ROME’S “DEADENING” INFLUENCE

New Zealand Tablet, 9 August 1917, Page 19

ROME’S “DEADENING” INFLUENCE

Writing in Everyman- a correspondent comments thus over the signature of “A.8.C.,” on the above subject: '*

“The Church of Rome has exercised a deadening influence on every country over which she has control,” says Mr. Stewart.

Let us take Belgium, over which Rome may be said to have had control. In Belgium forty head of cattle were fed on 100 acres of ground under cultivation. In Britain only twenty-four head of cattle were thus fed. In Belgium, with an area of 4,350,000 acres, 1,480,000 pigs were raised ; in Britain, with 48,000,000 acres, only 3,953,834 pigs were raised—i.e., 33 percent., against 8 per cent, in a Catholic country’s favor. In Belgium two and a-half tons per acre were grown ; in Britain only one and a-half. In France six tons have been grown on even poor soil. France is Catholic.

Consider the question of wages. The increase between 1835 and 1880 was: In France, 66 per cent.: in Belgium, 12 per cent. :in Britain, only 50 per cent. Cost of living in Catholic France, 8s per week; in Belgium, 10s per week ; in Britain, 11s per week. Regard for your space prevents me giving more points. Let me quote a scholar’s opinion on the deadening influence of Rome—Hyndman. He writes thus: “ There is nothing more noteworthy in the history of the human mind than the manner in which this essential portion of English society in the middle ages has been handled by our ordinary economists, chroniclers, and religionists. Even sober and, in the main, tolerably conscientious writers, seem to lose their heads or to become afraid to tell the truth on this matter. Just as the modern capitalist can see nothing but anarchy and oppression in the connection between the people and the feudal noble, so the authors, who represent the middle-class economy of our time, fail to discover anything but luxury, debauchery, and hypocrisy in the Catholic Church of the fifteenth century. It is high time that, without any prejudice in favor of that Church, the nonsense which has been foisted

on to the public by men interested in suppressing facts

should "be* exposed7._ It is not true that the Church of our ancestors was the organised' fraud which it suits fanatics to represent it. • It is not 7 true that the • great revenues of the celibate clergy and the celibate recluses were squandered, as a rule, in riotous living. As a mere question of religion Catholicism was as good as any creed which has ever found acceptance amongst men. The Church, as all know, was the one body in which equality of conditions was the rule from the start. . . . The Protestant Reformation became a direct cause of the increasing misery of the mass of Englishmen." (The- Historical Basis of Socialism in England.) It is much more instructive and interesting to study the economic than the theological history of countries.