Current Topics

New Zealand Tablet, 21 August 1913, Page 21

Current Topics

Journalism. Out West At times when the battle over the Bible-in-schools business waxes especially keen the combatants are apt occasionally to forget their customary courtesy and to drop into language that is more forcible than polite and into recriminations that, like the expletives of Bill Nye, are ‘ frequent and painful and free.’ But their wildest outbursts are a mere ‘ circumstance ’ compared to the quite ordinary, everyday amenities of controversyand particularly of journalistic controversy ‘ out West.’ Our late esteemed manager, Mr. C. Columb, sends us from South Fort George, British Columbia, a copy of the Fort Georye Herald of June 14, remarking in regard to its editorial article that it 1 will show us something new in leader writing.’ He is right. For the delectation, if not the edification, of our readers, we quote a few sample sentences. ‘ Like the puling cur that returns to its vomit, the organ of the outside townsite interests has again taken up the weary burden of its master, the promoter of doubtful fame who owns the body and soul of the townsite organ’s writers. . . . We can afford to pass by the amusing efforts of the snapping cur as we are watching the shifting countenance of the man who holds it in leash. ... To take these statements of the rag which has voiced them and deal with them at length requires more space than their importance justifies, but w© cannot pass by the arrant rottenness of the house organ’s accusations without exposing the reasons which impel them. . . . The rotten imputation regarding a vile clique which it alleges exists in this city, is in line with the usual detestable tactics employed by the white-livered cur who wields his faltering pen to make such ambiguous senseless statements. . . . Its insinuations are as vile as the palsied brain which dared to give such canards voice. . . . The Herald will not stoop to reply to the veiled insinuations regarding citizens of this community. When it is considered that the house organ was brought into being as a newspaper on the townsites where it is now located by a townsite promoter whose picture is hanging in the rogue’s gallery at Terre Haute, Indiana, and which is also No. 3738 in'the Pinkerton gallery at Chicago, and that the promoter’s townsite company numbered amongst its paid employees, that w© know of, two ticket-of-leave men, we think that this is enough to say.’ We should think it is, too. The Grey Election A Hokitika correspondent writes expressing dissent from the statements made in ‘ the much respected Catholic journal, the Tablet, on the Grey by-election, and assuring us that we have been ‘ entirely misinformed ’ as to the character of Mr. Michel. On this point we can at once re-assure our correspondent. We have not been ‘ misinformed,’ because we have had practically no information—except of the most indirect and negative regarding Mr. Michel personally. We have not ourselves in any way imputed personal wrong-doing to Mr. Michel. None of the communications which we have received from Greymouth—they have been both numerous and lengthy— suggested any direct and personal complicity on Mr. Michel’s part in the doings which so disgraced and embittered the recent election contest. The question at issue has been, not Mr. Michel’s personal character and attitude towards Catholics, but the nature of the tactics employed to secure his return and his attitude towards those tactics. But we must let our correspondent speak for herself. ‘ln your issues of "the 24th and 31st of July,’ she writes, ‘I was very much surprised to read your comments on the Grey* by-election in which you accuse Mr. Michel of adopting unfair tactics and stirring up sectarian feeling. As one who has known Mr. Michel for a great number of years I am in a position to state that he is not the bigoted person that your comments imply. I feel it my duty to inform you how terribly misled you have been. Mr.

