Current Topics

New Zealand Tablet, Volume L, Issue 21, 31 May 1923, Page 18

Current Topics

Frederick Ozanam Among the saints whose virtues the Church proposes for. our imitation there is variety enough to suit all kinds of devout people. Some there are who are attracted by the childlike innocence and flower-like beauty of Teresa, the Little Flower; others will turn to a saint who knew more of the rough and tumble of " the battle of life, and they will take for their imitation an Augustine or a Francis de Sales; students will take a Bonaventure or an Aquinas; soldiers, St. Martin; doctors, St. Luke ; pastors, St. Peter, and so on through ■ all the grades of human endeavor. For Catholic social workers, it will be interesting news that there is now question of promoting the cause of that model layman, Frederick Ozanam. The President-General of the Vincentian Conferences has sent out to all his affiliations the following query : “Is it your opinion that the Council-General should introduce at Rome the cause of the Beatification of Frederick Ozanam, chief founder of the Society of St. Vincent de Paul?” In reply to this circular, Cardinal Vannutelli has written the following letter: ' “I do' pot hesitate to reply that the project has always pleased and always will please me. . . If it pleases God to favor this cause, much good will doubtless result, not only from the Society of which Ozanam was the founder, but in general for charitable works and Christian life.” The Cardinal Archbishop of Paris supports the cause, and, in the meantime, the various Conferences throughout the world are askecl 16 close their meetings with the following prayer, composed by Cardinal Amette: • “0 God, who didst fill the hearts of Frederick Ozanam and his companions with the love of the poor, and didst inspire them to found a society for the relief of the spiritual and corporal necessities of the destitute, deign to bless this work of Apostolic charity, and if it be pleasing to Thee that Thy holy servant, Frederick Ozanam, should be raised by the Church to the honors of the altar, vouchsafe, we beseech Thee, to manifest by heavenly favors how pleasing he was in Thy sight, through Jesus Christ Our Lord, Amen.” The Conferences are also invited to distribute pictures with the above prayer. Unfortunate Germany In Stimmen der Zek, the historian, Bernard Duhr, writes a heart-rending account of the sufferings of German children at the present time. Hundreds of thousands of them are languishing awav from starvation, and as many more are constantly underfed. He says: “Investigations made by the Ministry of Labor resulted in laying bare a terrifying condition of general deterioration. In various home-work districts the majority of the children, seventy per cent., were undernourished. Another investigation showed that twenty per cent, of the city children, in their third and fourth and fifth year of life, were not as yet able to walk without support.” * " Among Catholic Sisterhoods many are dying of tuberculosis owing to want of proper food. America has done much to stay the ravages of hunger in devastated Europe, and the last act of the American troops before their withdrawal was to give a sum of ten million marks for milk for the little German children who are dying for want of it. It were well for those countries that maintained the most inhuman blockade known in historythe blockade which starved thousands of German women and children after the armistice to prove their realisation of the enormity cf their crime in the sight of God and mankind. Without a doubt the slaughter of these women and children is on the heads of the Entente politicians whose blockade killed the

