Melbourne Before Archbishop Daniel Mannix

 Patrick Morgan is an Australian academic who has written a number of books and articles on the connections between literature, history and politics, and has edited two volumes of the writings of B.A. Santamaria. Morgan’s book Melbourne Before Mannix: Catholics in Public Life 1880-1920 was published by Connor Court Publications in October 2012. On Wednesday 17 October 2012, Patrick Morgan addressed The Sydney Institute on the influence of Catholics and the Catholic Church in Melbourne’s early public life. 

MELBOURNE CATHOLICS IN PUBLIC LIFE 1880-1920

PATRICK MORGAN

In March 1868, the Irish Catholic Henry O’Farrell shot the visiting Prince Albert, Duke of Edinburgh, in Sydney, an event which caused immense anti-Catholic and anti-Irish feeling. What is less well known is that in 1882 O’Farrell’s crazed brother shot the Catholic Archbishop Goold in a street in Melbourne. Like the Prince, Goold survived, but his health declined and he died four years later. During this period, Cardinal Moran arrived in Sydney and he prodded the Vatican to get Goold to appoint a successor. Goold, prickly about his independence and remembering his long decades of pioneering work on the Australian Mission, replied to Rome:

Thank God I have no need of a coadjutor; when the time comes, I will request this great favour from the Holy See with all due submission. As I am the senior Bishop of Australia, and one of the first missionaries of the Colony, I hope the correspondence of Propaganda in the affairs of this Province of Victoria will be sent to me directly, not through Mgr. Moran of Sydney.

Goold was not going to be trumped by a newly arrived cardinal. This was an opening shot in the long rivalry between the Sydney and Melbourne sees. In this book, the Victorian Catholic Church comes out favourably in comparison with its NSW counterpart, but with the ALP the situation is reversed – the NSW ALP branch was successful and favourable to Catholics, whereas the Victorian ALP branch was not.

My book Melbourne Before Mannix: Catholic in Public Life 1880 to 1920 covers the decades of Archbishop Thomas Carr’s rule, and the first seven years of Archbishop Daniel Mannix’s rule. This book has been written for the centenary, this month, of Dr Daniel Mannix’s appointment as Coadjutor Archbishop of Melbourne. Mannix has had more biographies written on him than any other Australian, because there are still many unanswered questions about his turbulent 50 year career here. His many biographers have combed through his earlier 50 years in Ireland, searching, often in vain, for clues which might explain his Australian activities.

In Ireland, Mannix had been largely a private figure, living in a semi-enclosed seminary, Maynooth, all his adult life. My idea for this book was that understanding the decades in Melbourne Catholic life, before he arrived, is the more important pre-history of Mannix’s activities here. Then we can ask what he inherited from the Melbourne archdiocese, how he fitted in, and – importantly – what he changed.

Archdiocese under Archbishop Carr

 Though I had my eye on Mannix, I discovered that the Carr period was an impressive story in its own right. Under Carr, a great flourishing of religious activity took place and, as Professor Patrick O’Farrell has pointed out, Melbourne came to lead the Australian Catholic church in many ways. This great outburst of activity came about because Archbishop Carr encouraged lay initiative, unlike Cardinal Moran who wanted to do it all himself. When the large lay organisation, the Australian Catholic Federation, was founded in 1911 Moran wouldn’t allow it in Sydney. It began here only after his death.

Melbourne’s three Catholic papers were the outlets for a dozen or so Melbourne lay Catholics who were the movers and shakers of their time. All were thinkers, writers and organisers who formed new Catholic institutions and went into the public realm to advance their views. Melbourne was the archdiocese which started up Catholic institutions on a nation-wide scale, organizations such as the Hibernians, the Catholic Young Men’s Society, the Australian Catholic Truth Society, the Australian Catholic Federation, the Newman Society and the monthly magazine, Austral Light. While writing this book, I came to realise that the lineaments of the Catholic Melbourne I knew after the Second World War had been established not by Archbishop Mannix, but by his lesser known predecessor, Archbishop Thomas Carr.

