Mr. Redmond’s Cordiality
to Protestants is touching, says the Bulwark. He has declared that in the new Parliament politics will not be dictated from Rome or other outside place. A good deal depends on what is meant by politics. The marriage laws are politics; they concern the well-being of the State. But the Church would say the law of marriage is a matter of religion and concerns the Church. At once, according to Mr. Redmond’s own division of subjects, he must take his religion from Rome, and at once toleration, and good feeling, between Roman Catholics and Protestants is at an end. The Belfast mixed marriage case comes as a severe ordeal for trying the worth of Mr. Redmond’s studied pose. Good feeling among Irishmen is prevailing just now under the present rule. There are no tests available for judging how it will be if the Roman Hierarchy becomes able to dictate the policy of a working majority in a Dublin Parliament—no test except the Belfast case. What is done now in the green tree, when Roman Catholic Members of Parliament hold the balance, will be still more done when they are supreme.
Germany and the Vatican.
—A semi-official confirmation is given to the “Lakalanzeiger’s” report that at a luncheon given at the Vatican to the German clerics in Rome on the Emperor’s birthday, Dr. Von Muchlberg, the Prussian Minister, declared that the religious peace of Germany as well as the relations between his Government and the Vatican appeared to be threatened by the Curia’s attitude. According to the “Berliner Tageblat’s” Rome correspondent, the Minister told the guests that one could with much better reason talk of the oppression of the 45 million German Protestants by the Catholic minority than of the persecution of Catholicism in Germany, and that the attitude of the Curia had caused extreme exasperation among German Protestants, and was a grave menace for the religious peace of Germany. If to-day good relations still existed between Berlin and Rome that was due wholly and solely to the strong will of the Emperor.
A Well-Deserved Castigation.
—The Rev. Thomas Connellan, in the last issue of the Catholic, has administered a well-deserved castigation to Sir William Robertson Nicoll, in connection with his remarks in the British Weekly in reference to the M’Cann case. “The Knighthood,” he says, “bestowed on the Editor must have mesmerised him just as much as the hot coffee and buns distributed at Aberdeen entertainments converted some of our Dublin Presbyterians (ministers especially) to Home Rule. Perhaps the Editor of the British Weekly is not aware that the decree Ne Temere has not been published in Germany. Might he not bring the Nonconformist conscience to bear upon the English Government so that the Vatican would be told that the Roman Catholic blackguard who marries a Protestant girl, in a Protestant place of worship or before the Registrar, and then deserts her, will subject himself to a few years’ penal servitude. What is the use of gabbling about what the State can do when there is no law here in Ireland, except Canon Law, and even Mr. John Redmond assures an audience in America that Mr. Joe Devlin, and not Mr. Birrell, is Chief Secretary for Ireland. Mrs. M’Cann’s two children are, of course, hidden away in some convent ‘Industrial School,’ and her worthy husband is blacking boots in some monkey behind high walls and locked gates. And what has the English Nonconformity come to, when men who profess to be descendants of Cromwell’s Ironsides will swallow such rubbish as that in the article referred to?”