unfortunate people as really as if their throats were cut by the hands of Clemenceau, Lloyd George,iMr. Massey and the rest of them. .Through our representative, this country also shares in the guilt of»that crime, and surely it is time it proved that it does*not take its burden lightly. Discreditable Propaganda It is all in the game to resort to propaganda work in order to further any cause. After our experiences during the late war we never expect the propagandists to stick even loosely to the truth in-fact propaganda and falsehood have become synonymous. By every mail we receive sheaves of pamphlets and dodgers and papers attacking the Free State Government, its members, its friends, its ways, its aims, its sayings and doings. Naturally the “printed matter” which comes to us, contains a very large amount of what we know to be false. But, as we said before, that goes without saying when we are handling propaganda. But what we do draw the line at is the policy of attacking the Catholic authorities in Ireland. This is done systematically and hardly wisely. We might be inclined to read the rest of the stuff ‘had the anti-Catholic campaign been cut out, but the latter puts the authors right out of court at once. Mr. de Valera is rather unfortunate in his friends in , this respect, or else he is a bad judge of the temper of ordinary plain Catholics who still consider that their bishops are the best judges of what is morally right or wrong. Abuse of the bishops, by writers in Ireland and America, or by travelling lecturers, is not likely to promote their cause. Charges Against the Free State Quite another matter is that of the accusations made against Free State soldiers of treating prisoners with inhumanity. It such charges be true every friend oi the Free State is bound to demand that justice be done against the guilty persons. With reference to allegations of this nature, President Cosgrave recently said, according to a report in the Irish Xeivs of March 31: Complaint was also made by another deputy of the visits of certain exuberant spirits engaged in raiding. There might be excesses, but if there' were, they were isolated, for it should be remembered that they had ten thousand prisoners, and that nothing had happened the murderers of Dr. O’Higgins, of his (Mr. Cosgraves) uncle, of young Emmet McGarry. They were still alive,' and the ten thousand prisoners as well. He thought that while it was possible certain excesses might occur in pails of the country those particular matters must not be forgotten, and that even if out of thirty or forty thousand troops there was a percentage who, at some time or other, allowed their heart’s blood to obscure their common sense, as far as he was concerned the particular operation they had in hands had been conducted in a manner that they might be proud of. They had shown remarkable forbearance to the people who had started and persisted in this, and whenever the weight of their wrath fell upon them they squealed and turned and squirmed. There were only six cases as far as he could learn in which the property of those people or their friends had been interfered with, and their shrieks in each case had been heard from one end of the country to the other, and even in America. Sir Horace Plunkett Hopeful Sir Horace Plunkett’s views on the Irish situation are always worth considering. He is a calm observer, not likely to be swayed by prejudice, and whatever some people say of him his record has been that of a man who. tried to do his best honestly and consistently for his country. In a letter to the Times, which is quoted by a recent exchange, he discusses the question of “Irish Unity” and particularly of “Paths of Reconstruction.” Sir Horace says that in the armed conflict now prevailing the Free State is sure to win, as wasNorth America in the American Civil War, and essentially for the same reason. Personally he expects the issue to be decided much sooner than do many of his

well-informed friends. lien peace comes, he adds, the Free State will somehow have to absorb tens of thousands of young men who are at present the tools of the architects of chaos —“the women are beyond my comprehension. ’ These young men were kept out of the war by Irish public opinion, and by it were driven into a guerilla war against the British Army. Sir Horace thinks that “when peace comes, reconstructionmay be as surprising as the destruction has been wanton and disastrous.” The reason he gives for this belief is that Ireland depends mainly upon agriculture, and that industry, though functionally deranged, lias not been permanently injured. If the British people consent to waive their claim of Ireland’s share of imperial expenditure in the past and allow her future contribu- ' tion, as in the case of • other Dominions, to be settled by agreement between the two countries, Ireland should be solvent in a few years. His letter concludes;—“As for the moral situation—is it worse than that of many another new State set up at Versailles?” Science and Religion - Mr. H. Belshaw, M.A., F.R.E.S., delivered a lecture recently on the West Coast which makes one marvel at what ignorance even a man with university degrees can display when he leaves his last. Of course, he was speaking in a Methodist church, and, as we all know, religion, outside of the Catholic Church, is almost a matter of personal taste. There are no limits to what a Low-Churchman may hold or reject, and even an Anglican bishop can do some rail-sitting where there is question of deciding between Rationalism and Christianity. But.that a university man should be so ignorant of the wonderful learning and culture of the thirteenth century as to speak of the “great transformation which took place at the time of the Reformation by the inventing and use of the printing press which enabled people to read and think for themselves, and thus break away from established dogma” is a sad'commentary on modern education. • Can Mr. Belshaw think as clearly or to such good effect as Aquinas, or Scotus, or Dante? Can our universities turn out another Leonardo ? Can our architects rival the cathedrals built in little towns by the local guildsmen ? .The lecturer’s reference to Luther is astonishing considering what we know of the latter’s manner of life. And for a man with a university degree to refer as he does to the >. Galileo incident, so beloved of readers of cheap R.P.A. pamphlets, is strange considering that nowadays educated Protestants agree with that anti-Papal scholar, Huxley; who admitted that “the Cardinals had the best of it” in the case. Mr. Belshaw performs the feat popularly known as talking through his hat when he asserts that the Church has no vital message for the uplifting of the world, instancing the Great War. Unless we are very much mistaken, such good judges as Admiral Beatty, President Wilson, Signor Nitti, and Signor Mussolini would admitpthat it was because rationalists and lecturers who, unlike the men of the Middle Ages, read more than they think, led people away from the Church and made them deaf to her message that •the Great War was possible and the sham Peace an accomplished tragedy. “If,” he says, “the Churches went to the root causes of wars, they would be impossible.” He is quite right until he is wrong in assuming that the Church does not go to the root cause. It did just this and was denounced by every British profiteer, patriot, and propaganda agent as pro-German! We recall clearly how our press in this country received the , Pope’s peace proposals. The wild editors of the dailies fell over one another in proclaiming that the Pope was .working for Germany and that his note was inspired by Berlin, if not actually dictated b< T the Kaiser. A little later, President Wilson published his proposals, based on those of the Pope, and they were hailed with enthusiasm by the same editors and by numerous patriots who found nothing German at all in them. Wilson’s programme owed its inspiration to the Church, and had it .been carried into execution, as the various representatives of the Entente Powers pledged themselves to carry it it would have made the world a better place to live . n to-day. Judging from the report in the Argus, Mr.