I’ll briefly mention two Melbourne laymen here who made a mark on the world stage. James Hogan wrote the first history of the Irish in Australia. A fellow reporter, Alfred Deakin, described him in the 1880s as “an able and industrious journalist, never without a book, and always likely to be run over by a tram”. Hogan got himself elected as an Irish member at Westminster, where he said during the Home Rule debate that after less than 20 years of European settlement in Victoria it had been given self-government, that is Home Rule, by Britain. But Ireland, a distinguished European nation for at least 1500 years, had been denied it.

Arthur Lynch, from Ballarat, led an Irish Brigade for President Kruger against the British in the Boer War. He also got himself elected to Westminster as an Irish member but, as he was about to take his seat, he was arrested for treason and sentenced to death. After much public protest this was commuted to life imprisonment and he was freed after five years by the King, after which he took up his Westminster seat for another decade.

At home, the surgeon Dr Leo Kenny served the Melbourne archdiocese as a prominent layman for six decades from the 1880s. The first of his three Papal Knighthoods was awarded to him at the extraordinarily young age of 23 – the fact that he was the Archbishop’s cousin had something to do with his three Papal gongs. His last public appearance was at the age of 86 to chair a giant Catholic meeting in 1939 on the coming world war, at which Prime Minister Robert Menzies and Mannix spoke. This was the first public appearance of the 24 year old Bob Santamaria, the organiser of the meeting. Like Santamaria with Mannix, Kenny was a younger friend and confidant of his Archbishop who carried out major organisational and propaganda tasks for the Archdiocese.

The Melbourne Irish

 Nineteenth century Melbourne was, like Sydney and Brisbane, almost a quarter Irish Catholic. For a number of reasons, Melbourne became the focal point of consciousness of being Irish Australian, and of consciousness of the wrongs of old Ireland in Australia. The publisher of The Advocate, Joseph Winter, was a relentless propagandist for Home Rule for four decades from 1870s (I know Sydney had Tighe Ryan doing the same with the Catholic Press here later on), as were the Home Rule activists Nicholas O’Donnell, leading Gaelic scholar,  and the organiser Morgan Jageurs.

Then there was the dominance in Melbourne of the Irish Christian Brothers, who had anti-British Irish nationalism in their DNA, in contrast to the Marist Brothers, originally a French order, in Sydney. Victoria had in addition three early Irish Catholic Premiers – Sir John O’Shannasy, Sir Charles Gavan Duffy and Sir Bryan O’Loghlen. Irish Home Rule delegates sent out to Australia said Melbourne was, like Boston, well known in Ireland as an organised and fervent supporter. Mannix’s arrival in Australia was therefore not entirely random and fortuitous in time and place.  He came to the city in Australia most conscious of its Irish heritage. And, in time, he came just before the Easter Rebellion, when Irish events began for the first time to play a role in Australian affairs.

But there was a catch – there’s always a catch. Melbourne’s Irish propagandists were more moderate on Irish issues than their American counterparts for a number of reasons. Coming a generation after the famine, those who came to Australia were working and lower middle class rather than the utterly destitute of the previous generation, and their memories of Ireland were as a consequence less bitter than those who had left earlier. The long voyage out meant a permanent psychological as well as physical break from Ireland, with little chance of returning and less emotional investment in Irish affairs. The Irish here lived under British rule, and so were less likely to develop an anti-British worldview than those in the independent United States. These factors combined to lead the Australian Irish to be more temperate, as Oliver MacDonagh has pointed out, in their subsequent political affiliations, and more moderate than Dr Mannix, which was to cause problems for him in Melbourne. Sydney had a much more radical group than Melbourne (documented by O’Farrell) who were interned during the First World War.

The main clerical activists in Melbourne were, naturally, all Irish-born Catholics. Not so the lay activists. If the principal movers and shakers among Melbourne lay Catholics are listed by their background of place of birth and faith, only five of the fourteen were “pure” Irish-Australian Catholic. The others had mixed backgrounds.