Michel has lived in Hokitika the greater part of his life, and has always been a good friend to the Catholics, and .1 am only voicing the sentiments of the majority of the Catholics of Hokitika, when I say that you have been misinformed v The residents of Hokitika are; in a better position to judge Mr. Michel than the Greymouth Catholics, who only had him in their midst for one month.’ • - * - ...; vOur correspondent has, we are afraid, read our comments with very little care, or she .would have seen that on no occasion have we ‘ accused Mr. Michel of adopting unfair tactics and stirring up sectarian feeling.’ We have accused—and do . accuse—Mr. Michel’s Grey supporters of doing so and on this point — regard to which the electors of Grey must be acknowledged to be in the best position to speak—we have written and other evidence of the most complete, detailed, and circumstantial kind. Our censures were meant for this section of Mr. Michel’s supporters and for Mr. Michel only so far as he failed promptly to repudiate and dissociate himself from such tactics. In not a single sentence have we suggested, or attempted to suggest, that: Mr. Michel was personally responsible for the employment of the discreditable tactics; and if our correspondent has supposed otherwise it is because she has read into our words a mean-; ing that was not intended. The ‘ taint attaching to this election,’ for example, and the ‘ ill impression’ referred to, were the taint and the ill impression arising, not from the personal action of Mr. Michel, but from that of his supporters, and from his being associated with followers who were capable of deliberately and systematically resorting to the tactics known to have been employed. We held, and still hold, that it will take Mr. Michelman of ability, as he admittedly is—all he knows, to regain the ground lost for him by the worse than stupid action of the sectarian-mongers amongst his following. We have some slight personal acquaintance with Mr. Michel; and we are bound to acknowledge that our former knowledge of him as a public man, and our slight personal experience of him in his official capacity, were not calculated to suggest that he was a bigoted person. As to the sentiments of the majority of the Catholics of . Hokitika, we know the Catholics of Hokitika ' fairly well; and w© know that, if it happened in their own district, they would be the very first to feel keenly, and to resent quickly the insult to their Faith involved in the employment of such tactics as disgraced the Grey election. We have no desire to be other than absolutely just to Mr. Michel, and we therefore give publicity to the foregoing defence of that gentleman; but we cannot open our columns to a correspondence on the subject, which would only revive a' bitterness which in the interest of all parties ought to be allowed to die. Catholics and the Y.M.C.A. A week or two ago we referred to a somewhat surprising statement regarding Catholic membership in the Y.M.C.A., which is being diligently circulated throughout the South Island by the national secretary of that organisation. 1 The statement was to the effect that in the country town of Levin there were included in the membership of the Y.M.C.A. ‘eight Roman Catholics,’ and it was made for the purpose of ‘ showing the perfect interdenominational union always held by the Y.M.C.A.’ There is no resident priest in Levin ; and the locality has been served from Otaki, but until the last few months at irregular intervals only, W© have communicated with the. Otaki priests; and they have furnished us with particulars which show that this official statement of the Y.M.C.A. representative is wholly incorrect. To begin with, only four even nominally Catholic boys have so much as given in their names to the Association, the attraction in most of the cases beingnot ‘interdenominational union’—but simply anal solely the gymnasium. ,Of these four, one is the child of a mixed marriage. He does not go to the Catholic Church, nor does his Catholic parent. Another merely gave his name to the canvasser of the Y.M.C.A., apparently only, to get rid of him, for he has neverbeen to any meeting of the Association, and never had

any intention of going. In order to get his name definitely removed from the Y.M.C.A. roll he is sending in his ‘ resignation ’ of a membership which had never any existence except on paper. The third boy went once to a Y.M.C.A. meeting more than a year ago, and the secretary promptly put his name on the roll. The boy has never been to a meeting since, and had never any intention of returning, but he still flourishes as a ‘member’ in the Y.M.C.A. publication. He, too, is sending in his ‘resignation.’ The fourth boy has actually been for some months a regular patron of the Y.M.C.A., and he is also a practical Catholic. In joining the organisation he had, of course, no knowledge of its confession'al character, or of the fact that Catholics are directly .discriminated against and debarred from holding any executive office in the Association. He also will withdraw from membership. Like the ten little nigger boys of the nursery rhyme who so rapidly and successfully did the vanishing trick, the eight ‘ Roman Catholic ’ members who made such a brave showing in the Y.M.C.A. publication have thus been speedily reduced in number, until, when full investigation has been made, it is found that only one is left who was both a practical Catholic and a real member of the association ; and |even he has now resigned. In circulating this statement regarding the Levin membership of his institution the national secretary of the Y.M.C.A, is officially disseminating what is not true. No one wishes any harm to this young men s organisation ; but it cannot be allowed to push its claims by sailing under false colors. Such a policy may seem to succeed for a time; but the deception is soon found out, and the institution which is associated with it is brought into serious discredit. * Meanwhile, as a further gentle warning to unsuspecting Catholics, young and old, as to the sort of entanglement in which they may land themselves by * putting down their names ’ for subscriptions, etc., without taking care to acquaint themselves with the precise nature of the organisation, we reproduce the following account of an instructive incident from a recent issue of the San Francisco Monitor: ‘Flagstaff, Arizona, is just now the scene of an interesting controversy between prominent Catholics and the Young Men’s Christian Association. The Catholics are wellknown business men of Flagstaff, who some time ago put their names to a public subscription for the Y.M.C.A. When they learned that, according to the by-laws and constitution of the Y.M.C.A., Catholics are debarred from holding office in the association they refused to pay the promised subscriptions. Thereupon "the Y.M.C.A. sued. The case went to trial last week, and the jury brought a verdict against the Catholics, declaring that the subscriptions must be paid. The defendants are P. T. Hurley (500 dollars), A. T. Hesey (1325 dollars), and S. D. Lount and Son (500 dollars). Mr. Hurley is one of the best-known business men in Arizona. The Catholics have appealed the case to the Supreme Court. The payment or non-payment of about 6000 dollars in held-up subscriptions depends on the final outcome of the case.’ The incident carries its own moral. If these estimable Catholic citizens had carefully read their Catholic paper they would probably have been saved from this blunder. The Federation and Politics How very necessary it is that members and advocates of the Catholic Federation, in publicly expounding the relation of the organisation to politics, should exercise reasonable discretion and keep strictly within the four Corners of the actual provisions of the constitution on the subject is illustrated by the sequel to a recent utterance by Father O’Reilly, of Bathurst, a mutilated portion of which was cabled to New Zealand. According to the cable, the Rev. M. J. O’Reilly, president of St. Stanislaus College, declared that the Roman Catholics were going to organise so as to deal with their opponents in the most effective waynamely, at the ballot-box. “The Catholic Federation of New South Wales is a political body, and,’ he- said, ‘we are going to sell ourselves to the highest bidder. We shall