Belshaw’s views on history, religion, and social reform are not in keeping with the hopes raised by the letters behind his name. They smack strongly of the literature of Mr. Grant Allen, Ray Lancaster, Clodd, and Mc-*v Cabe, writers laughed out of, court long ago by serious critics. The perusal of the column devoted to him in the Argus endorses the old Roman's advice : Ne sulor ultra crepidam ! No Popery Stunts A wild and weird parsonical body arrived in Dunedin recently and advertised that if the public would patronise him he could a tale unfold that would make them sit up and take notice. Dunedin, like Mr. Massey, has grown weary of the tales of rambling parsons, and the visitor had to address practically empty benches when he took the floor to recommend to our peaceful citizens the American murder-club known as the Ku Klux Klan. Our people have too much common sense to go in for hooded and white-sheeted masquerades, with violence, arson, and assassination as side-shows; and if there be any who might secretly entertain a propensity for applying such methods to their Catholic neighbors, they have now discovered that the game does not pay. Was it a mere coincidence that the advent of the Ku Klux Klansman, who was not, we believe, a wild man from Borneo but only a tin-tabernacle preacher from Canterbury, was closely associated with the spread of No-Popery pamphlets of the real old-fashioned style that a mongrel cur would, after one sniff, avoid as carefully as he would the carcase of a rat sodden with Bubonic germs 1-r At any rate, both the Klansman and the putrid pamphlets troubled the air of this city contemporaneously. We have seen a sample of the latest output of “Protestant Literature.” As usual it quotes the ex-priest Chiniquy who, after being expelled from the ministry for his scandalous life, was received and petted by the Presbyterians until a habit of pocketing the plate mad© them weary of his ways, and who finallv descended to making a living by concocting lies and turning out such filth .as certain parsons create a demand for. On the authority of witnesses such as the Chiniquy miscreant, the learned and pious author of the pamphlet (who spells the genitive case of the noun matrimomum , matrimonee !) tells the worshipful patrons of Protestant literature that the Pope and his priests are liars, slanderers, swindlers, thieves, assassins, murderers, and promoters of strife. We are entitled to fair treatment by the law of New Zealand. And behold we have a Government in power which makes it possible for Protestant scoundrels to circulate filthy books about us, to call us in so many words thieves and murderers, and to pander ’ to the bigotry of the uneducated members of the more negligible sections of Protestantism. The pamphlet we have before us was passed on to us by a decent and disgusted Protestant who certainly does not stand for such methods or for the political importers who thrive by encouraging them. In fact it is a downright insult to offer to any clean-minded and educated person such a pamphlet, and it is only a lack of recognition of what is due to self-respect that prevents anvbody to whom one is offered from literally wiping his feet in the 'face of the pimp who does this dirty work. In this connection recall what Bishop Hughes told the New York State authorities in 1854 : “If the State will not protect our property, then the State intends that Catholics should defend their property themselves.” Now among our “property” we certainly reckon our good name, that of our Church, that of our schools and convents. And if the State authorities in this country continue to countenance a campaign of calumny against all these we ought to take serious notice of Bishop Hughes’s words. '

Don’t be afraid of the obscurity of your position. A. man’s worth comes not from the importance or the tumult of his acts, but from the will that moves him. A wisp of straw, picked up through charity by a farmer’s wife for the nest of her fowls, will fetch a far greater reward than many brilliant actions done through ': pride. Rene Bazin.