Current Topics

New Zealand Tablet, Volume XLIX, Issue 39, 5 October 1922, Page 14

Current Topics

According to Hoyle We noticed a"; week ago that while South Africa, Canada, and even Mr. Hughes of Australia, wanted more information before taking down their war drums, Mr. Massey plunged headlong into militarism at a whisper from Lloyd George. How consoling it is now to read that the Orangemen of Ulster are sending their congratulations to Mr. Massey. It is in strict accordance with the premises that Craig and Massey should rush where statesmen ponder, and it is remarkable that the same two Prime Ministers are united in their opposition to the sane measure of Proportional Representation. No greater argument in its favor could be produced. . In spite of the million and a half of unemployed in Britain Lloyd George’s war cry was received very coldly there, and it was received even with a note of hostility in France and Italy, However, we are sure that he, Mr. Massey, and Sir James Craig will be found ready to send the last man to die fighting for a war that nobody else seems to think ought to be fought at all. Football While anonymous writers continue to pour out the vials of their sectarian hatred of the Brothers’ Boys in our papers* we read that fresh attacks against the young players are being organised in the north by those poor examples of true sport, the State School teachers. Catholics may expect persecution as long as they live. From the beginning all the atheists and Jews and Mohamedans and Protestants have been ready to make common cause against ihe Church, which is of course the sure sign of its rightness. Persecution is sure to come from a country governed by a Cabinet which prosecutes a bishop for saying things he never said while it sends its policemen to safeguard an agitator whose vile calumnies are a constant breach of the law, as is proved by the fact that they have stirred up riots in many centres already. However, if persecution unites us and teaches us to hold up our heads and hit back harder than our foes hit, it is not altogether an evil thing. Coming back to the matter of football, why not unite in a movement which would hit the enemy very hard at present? If every Catholic school were to throw its weight and influence into the agitation in favor of the League game they would be doing something more telling than mere words. Why not do it, and do it unanimously and at once? Father Bernard Vaughan From the Catholic Herald of India we take the. following note: “A special cable to the Statesman announces that Father Bernard Vaughan, 8.J., is lying seriously ill. None but will wish the great preacher another spell of life, but should he die, we hope he will not be buried with his great secret on the last hours of King Edward. Father Vaughan, who had been for many years an intimate friend of the late King, was summoned to the monarch’s death-bed. What passed between them has never been revealed to the public, but the late Father Plater has stated more than once, among others to Lieut.-Col. Ranking that King Edward died a Catholic and was received into the Church by Father Vaughan at their last interview. The evidence is unsatisfactory. But the secret is with Heaven and with Father Vaughan.” Canards of this kind are too frequent. Similar * was the story that used to be told about Queen Victoria. If our memory does not play us false Father Vaughan long ago denied the truth of the rumor of Edward’s conversion. And then another priest (unnamed) was suggested as the medium. What reason could any one find for suggesting that such a final grace would be granted to the one or the other Edward was no saint surely and his mother was by no means fond of Catholics, as her famous letter to the King of the Belgians proves. " V-;- ■ ■ ;

G.K.C’s Conversion Some time ago a cable announced that Mr. Gilbert Chesterton had been received into the Catholic Church. At the time, owing to the fact that a similar announcement had been falsely made more than once, we preferred to wait for confirmation of the report. As we now read in an American exchange an account of the quiet ceremony, with the name of the priest (Father O’Connor) who officiated, there seems no reason for doubting any longer that the report is true. All Catholics will extend to Mr. Chesterton a warm welcome into the fold. Indeed, so vigorously has he always stood for the sane and rational principles of which the Catholic Church is the only fearless exponent to-day that it was often taken for granted by Protestant writers that he was a Catholic. In this was conveyed a double compliment—to the Church and to Mr. Chesterton. Unfortunately it is true that Protestant Churches allow expediency and State dictation to destroy their Christian traditions more and more as time goes on, until we have civil law imposing on some of them without protest obligations which are contrary to their beliefs, while others are prepared to give to Caesar the things that are God’s. Hence the astonishment at seeing a non-Catholic boldly fighting for the old and sound principles which meant everything to all before the Reformation and State-dictated religion. Hence, too, the complimentary inference that a man who did have the courage and consistency to stand for such things must be a Catholic. Well, he has now “come over” and followed the example of his brother Cecil, who was killed during the war. Prussianism in Education The enemies of Christianity in America are, as in New Zealand, attacking private schools, but, unlike New Zealand, America finds among all creeds and classes strenuous defenders of the rights of the private institutions, because, again unlike New Zealand, America has a large number of citizens who are capable of thinking for themselves instead of rushing headlong after a Lloyd George, as Mr. Massey does, or after a P.P.A. liar as the mob does. Not only Catholic, but Presbyterian, Lutheran, Episcopalian, and Adventist organisations in the United States have boldly taken up the challenge and defended the rights of the schools attacked. The arguments against the proposed despotic legislation ought to be studied in New Zealand, where, too, we have a Government, trying by Prussian methods to ruin the country. An American exchange says: A vigorous argument against the measure was made recently in a statement signed by a group of thirteen prominent business men of Portland. They describe the measure as imitating “the method of public education which brought Prussia to her deserved destruction” and contended that the title of the Bill is deceptive since compulsory education, which this measure purports to provide, is already required by law in Oregon. “In present-day Russia, the Bolshevist government treats the child as the ward of the 'State,” the argument. reads. “This measure proposes to adopt this method and to substitute State control for the authority and guidance of the parents and is destructive of American independence.” * “It represents an American effort to standardise the individual and strike a blow at democracy’s long struggle to protect the individual in his right to direct his own life,” is the way the proposed measure is described by representatives of four private nondenominational schools in Portland. From representatives of the Lutheran Church a strong protest has been made on the ground that prohibition of private schools would violate the rights guaranteed to the individual by the Federal constitution. “Under the Constitution of the United States and the State of Oregon,” their argument reads, “you enjoy religious liberty; that is, the liberty to worship God according to the dictates of your conscience, and to rear your child according to your religion. If you . see fit to send your child to a school in which the religion of your choice is taught, not one day in the week,

