Interpretación cualitativa de las pruebas saber grado Tercero

232 NZ Tablet, 18 February 1909, pp. 251-2; 7 April 1921,

p . 26. In Australia, too, there were reports

of prisoners falsely claiming to be Catholics (NZ Tablet,

18 March 1909, p. 409).

233

D.P. O'Neill, "Catholics and Delinquency" (Victoria University M.A. thesis,

1951),

cited by H.

66 Chapter One: A People Apart? Catholic over-representation in crime statistics evidently reflects the Church's inadequate pastoral care for its wayward members. Preoccupation with the righteous seems to have precluded going in search of the lost sheep. In

192 1 ,

Father John

Golden, chaplain to St Joseph's Home for the Aged Poor in Ponsonby, wrote a letter to the Tablet, lamenting the spiritUal condition of some of his elderly charges.234 Most of the inmates were "devoted Catholics" but others he characterized as "stray sheep". In their younger days, the majority of them "had known a priest at a safe distance" but the "ambassador of Christ" had not fulfIlled his finest and most meritorious duty by

recalling them to the practice of their religion. Now it was too late: "The pension and Johnnie Walker lure them away to the police cells ... ". Single men could easily be overlooked by a Church whose chief institutions, the school and the parish, were primarily oriented towards families. In their old age, indigent Catholic men might benefit from the Church's charity, but it was too late for a change of lifestyle.

The failure of the Catholic Church in this respect reflects the more difficult task it had before it than the other churches did. In all western societies, the churches have found it easier to retain their middle class than their working class constituents and the Catholic Church in New Zealand had a disproportionate number of such members. Such people were more likely to be only nominal Catholics; they were also inherently more likely to be caught breaking the law. The Anglican Church's high proportion of prisoners (by contrast with the relatively low proportions of Presbyterians and

Methodists) was no doubt also due to the disproportionate number of nominal, working class adherents of that denomination. As Venning wrote of the "Catholic" prisoners he interviewed in

1909:

They are in gaol, not because they are Catholics, but because they had no Catholic influence in their early lives; they had been without a Catholic home, Catholic companions, Catholic teaching, Catholic schools.235

In all likelihood, most of them had also lacked the advantages of a middle class or respectable working class upbringing: social and ecclesiastical marginality went together.

Catholics were markedly over-represented in prisons and other corrective

institutions, although the small numbers of inmates, especially women, cannot be taken

(Footnote continued from previous page.)

Perspectives (Sydney, Wiley and Sons,

1973),

p.

268.

234 NZ Tablet, 18

August 1921, p. 35.

Crime and Imprisonment 67 as representative of the Catholic community as a whole. Prisoners and other inmates who described themselves as Catholics tended to have had little contact with the Catholic community and showed little appreciation of its beliefs and practices: they had not been effectively socialized as Catholics. Most of them had committed

offences typically associated with lower socio-economic groups, such as drunkenness and vagrancy. The relatively youthful profile of the Catholic population and its high proportion of single men no doubt contributed to its disproportionate share of petty criminals. Moreover, heavy drinking, without the traditional social constraints, seems to have been a common pattern among Irish immigrants and their descendants.

Although there was some decline in the proportions of Catholic prisoners before the statistics ceased to be published in

193 1,

the long-term trend demonstrated by Graph

1 .5

shows that there was a significant number of nominal Catholics who were not well integrated into either the Catholic community or respectable society as a whole. Conclusion

Catholics made up about one seventh of the New Zealand population, the rest being predominantly Anglican, Presbyterian or Methodist. In origin, the Catholic

community in New Zealand was overwhelmingly Irish but by the interwar period, while some Irish immigrants continued to arrive, only a small and declining proportion of Catholics had themselves been born in Ireland. Other nationalities also contributed to the Catholic popUlation, but the largest, the Dalmatians, numbered only several thousand immigrants and their descendants. The smaller ethnic groups influenced the character of the Catholic population in some areas, for example the Italians of Island Bay and Eastbourne. However, there were no Catholic enclaves except for the small population of Puhoi, which was unusual in having been settled almost exclusively by small groups of German Catholics. The minor Catholic ethnic groups largely

conformed to the prevailing patterns of New Zealand Catholicism, although occasionally they received visits from clergy of their own nationality and the

Dalmatians had a resident Yugoslav priest for much of the period. The Church in New Zealand continued to depend on Irish priests and nuns but, as a community, it showed little evidence of any continuing sense of Irish identity. Like the descendants of other settlers from the British Isles, Catholics of Irish descent had not forgotten their origins but they regarded themselves as New Zealanders.

One of the principle reasons for the failure of the Irish and other Catholic ethnic groups to retain any strong ethnic identity was their dispersion throughout the country.

68

Chapter One: A People Apart?

Even those who settled in relatively large clusters, like the Italians, nevertheless lived among other Catholics and non-Catholics. Although the unique character of the West Coast owed much to its relatively high Catholic population of Irish descent, this was a very small province and even there, Catholics were not dominant in a manner

comparable to that of the Presbyterians in Otago or Southland.

In

other areas where there was an over-representation of Catholics, it was usually only by a few percentage points and there were no large towns with significant concentrations of Catholics. Almost everywhere, Catholics were but a small minority.

In most other respects, the Catholic population did not diverge widely from the rest of New Zealand society, although it had some quite distinct features. Catholic male to female ratios in

192 1

and

1936

were very similar to those of the Anglican and

Presbyterian communities. The age profiles of the Catholic population reveal higher proportions· of children and fewer old people than do the profiles of the other large denominations. Catholic men and women appear to have m arried at ages only slightly older than those of non-Catholics but Catholic women and especially Catholic men were more likely to remain single than were members of other churches.

In

the case of Catholic women, about half the "extra" unmarried women were nuns, but the

unmarried men were more likely to have been influenced by economic constraints. Catholics were markedly over-represented in hospitals and charitable institutions and in the country's prisons, although it has been seen that those who thus demonstrated their failure to integrate into the wider society were also unlikely to have been adequately socialized as Catholics.

The employment patterns of Catholics had some distinctive features. Catholics were over-represented in certain areas of government employment, especially the police force, the railways, the telegraph and telephone service and in the rather miscellaneous category of general government employees. Catholics were under­ represented in commerce and in private business and Catholic men were more likely to be employers than employees. A relatively high proportion of Catholic women were in paid employment, many of them as proprietors of licensed hotels. Catholic men and

,women were more likely than Protestants to work in industries connected with drinking or gambling. Such patterns of employment were self-perpetuating in that younger Catholics no doubt often followed older role models or sought their help and advice. Moreover, the Catholic religion and Irish culture had relatively tolerant attitudes towards drinking and gambling. The high proportions of unskilled or semi­ skilled Catholics suggest that they tended to lack capital or advanced education. This

Conclusion 69

would also have encouraged them to seek government employment, a tendency

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