We tend to assume that the coherent Irish Catholic group in Melbourne, evident from the 1880s to the 1950s, always existed. But, in earlier decades, the overall population, including Catholics, was much more jumbled. Relationships were much freer in Australia than in the old world, and mixing with strangers much more common. Goldfields society was especially like this. A general shortage of women meant men often had to look outside their own religious group for partners. The higher proportion of women among the immigrant Catholic Irish meant that a significant number of them married out. Half of the Irish Catholic women who married in the 1850s gold rush decade in Australia married non-Catholics.

Among activists from mixed marriages, those whose mothers were Catholic ended up as Catholic, partly as a condition of church approval of the marriage. More than a quarter of the activists were converts, four came from mixed marriages, five had English and two Scots backgrounds. This was pretty typical of the melting pot atmosphere in Australia at the time. It gives the Catholic activists an unexpected breadth, influences their outlook, and throws into contention just what the phrases like “Irish Australian” or “Irish Catholic” meant in Australia – these monochrome terms masked a more diverse background, including the important strain of English Catholicism. It was only later in the century, when people began to settle in the big cities, when there was a larger marrying pool within one’s own group, and when the church began to enforce its dislike of mixed marriages, that the large group called “Irish Australian Catholics” consolidated itself.

The arrival of Dr Mannix

 Mannix arrived on the scene in 1913. Soon after his arrival he became a controversial figure. What was tumultuous was not his coming, but world events at the time. Coinciding with Mannix’s arrival the settled, predictable and relatively simple pattern of the previous decades was shattered by world eruptions. The years from 1914 to 1920 caused seismic shifts in the positions of the main actors in the Melbourne Archdiocese. A series of cascading, interwoven eruptions took centre stage – the outbreak of the First World War in 1914,  the Home Rule Bill, the death of the Pope, the Easter Rising in Dublin in 1916, the conscription referenda in 1916 and 1917, the Anglo-Irish war from 1919 and then the Irish civil war. These events took everyone, including Mannix, out of their previous comfort zones.

Everyone had to make big adjustments, but Mannix had to make additional simultaneous adjustments: moving from Ireland to Australia, adjusting to its politics and its style of Catholicism. Moreover, he had to move from private to public life. He said here that he had never been in a public controversy in Ireland. Whether this move into public life went against a natural inclination to privacy or suited a previously undisclosed political acumen, he never revealed. The latter is more likely, and both may be true. Most of Mannix’s biographers have understandably placed him in a political context in Australia, with the advent of the 1916 Easter Rising and the two conscription referenda. This makes him look dominant as he was soon the equal and opposite of the Prime Minister. But his primary location was in the Catholic Church. Viewed from this perspective he looks a less assured, though still outstanding, figure, one who was feeling his way. He was, to use our current cliché, on a steep learning curve.

Changing Melbourne catholicism

 Mannix put an end to the round of internal self-congratulation and external defiance, the usual fate of repressed minorities. He didn’t, in his early years as archbishop, publicly ponder much on such questions as salvation outside the church, or mixed marriages, or other staples of the sermons of Catholic moralists. Mannix didn’t spend his time debating Protestant clergymen on the longstanding disputes caused by the Reformation. Nor did he emphasise the nineteenth century devotional practices of Jansenist piety and personal moral guilt. Jansenism was a French form of the Puritan or Manichean heresy despising the things of this world – I don’t have to explain its crippling guilt-inducing effects, as every autobiography of a Catholic childhood has done that for you.

Mannix helped Melbourne Catholics, in a very short time, to face modernity and to break from being morally hamstrung by these Jansenist nostrums. This had some surprising and unforeseen consequences. It was, ironically, an archbishop who to some extent broke the hold the clergy had on laymen and women.

Up till this stage, Catholic bishops and clergy had been in the business of finger-wagging admonition – admonishing their flocks for their moral failings, and admonishing their opponents for failing to appreciate Catholic beliefs. He didn’t speak at his flock – instead he faced the other way, he identified with his people, speaking on their behalf to the public rather than blaming them, which made them warm to him. He encouraged them and brought them on, as he had done with his seminary students in Ireland.  He wasn’t so much church-centered as society-centered. Mannix realised that Catholics were now living in a largely secular world. He adapted to this, and was able to act outside the church realm on behalf of his congregation.