but every day, and the whole training of the child is permeated by such religion, the (State, under the Constitution, must not prohibit you from doing so. This Bill if enacted will prohibit you from doing so. The Bill is manifestly unconstitutional,” A protest from the Catholic Civic Rights’ Association, which has been filed with the Secretary of State, recites the history of private schools in America from colonial days, and declares that one of the chief elements of strength in the American government has been its guarantee of religious liberty. The opinions of public men, including that of Philander Claxton, former XJ.S. Commissioner of Education, are cited in support of the value of private schools, and it is pointed out that such men as Woodrow Wilson, Theodore Roosevelt, Senator Lodge, and Senator Underwood received their education in such institutions. The fact is brought out that the private schools give the same courses of instruction in civics and American history and other subjects as those prescribed for the public school curricula, and in addition offer many advantages in an educational way which cannot be adapted to the public school system. No foreign language is used as a medium of instruction in any of the private schools in Oregon, it is asserted, and the vast majority of the children of the foreign-born attend the public schools. Attacks on the Irish Bishops We do not imagine that anybody is simple enough to think that all the Irish Bishops were, during history, stout defenders of the Nationalist cause, but it is certainly unjust to say that they were all on the wrong side always L as some critics have said and still say. It is a strange fact that this charge is made not only by Sir Edward Carson but also by certain intransigent Republicans who regard Rory O’Connor and Erskin/ Childers as better guides than staunch and proven patriots such as Bishops Fogarty and Hallinan. Republican papers have even gone as far as to denounce the Bishops (in mass) as traitors to Ireland, just as Carson denounced them as traitors to England. As ’ the matter is of no small importance we here give prominence to a reply which appeared in the Catholic Times from the pen of the Rev. Owen McGuire, D.D. : “Carson had declared that it was the bishops who did not want peace, who destroyed the Partition settlement of 1916 and his associates, in high circles and low, have taxed the hierarchy with every evil, in their estimation, which has since occurred. But Carson was later out-Carsoned in attacks on the hierarchy by some writers in An Pohlacht, the organ of the antiTreatyites. Two writers,, both of them professing Catholics, seemed to have got the hierarchy on the brain. According to these writers the Irish Hierarchy has never been politically right. They have betrayed the nation in every crisis of its history since the landing of Strongbow, or at least since the fall of Limerick. They did not follow Wolfe. Tone in ’9B. They were against the patriots of ’4B. They condemned Fenianism in ’67. They opposed the Land League. They banned the Plan of Campaign. They were lukewarm, or, in individual cases, hostile, to the Republican movement before the Treaty was signed; and after the Treaty was signed they failed in their, manifest duty to denounce the signers and the majority of the nation who thought that in the circumstances they had made a fairly good bargain. They should have followed the wise leadership 'of Messrs. Childers and Barton, de Valera and Rory O’Connor, who spoke for ‘the soul of the nation,’ denounced ‘ cowardlv reason ’ and the * craven fears ’ of the majority, and claimed openly that ‘in a period of revolution elections could decide nothing, that an army was ‘ autonomous,’ and that if a majority even of this autonomous army, led by ‘ cowardly reason ’ and ‘ craven fears,’ went over to the majority of the nation, a subsection of the army became ipso facto autonomous, with the right to impose its will by force. And the bishops are declared traitors to nationality by two Catholic writers because they did not canonise these doctrines! And we Americans were expected to canonise,them ! . ;

