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Show JULES LAMOTHE AND AVE MARIA. - To the Editor: Sir: May I trouble you to find space for the enclosed clippings from the December number of the Ave Maria and for a few questions I wish to ask touching these abstracts.. The editor of the Ave Maria writes: "In an exceptionally interesting interest-ing communication appearing in a recent issue , of the Independent, Mr. A. L. Pitcher, an American Ameri-can school teacher, says: . "I went to the Philippines to help show the natives something about American schools and to teach them English. I was assigned to an "inland town of Pampanga, a province of Luzon. The people of this town were friendly and hospitable when, a perfect stranger, I came among them. I saw that they werenot savages, that they wore clothes scant, to be sure, but modest; that they had profiled to a high degree, from the civilizing influence of Spain. I Avas surprised to find in a peasant community so high an intellectuality. I was admitted to their family life an intimacy inti-macy that proved to me their respect for. old age; their love for their children; their reverence for .the family, accountable for monogamy, legitimate children, and a wholesome observance of marriage. I found that in their relations one with the other their conduct was marked by a dignified courtesy and a constant good nature. The low, worthless Americans let loose in the archipelago are far from being the equals of those they bully. The brutal coarseness with which this class of officials administer American justice to a people still in medievalism is completely estranging es-tranging the Filipinos and perverting their ideas of Americans. Our nation is judged by ' these things and these persons; the natives receive impressions which work for no good to the government gov-ernment at large, and which frequently drive them to the hills to avenge themselves on a government gov-ernment so represented. It is thus largely a ques-. ques-. tion of winning or antagonizing the Filipinos though provincial officials. On the same page of the Ave Maria we find this abstract, given as a statement made, somewhere some-where and at some time, by Frances E. Willard, the philanthropist and great temperance advocate. "I am a Protestant, but there is no blinking this fact; the Catholics are, in this country, and in Ireland, ahead of us in social purity. You can take a Protestant family into a London slum and put them into a dirty room on the right-hand top of the stairs, and then put a Catholic family on the other side ofthe stairs, and you will find after two, three or four years, half 'of the girls of the Protestant family have gone to the bad, and ail the members of the Catholic family have retained their virtue. I was astonished when I went to Ireland by the contrast between that country and our own. I heard from Protestant and Catholic, Unionist and Home Ruler alike, that, although they may be packed together, you will find that they are the most virtuous peasantry in the world. How is that? I tell you it is because the priests have preached sedulously and inoculated in the confessional and in families the duties, of parents to children and the duty of young people to each other. In this matter the result is, I say frankly, a moral miracle, before which we Protestants have reason to bow our heads in shame." Now these are very strong admissions comiug from the opposition benches, but when a Protestant Protest-ant acquaintance, to whom I read them, challenged me to substantiate these quotations, I could not. I bring this charge against many of our Catholic newspapers, magazines and books that they are inexcusably in-excusably careless in omitting a very important item in their citations. Personally, I have no doubt that Mr. Pitcher and Miss Willard wrote or spoke as recorded in the Ave Maria, but how am I going go-ing to prove it to one who denies the accuracy of the quotations or the quotations themselves i "A recent issue of the Independent says:" What issue is-sue says it I And what Independent t There are eleven Independents in the United States. Again, "Frances E. Willard states." What did she state, and where, or on what occasion? How am I to verify it. An abstract in law or literature has no value unless it can be verified. 1 have in my library a very able refutation of Paine, the deist, written by a talented priest, but the work is almost valueless, for in nine cases out of ten, his quotations from Hume, Voltaire, Gibbon and others are not chaptered, paged or editioned. In this age of skepticism and ruthless criticism of sacred sa-cred things, there can be no excuse for a Catholic apologist who is careless and 'slipshod. JULES LAMOTHE. Denver, Dec. 14, 1007. |
