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Salient. An Organ of Student Opinion at Victoria University College, Wellington N.Z. Vol. 21, No. 4. April 23, 1958

Gloating

Gloating

The Editor:

Sir,

—Doubtless the Roman Catholic population of this country (including yourself, are gloating over the increasing numbers of adherents to their faith.

I myself, in common with most New Zealanders, view this increase with anything but pleasure; the aims of the Roman Church to recover its lost supremacy (both political and spiritual) by sheer weight of numbers, are sufficiently evident, especially in Australasia and the U.S.A., to cause concern to anyone wishing for the dawn of a more enlightened age.

The Church of Rome has a grisly record of promoting wars and bloodshed which extends over many centuries, and which culminated in Catholic acivities prior to and during the Second World War.

It was Pope Pius XI who hailed Mussolini as "a man sent by Divine Providence", forbade Italian catholics to oppose his rise to poyer, and concluded the Lateran Treaty, which cleared the way for Mussolini's invasion of Ethiopia; this same invasion, notorious even at a time when such acts were relatively frequent, did not provoke one word of censure from the Roman Hierarchy.

Hitler himself was a Roman Catholic; and the support of the Pope, who ordered the German bishops to instruct their clergy to support Hitler, proved the decisive factor which enabled him to seize power in Germany. It was (and for that matter, still is), Vatican influence that enabled so many ex-Nazi leaders to resume key positions in Germany only a very few years after the war. (See "Lest We Forget", in "Salient," 27/3/58.)

The Vatican promoted one of the bloodiest civil wars of modern times, when Franco's (Catholic) minority party, aided significantly enough, by Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy, plunged Spain, who was at last making the first steps towards democracy, into three years of strife, resulting in the enslaved and backward country that is Spain today; the enormity of this crime becomes even greater when it is realised that even by 1910 two-thirds of the Spanish people were no longer Catholics.

Roman Catholic interference is still active in affairs of foreign countries; Malta is an excellent example of this; and the present fiasco with Mr. Mintoff is only a repetition of the Lord Strickland case in 1930. Strangely enough, both these men are Roman Catholics, and it is well known that the Vatican does not wish Malta to be integrated with Britain. Conclusions are obvious.

Your call for State Aid for Private Schools (for Private . . . read Catholic), and your implied claim that lack of religious (also presumably Catholic) teaching in schools is responsible for our juvenile delinquency I found no less surprising than your pleasure at Catholic increases in the population.

Why Roman Catholics, or any other sect, for that matter, feel justified in demanding State Aid for their schools has always been beyond me. A perfectly adequate education is provided by the state, and if any group wishes to educate its children by some different method, surely it is up to them to pay for it themselves. If Roman Catholics have a right to state aid, then so has every tin-pot group of fanatics and cranks that care to ask for it, to say nothing of the twenty-five or so religious groups represented in this country. Furthermore, why should the bulk of the population be taxed to provide for the special education of a minority group?

It is also difficult to see just what the Catholic schools have to recommend them; for example, in Catholic Spain, children are taught that Liberalism, liberty of conscience and freedom of the Press are grave sins. A group which operates the in famous Index, and which has been responsible for centuries of ignorance and deliberate suppression of knowledge can hardly lay claim to an enlightened education system. The Index is worthy of a closer examination:

The first Index was published in 1559, and has gone through more than one hundred editions up to the present day. The punishment for a Catholic who reads a book on the Index, unless his ecclesiastical rank is that of a bishop or above, is eternal damnation. The Index covers a range of books from all translations of the Bible made by non-Catholics to Gibbon's "Decline and Fall", and includes writings of Luther, Zola, Rabelais, Erasmus, Leibnitz, Defoe, Descartes, Flaubert, Anatole France, Heine, Kant, Maeterlinck, Pascal, Lord Acton, Bacon, Hobbes, Bertrand Russell, Richardson, Addison, Victor Hugo, Goldsmith, Dumas, Voltaire, Rousseau, Paine, Milton, Chaucer and Dante. The Index of 1900 contained 7,200 names, 3,000 fewer than its predecessor; the 1930 edition contains between seven and eight thousand. More than 5,000 books in English are forbidden. This is scarecely a recommendation for the Liberalism and high educational aims of the Catholic Church, much of the world's most enlightened literature and thought absolutely condemned.

Your comment about the lack of Christian (again, I infer Roman Catholic) teaching in schools, also deserves a few words. One would, going by your remarks, expect Catholic countries to have a high standard of moral behaviour; this is unfortunately not so: in Italy itself, prostitution is controlled by the State, which makes a tidy revenue out of it, and there are hundreds of brothels in the very seat of the Papacy. Spain is in a very similar position, and in Brazil, a super-Catholic country, over 90% of the population has, or has had, venereal disease, while in Paris alone there are 100,000 prostitutes.

Incidentally, your remark about "spring knives" recalls to mind an interesting series of coincidences: Abraham Lincoln was assassinated by a Roman Catholic; a Catholic attempted to assassinate Bismarck because of his anti-Catholic laws; the President of Mexico was murdered in 1927, the day after he declared he would enforce the Mexican page 6 constitution of separation of Church and State; Lord Strickland, P.M., of Malta, who was acting contrary to Vatican wishes, suffered an attempt on his life in June, 1930; in Italy in 1948, a Catholic tried to assassinate Togliatti, leader of the Italian Communists; in August, 1950, two Catholics murdered the Communist leader of Belgium, who had spoken against the return of Catholic King Leopold. It may be a consolation to some to know that it was a Catholic who tried to murder Hitler.

In view of the exciting series of events related in my last paragraph it is with considerable trepidation that I sign myself—

R. G. Hall.