATHOLIC DISABILITIES IN THE BRITISH ISLES

New Zealand Tablet, Volume XXXVII, Issue 3, 21 January 1909, Page 90

CATHOLIC DISABILITIES IN THE BRITISH ISLES

.THE BILL FOR THEIR REMOVAL

The thanks of all Catholics in the United Kingdom and in the Empire at large will (says the London Tablet) go out to Mr. W. Redmond for his efforts to remove the civil and religious disabilities which still disgrace the Statute Book in our regard. We have little doubt that when he rose m his place in the House of Commons on Tuesday in last week, to ask leave to introduce his Bill for this' purpose, that many who watched him dimly wondered what they were about to be asked to do. For was not an Emancipation Act passed in 1829 which was to relieve Catholics of the disabilities imposed upon" them by the penal code, and to place them upon a footing of equality with their fellow-citizens? Rut that Act was not all that many people, who have not studied its provisions, nowadays seem to think. It is quite true that it was to a large extent an Act of Emancipation, for it repealed the various enactments which, by the oaths and declarations they required to be made against our belief and practice, blocked the way to our voting or sitting in Parliament and to our holding civil, military, and municipal positions. But the Act did not stop here. Whilst giving emancipation upon certain points with one hand, it inflicted pains and penalties with the other by the enactment of certain provisions which, as Mr. Redmond declared, were of the ' most offensive and insulting character towards Catholic people.' We might sit in Parliament, and even hold office, but the great prizes of political life were to be denied to those who, except for their being Catholics, might have proved their worthiness to hold them. No Catholic, it was laid down, could sit on the Woolsack, or be Lord Lieutenant of Catholic Ireland. But this was not all. Under heavy penalties our priests were forbidden to exercise any religious function, or wear the habits of their order, outside the walls of private houses or of our churches, and in Clause 28 a brutally frank provision was made for the suppression and extinction of the religious Orders within the realm. All Jesuits and members of other religious Orders then living in the land were to register themselves within six months, and any others were forbidden, under the severest penalties, to enter the kingdom. Indeed, so evidently was this Act of Emancipation one of offensive and unjust restriction that a prominent Catholic journalist of the day, William Eusebius Andrews, editor of The Truthteller brought out the issue of his paper announcing the passing of the Act in deep mourning. In spite, however, of the obnoxious enactments thus included in the Act, the measure of relief which it extended was welcomed by the majority of the Catholics of that day. But the penal provisions that brand us alone amongst our fellow-citizens with civil and religious inferiority, after seventy-nine years of boasted progress and enlightenment, still stand upon the pages of the Statute Book ready to the hs»nd of any bigot or oppressor who may desire to use them against us. This is surely little creditable to English justice and f airplay. We are ctizens of the Empire equally with those who would oppress us; we bear our share, and in some matters more than our share, of the public burdens; and we have a right to be placed upon an equal footing before the law. Against this it may be objected that as most of the enactments in question have, in the words of Sir James Stephen, been ' treated absolutely as a dead letter ' ever since they were passed, there is no need for us to worry for their repeal. Unfortunately, however, these provisions are not the dead dogs that some peoplo think. In spite of the attempt made in 1891 by Mr. Gladstone, Lord Morley, and Mr. Asquith to clear the way for Catholics to the Lord Chancellorship of England anil the Lord Lieutenancy of Ireland, the Emancipation Act still stands as more than ' a lion in the path.' And more recently still, we have had attempts at the enforcement of other restrictive provisions of the Act. It will be remombered that in 1902 the Protestant Alliance applied to Mr. Kennedy, a police magistrate, for summonses against three individual Jesuits under "the Act with a view to their banishment, and on an appeal to the Court of King's Bench the judges refused to issue the mandamus to compel him to act on the plea that he had exercised a legitimate discretion. All, then, that stands between our religious orders and expulsion is the temporary absence of active bigotry and the discretion of the particular magistrate to whom application may be made. Such a state of things is not only not cretlitable, it is not endurable, for it places the security of peaceable citizens at the mercy of the first fanatic who may chance to come along. Nor need we go so far back as six years ago for a proof that these disabilities, ' the solitary and belated relic of a past which can never be rebuilt,' as . Mr. Asquith has called them, may be used against us. Only a