“Bad and Dishonest Arguments. “But sie arguments used to. prove this are really no worse than those put forward to show that the Irish bishops were always politically wrong had always deserted or betrayed their people. In themselves the arguments are historically false and manifestly dishonest, although I would not charge these two writers with personal dishonesty. I had followed the literary career of one of them with admiration. They were suffering from brainstorm, which clouded their intellect, kept their eyes fixed as in an hypnotic state on their own ideal only, shut out the field of Irish history generally, and blinded them to its most luminous facts. It is surely a narrow-minded and short-sighted view of Irish history, or of any history to expect that bishops in the 17th, 18th, and 19th centuries should have gone ahead of all political leaders and proclaimed the political principles which are generally accepted to-day. Yet it is for not doing so that the Irish bishops above all are now denounced, whereas above all other bishops they had in the awful circumstances of these periods to be cautious and prudent, if the lives of their people and the very existence of the nation were to be saved. “The Bishops’ Ideal. “And without doubt it was, under God the Irish bishops who saved both. Tile Irish bishops never either lost or betrayed their ideal of an independent Ireland. How to obtain it was a very different question, If it was not obtained in the Confederacy, the failure was certainly due more to the political and. military leaders than to the hierarchy. And the same may be said of the Williamite wars. But if we take especially the period that succeeded the darkest night of Ireland’s thraldom, which ran from the fall of Limerick to the advent of O’Connell, we can see what Ireland owes to its hierarchy and also the root-reason why Irish labor and the hierarchy are in agreement to-day. It was the darkest night of Ireland’s thraldom. The cause of Irish nationality and of the Catholic religion in Ireland had become identical. The people saw that the extinction of the one meant the destruction of the other. Their oppressors saw it, too, and shaped their policy accordingly. Mr. Belloc says that the survival of both is ‘ miraculous.’ Edmund Spenser, Froude, and Macauley came to practically the same conclusion. They did not say ‘ miracle;’ but they declared the fact to be inexplicable. A miracle it truly was, as running counter to all the known laws that govern the relations between historical cause and effect. “The Bishops Saved the Faith and the Race. “According to these laws Irish Faith and the Irish race should have perished. That they did not is, under God, most certainly due to the Irish hierarchy. The military and political leaders had expatriated themselves. The only leaders left were the hierarchy. They preserved the priesthood and preserved and fostered its discipline. Without a priesthood and discipline the battle was lost; and with a courage and sacrifice even to martyrdom, sharing the sufferings of their people to an extent never realised in the history of any other hierarchy, the Irish hierarchy preserved both. They saved the nation and the Faith; and if they had not stood to their post both would, humanly speaking, most certainly have perished. “Without Political and Military Leaders. “I have said that the identity of view taken by the hierarchy and the Labor Party to-day is both suggestive and instructive. And it is; for the Irish Labor Party -of to-day, more than any other Irish party, represents the Irish nation as it existed in the awful conditions of the period. They were a nation of toilers, penny and property less, who earned their bread in the most adverse circumstances in the sweat of their brow. - They were left to suffer when their political and military leaders were dead or expatriated. But the bishops remained with them to share their sufferings. They thought first, in virtue of their office, of the spiritual and eternal welfare of their people; but secondly, or rather at the same, time, of their lives

and temporal welfare. They knew and their- successors know, both- by tradition and experience, the forces £hat were marshalled against them, and the horrors for the common people that follow- in the track of unsuccessful revolution. To hurl the bare breasts of a people . against : a military power twenty times stronger than they, even if they were armed, may be a fine gesture for idealists who are willing to die themselves rather than compromise. But the mass of the people do not die. They remain to suffer; and when, as after the fall of Limerick, the idealists are dead or expatriated to fight in ‘far foreign fields’ where they did little service to Ireland, the hierarchy and labor remain, * to bind up the nation’s wounds,’ to devise new means to save it from utter extinction, and to share also the sufferings of the common people who remain and cannot live in idealism alone. . . “A. Luminous Fact. “It is this fact, written in letters of light, and of tears, too, and blood, on every page of Irish history for the past four hundred years, which is the root-cause of the agreement between Irish labor and the Irish bishops. Where were the editor of An. Pohlacht and his associates then? They .were certainly not there, nor their representatives ; and if the bishops had not been there, no effort could be made to-day to revive a Gaelic nation for it had perished. It was not saved by rhetoric; nor could it be even if Mr. Childers and his associates had been there to make it.