But, to do this, Mannix had to form a new alliance over the heads of the Catholic elite and clergy, between himself and ordinary Melbourne Catholics, who applauded his speeches. The most prominent Catholic layman, Dr Kenny, differed with Mannix on conscription and Ireland. The Celtic Club, the United Irish League and the Gaelic League all had ructions over conscription and Irish nationalism. Morgan Jageurs, head of the Home Rule body, wrote to the High Court Justice Henry Bournes Higgins of “the sinister and powerful influence of Dr Mannix”. Tom Brennan, editor of the leading Catholic paper The Advocate supported conscription. The convert Benjamin Hoare of The Age was an outright opponent.

Previously, the emphasis has been on the intense public squabbles Mannix, leading a Catholic phalanx, had with the Prime Minister Billy Hughes and the conscriptionists. But there were just as many also squabbles inside the Catholic community. So the picture of him leading a united Catholic flock needs to be modified. The leading clerical and lay figures in Melbourne, with very few exceptions, disagreed with his views on on the Easter Rebellion and the conduct of the first world war, and even on conscription.

Some lay figures complained to Rome, through the Apostolic Delegate, about his activities. Mannix received two Papal reprimands. Billy Hughes made similar representations to the British government in London. In later life, Mannix’s favourite anecdote related to these attempts to restrain him:

In the middle of the First World War, “Billy” Hughes had made urgent representations to the British Government to induce the Vatican to get this troublesome prelate finally recalled from Australia. Asquith met the leading English Catholic cleric Cardinal Gasquet at a garden party at Buckingham Palace. The request was put to the Cardinal in a private conversation to be passed on to Pope Benedict XV. Cardinal Gasquet, perhaps startled by the request, perhaps playing for time, said: “But what could we do with him? Where would we put him?” “Well” said Asquith “couldn’t you bring him back to Rome and put him in charge of a college?” “God forbid!” said the Cardinal. “At least in Australia he’s that far away.” 

There was a precedent to this. When the last Benedictine hierarch, Archbishop Vaughan of Sydney, died in 1883, Melbourne’s Catholic paper The Advocate speculated that Archbishop Croke, the radical Irish nationalist, who had been officially warned by the Vatican for his views, might be appointed to Sydney:

We can even imagine reasons why, in certain quarters, it might seem desirable that Croke should be sent out of Ireland and placed in Sydney, as it happens that there is a vacancy there in which he could be provided for at a long distance from Ireland.

This didn’t come about, but is an eerie premonition of similar speculation that later arose that Mannix, who followed the Croke line in Australia and also received papal warnings, was being kept in exile in the antipodes because of his nationalist sympathies. Mannix adopted Croke’s policy of outspokenness on Irish issues when he came to Australia.

The Mannix style

 Mannix transformed the Melbourne style of debating, undermining rather than berating his opponents. He did not employ the high hectoring, deadly serious style of escalating vituperation common in Melbourne’s sectarian debates at the time. Instead he used a sly, apparently self-deprecating tone to undermine his targets. Here he is on is his boss, Archbishop Carr:

Archbishop Carr is a man of peace and placidity, but he has been converted – not by me (laughter) – and not by you, but by those who for 25 years and more have denied him and denied you the barest justice … I am myself a sinner in this matter. The Archbishop said he has given advice when it has been sought. I fear that I have broken his wise rule, and give advice possibly when it is not sought. (Cheers and laughter)

This is cheeky. He is apparently blaming himself, but really saying that Carr has lost touch, and new tactics are needed. Mannix patronised his opponents, treating them as passé, more to be pitied than worried about. He chipped away at the establishment verities of the time in a soft but clearly articulated voice.

The Australian Catholic Federation

 I shall now focus not on the much discussed conscription referenda, where Mannix was successful, but on an earlier series of events when his touch was not so sure. A parallel is often drawn between the Labor Party split of 1916-7 over conscription and the great Split 1954-55, in both of which Mannix was a key player. But another comparison is with events in 1914-5 connected with the Australian Catholic Federation (ACF), and the Movement in the 1940s.

