BRENDA NIALL
Text Publishing, 2015, 439 pages
Daniel Mannix, Catholic Archbishop of Melbourne for half a
century, could be a bit of a rebel. As
Monash University’s Brenda Niall recounts in her biography, the Irish
nationalist and opponent of conscription in Australia during the first world war
would show his disdain for the British monarchy by sticking postage stamps,
bearing the King’s image, on sideways.
The one-time Labor Party-supporting champion of the working
class, however, spent his last decades splitting the party and keeping it out
of government, whilst white-anting the trade unions, by unleashing his literally
secret weapon, the Italian grocer’s son from Brunswick, Bartholomew Augustine
Santamaria, in a clandestine, anti-communist offensive.
Born to a tenant farmer in Ireland in 1864, Mannix was
always conscious of the grim and violent past of British rule in that colony. This survived his seminary training and he retained
his Irish republican sympathies when he was sent to head the Church in 1913 in
Melbourne, the then seat of federal government.
Mannix condemned Britain’s murderous reprisals for the 1916 Easter Rising in Dublin which declared an ill-fated independent republic. Alone amongst Australia’s Catholic Archbishops, Mannix “took the side of the rebels” and declared himself for Sinn Fein, Ireland’s radical nationalist republicans. Unwilling to see colonial lives sacrificed for British empire, Mannix opposed, and helped defeat, the two conscription referenda during the Great War, adding that ‘the working class would pay the highest price in the war and then be forgotten’.
Mannix openly supported Labor and his working class
parishioners in north Melbourne, and, during the seamen’s strike of 1919, said ‘the
worker must get a fair share of the wealth he produces’ and that people are
‘more sacred than property’.
The worm in the apple of this putative Red priest, however,
was anti-communism, an ideology shared by all the Catholic hierarchy. Mannix sought to promote Catholic leaders in
the secular world, beginning in the politically turbulent 1930s, to ensure that
if people ‘are to move along safe lines, the public mind should be leavened by
Catholic principles’. ‘Safe lines’ meant
stopping the Red Menace.
It was fine to give coins to the poor, as Mannix did on his
daily walk to his Cathedral, or to organise welfare relief, but just don’t let
the workers do anything about their lot that might actually challenge
capitalism, or the Church.
Santamaria’s publicly nameless and secretive anti-communist
strike force was Mannix’s insurance against any such outcome. Mannix “ensured funding for The Movement” as
it organised ‘Industrial Groups’ to overthrow Communist Party leadership of key
Australian trade unions and it penetrated the ALP to campaign against its left,
splitting the party in 1954-55 and keeping it out of office until 1972 courtesy
of the anti-Labor preferences of his splinter Democratic Labor Party.
Santamaria was Mannix’s lever for directly influencing public
political and industrial policy in the way an Archbishop could not openly do. In a 1961 interview on ABC TV, two years
before his death, Mannix called Santamaria ‘the saviour of Australia’.
Niall, for her part, is in fairly comfortable proximity to the
Mannix-Santamaria ideological cosmos.
Communism, she agrees, “was a cruel failure”. She puts down all Communist Party union
leadership to “ballot-rigging, intimidation, physical force and mass
apathy”. Her first job was research
assistant to Santamaria and, although she claims not to have been aware of The
Movement at the time, Niall would probably have been right at home with its
politics as demonstrated by her going on to work for Santamaria’s
anti-communist News Weekly as book
reviewer.
Niall’s wooden anti-communism is complemented by a largely
unreflective Catholicism. The Mannix
hobby-horse of state aid for private religious schools is assumed to be a good
and just thing. The ethics of Church
wealth is unchallenged (as is the hypocrisy of the worker-friendly Archbishop living
in wealthy Kew, in the conservative electorate of Liberal Prime Minister,
Robert Menzies). “Atheistic communism” (simplistically
reduced to Stalinist horrors) is assumed to be undesirable.
Niall’s academic career was in English literature, not
history, and her personal background that of Catholicism not Marxism. Unsurprisingly, therefore, her portrait of
Mannix is closely intimate rather than politically substantive. Arcane points of Catholic doctrine and
institutions tend to crowd out a fully rounded analysis of Archbishop Mannix who,
like the majority of working class Irish Catholics at the time, was mocking of
the Union Jack, cold on conscription and who could be numbered with the unionists
and the left but who wound up undoing all this as a remote control leader of
the anti-democratic, anti-communist Catholic right in Australia.