be in the market by-and-by. For a great many years I have been voting Labor, but I shall vote another . ticket to-morrow if it suits me.' As a matter of fact that is by no means a fair representation of what Father O’Reilly really said. He explained that the Federation was not a political organisation in the ordinary and recognised sense of the expression; but one indiscreet sentence gave the daily press the opportunity to pounce upon the movement, and they were not slow to take advantage of it. On the morning after Father" O’Reilly’s utterance both of the big Sydney dailies came out with solemn and stodgy and at the same time ill-natured deliverances on the new movement. The Herald , for example, remarked: lb is the fact that a large number of the men and women of this State having in common, besides their citizenship, only their religious adherence to the Church of Rome, have permitted themselves to be guided (if nob coerced) in their exercise of the franchise by the leaders of their religious community. Their intrusion into politics is, therefore, a factor which cannot be neglected. It is well known that at the last State elections these votes were cast on the side of Labor. A price was paid in the passing of the Bursaries Act, and in other ways.’ The same absurd insinuation that the Federation is a clerical movement organised for the purpose of further coercing a priest-ridden people-was voiced by the Daily Telegraph in still more undisguised fashion. Were it [‘the programme of the Catholic Federation as Father O’Reilly expounds it ’] to materialise,’ it remarks, ‘ and the twenty-five per cent, or so of the people who are included amongst the adherents of the Roman. Catholic Church, or a similar number belonging to any Church or class, to take such an attitude, representative government would assume a new phase. The ordinary questions which Governments exist to deal with would drop into abeyance, and Parliament be transformed from a work-a-day institution into a futile babel of dogmatic tongues, in the midst of which the secular affairs of the country would be left to take care of themselves. . . It is to us incredible, however, that any large body of intelligent Roman Catholics would be prepared to follow the lead of Father O’Reilly in this matter. . . . Roman Catholics have the same interest in sound civil government as other citizens, and the days of dragooning people to the ballot-box have gone.’ ' * The attitude of the Federation towards politics is laid down with perfect clearness in the Constitution as it has been adopted in New Zealand and in all of the Australian States in which the organisation has been established. The preamble and explanation of objects declare: ‘ It is not a political party organisation, and does not seek to influence the political views of its members, nor to touch politics except where politics touch religion. It stands for the Christian life of the nation for the Christian education of youth for. the repression of intemperance; for the sanctity and indissolubility of Christian marriage ; for the safe-guarding of the Christian home, and of Catholic institutions, and for the suppression of indecent, objectionable, and anti-Catholic literature, pictures, films, theatricals, and advertisements. It asserts the necessity of Christian principles in social and public life, in the State, in business, and in all financial and industrial relations. It is willing to co-operate with all citizens and all civil and social agencies working for truth and virtue. The aims of the Federation, therefore, are religious and patriotic they are the interests of all New Zealand Catholic citizens and of those who believe in the revelation of a Divine religion through Christ our Saviour,’ There is no ambiguity about that ; and it is the official statement on the position. So long as that Constitution is in operation no member or advocate of the Federation has either the right or the need to go beyond it.