In 1913, Mannix asked for state educational scholarships for Catholic schools, a form of State Aid. Liberal Premier William Watt rebuffed him, upon which Mannix said rather bluntly: “The door has been closed and closed with a bang, in [our] face. The next move I hope it will be an open, straight approach to the Labour Party.” He also spoke of “turning the political screw” at the forthcoming state election. These comments occasioned Premier Watt’s jibe, repeated by others over the years, that Mannix did not understand how Australian politics worked. Mannix’s bluntness here was a miscalculation – he had overplayed his hand.

The Victorian ALP which Victorian Catholics, led by Mannix, now approached, was very different from the NSW one. Cardinal Patrick Moran had the support of Labor because he supported the workers in the 1890s strikes and because, as Patrick Ford has demonstrated, he pressured the new party to play down its left socialisation plank. It became a moderate party Catholics felt at home in. In contrast, the Victorian party had a strong left faction, plus a strong, anti-religious liberal strain, both of which gave rise to a view that extreme ideological purity was to be preferred to electoral success. A recent history of the Victorian ALP is titled Neither Power Nor Glory. It had an appalling electoral record. Memorably, in the 1960s, Whitlam said while trying to get rid of the Bill Hartley Socialist Left grip on the party: “Only the impotent are pure.” It was this party in which Catholics felt uncomfortable, and which Mannix and the ACF now approached

Before the state election in late 1914, the ACF wished to meet with the executive of the Victorian Labor Party to discuss Catholic grievances, and to water down the Labor Party’s commitment to secular education. This approach was rejected by the Victorian executive. Eventually, it banned the Australian Catholic Federation members from being members of the ALP. To overcome the ban, Victorian Catholics formed a new body, the Catholic Workers Association (CWA), open to unionists and PLC members, aiming to cooperate with the PLC to improve workers’ conditions and to push for religious education. Mannix stated that the CWA was being organised “within the Labor Party by Catholics”. The Catholics hoped through the CWA to gain a controlling influence in the Labor machine. By this, Mannix was a leading strategist of the ACF, even though it was supposed to be a lay organisation.

At the Victorian Labor Party conference in April 1916 a truce was called, and the ban on ACF members was ended, with the successful motion moved by James Scullin and Ned Hogan. The Australian Catholic Federation’s attempt in 1915 to infiltrate the Labor Party in Victoria, through a new body, the Catholic Workers Association, when the ACF was banned by Labor, has obvious parallels with industrial and political events in the 1940s and 1950s, when the Catholic Action organization formed the Movement, which tried to dominate the ALP and was in turn proscribed by the ALP. The CWA was a body of Catholic unionists and ALP members, the same tactical composition as the Movement. Mannix had form on this issue, as he was deeply involved in both manoeuvres.

I discovered to my surprise while writing this book that, on at least four occasions in the past, Melbourne Catholics had organised a Catholic bloc vote based on parishes to try to achieve their political ends. It has been previously assumed that Bob Santamaria thought up the idea of the parish-based Movement to fight Communist influence in the unions and the ALP, and that in the background Mannix provided spiritual and financial assistance. In 1941 when the Movement was formed, Mannix was a wily 78-year-old and Santamaria an inexperienced 26-year-old. Given Mannix’s involvement in a previous attempt in 1914-15 by the Catholic Workers Association to use parish lists and unionists in an attempt to infiltrate the local Labor Party, it is possible that Mannix had a more crucial input into the Movement’s inception and tactics than has been previously realised.

Conscription

 Because of sectarian feeling and wartime curtailment of freedoms – military lawyers and censors were after him – Mannix couldn’t say openly that he didn’t believe in the British Empire nor the reasons Britain gave for going to war. Nor could he say that Ireland would be freed only by armed insurrection. So it is in Mannix’s apparently throwaway lines that his real position can be discerned. When he said, “my loyalty to the Empire, such as it is”, or “the Empire, to which, fortunately or unfortunately, we belong”, or “we are paying in men and money for other people’s ambitions”, he was insinuating he had grave doubts about the Empire and the war. In Australia, he kept his opinions below the radar of the censorship authorities by not making them explicit, resorting instead to cryptic utterances.