month or two ago, when Catholics from all parts of the kingdom, the Empire, and the Continent had assembled in London for the International Eucharistic Congress, we had . a fresh illustration of the vitality of these laws which many had thought dead and buried. It was only necessary for a little horde of bigots to raise their voices in dissent and threatening for the Liberal Prime Minister of England to feel himself compelled, with the Act of 1829 in view, to declare that the ' legality ' of the programme of • the Congress was ' open to question,' and for the public procession of the Blessed Sacrament, which is a constant feature of such Congresses, to be maimed in the name of Protestant England and of the Act that was supposed to have freed us from the oppression of the Penal Laws. With such instances as these before us, and with the pain and the shame of the latest still rankling in our hearts, we are surely abundantly justified in pressing for a repeal of the enactments which lay us open to such attacks and brand us with such unjust and undeserved inferiority before the law. Our claim for equality is unassailable and incontrovertible, and equality is all that is asked for by Mr. Redmond in this Bill. ' Catholics,' he said, ' only ask for equality. It is their right, and they will be satisfied with nothing less.' At present we are free neither in theory nor in fact; we have borne the injustice for seventy-nine years, and the events we have recalled show that its removal is as urgent as it is long overdue. Still longer overdue is the reform of the insulting language of the Declaration which our Sovereigns must make as a condition preliminary to their being allowed to ascend the throne. In that outrageous formula the Sovereign is required to deny Transubstantiation, and to declare that ' the invocation or adoration of the Virgin Mary or any other Saint, as they are now used in the Church of Rome, are superstitious and idolatrous.' These doctrines are of no political significance, and have no bearing on the proper exercise of the Royal power, whilst the statement that Catholics adore the Blessed Virgin or any other Saint is palpably untrue. The whole formula, which, as Lingard says, owes its origin to ' the perjuries of an impostor and the delusion of a nation,' is grossly .insulting to British Catholics, besides being absolutely useless for its supposed purpose as a safeguard of the Protestant succession. And it is not only insulting, but, as the Catholics of South Africa have declared, ' it is an infringement of the religious equality to which we are entitled by the Constitution of the Commonwealth, and which we regard as our birthright.' The King rules over an Empire embracing men of many creeds, but out of all these the belief of Catholics alone is singled out for exceptional treatment and contemptuous and scurrilous repudiation. Since 1891 several attempts have been made by the Catholic Peers to get rid of this relic of barbarism, which Lord Salisbury did not hesitate to describe as ' a stain upon the Statute Book.' Mr. Redmond had, therefore, ample reason for including the reform of the Declaration by the deletion of its offensive language against Catholics in his Bill for the removal of our remaining disabilities. The justice of our claim that in a country of tolerance we should be spared intolerance and the cruel necessity of having to listen to needless insult from the steps of the throne has been recognised by all who have considered it. The Sovereign who is required to repudiate and insult our beliefs knows that, thanks to those beliefs, our loyalty has come intact out of the fire of centuries of penal legislation and statutory insult and oppression. It is therefore too much to expect that he can make such a Declaration seriously, insulting as it is both to him and to us. In fact, it is known that both the King and the heir to the throne would both gladly see the necessary alterations made which would spare them the painful ordeal thus laid upon them by the dead hand of the past. Nor can we suppose that the Government of the day would be unwilling to get rid of this damnosa haereditas, which mvist darken the dawn of every reign and arouse long rancors in the breasts of twelve millions of loyal subjects in the Empire. We shall soon know with certainty how Mr. Asquith and his colleagues stand in this matter. The welcome accorded to Mr. Redmond's Bill by two hundred and thirty-three members in the House of Commons, against the miserable minority of forty-eight who followed Mr. McArthur's lead into the lobby against it, should encourage the Government" to tell Lord Braye, when he puts his direct question on the matter on Monday, that they are ready to facilitate, or even to bring in, a measure which will at once relieve Catholics of their remaining disabilities and clear the pages of the Statute Book of the outrageous language which has stained it so long. Good will, we feel sure, is not _ wanting ; and where there is a will it should not be difficult, on the part ofHhose in power to find a way. .

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