Among the American Irish, and after the war by contrast, Mannix felt freer to speak his mind. He said, in a speech at Plattsburg, New York, on his US tour of 1920: “England was your enemy. England is your enemy. England will be your enemy for all time. England is one of the greatest hypocrites in the world. She pretended to be your friend in the war, and now that the war is over she tells you to mind your own business.” It is likely that the Plattsburg utterance reveals Mannix’s true but covert position during the First World War and conscription debates. Melbourne’s Catholics had been brought up, unlike Mannix, in a society where the British connection was important. Mannix was leading his flock to weaken that connection, and to act in the more forthright way American Irish Catholics always had.

Conscription was contemplated because massive reinforcements were required, since tens of thousands and even hundreds of thousands of lives were regularly being lost in the mud of France. The war was by now very different from what it had been in August 1914. Mannix made the important point that a war that was just at the start may cease to be just as it progresses. The war with its massive losses was at a stalemate with no end in sight. Conscription simply poured more victims into the abyss. Men feared not just conscription, they feared death. It was a lottery in which your chances were not good – a third of Australian soldiers who went overseas were either killed or wounded.

To some extent Mannix was himself responding to a deep, pre-existing feeling among ordinary Catholics that their hereditary class enemy was asking too much of them. Conscription had radically changed things. It was one thing for Australian Catholics to volunteer to fight for another country, England, but another to be forced to do so – that was a bridge too far. Britain was shooting Catholics in Ireland at the same time as it was compelling Irish Catholics in Australia to go to war on its behalf. Britain, through the agency of the Hughes government, was now in its hour of need acting in Australia not benignly, but imperiously using people for its own agendas without regard to their interests. It was changing citizens back into subjects. Catholics were now for the first time acting independently. Mannix capitalised on that change and gave public expression to it.

Tribalisation versus assimilation

 One main charge against Mannix is that in both the conscription and the Split era his actions reignited sectarian animosities and so retarded the natural assimilation of Irish Catholic into the wider community. The fluctuation between tribalisation and assimilation is a continuing theme in this book. Did he hold up Catholic assimilation as alleged?

Firstly, Catholics were not in physical ghettoes. Hogan showed in his book The Irish in Australia that Melbourne Catholics did not live in a distinct Irish quarters – they were spread out evenly throughout the city. Historians have said Catholics had to choose between Mannix and the Protestant establishment. But it was not an either or question. The only priest who supported Mannix and the Sinn Fein position, Fr JJ Malone, also on his world tour praised the British Empire for its rational, civilising role.

The crucial issue was not assimilation but getting on in the world, getting jobs, upward social mobility. St Kevin’s Christian Brothers College was founded in 1918 in the same year as Newman College; it was a Leaving and Leaving Honours central school for boys from all Christian Brothers secondary colleges wishing to go to university. St Kevin’s and Newman College provided a pathway for young Catholics into the professions, business and public positions where they had been previously under-represented. Many commentators have focussed on the conscription imbroglio as cementing Catholic separation, but at the same time the church was providing, through higher education, a route out of the condition of a beleaguered minority. In the long run this was a more significant factor in assimilating Catholics than the conscription issue was in retarding that assimilation.

With the Labor Party split after the first conscription referendum, many Protestants left because of their strong Empire loyalties and Catholics naturally stayed in, which meant Catholics had more numerical influence in the party. The conscription debates and Mannix’s involvement in them have traditionally been seen as a factor which hindered Irish Catholic integration. Professor Patrick O’Farrell draws the opposite conclusion:

This situation had the curious effect of drawing Irish Catholics into the centre of Australian affairs in a way they had never been before … now as one aspect of a victorious anti-conscription movement they had new friends with whom they had made common cause … The nature of the anti-conscription movement also had the general effect of integrating Irish Catholics much more firmly into the labour movement. And, crucially, into the Labor Party.

Contrary to the usual view that the Irish Catholic element was a force for disunity in Australia, Professor O’Farrell argued generally that the Irish Australian minority was so large and influential that its struggle for definition was a key element in the formation of the Australian consensus. Catholics became part of the mainstream not by deferring to it, nor by attacking it, but by independently asserting themselves.