Archbishop Daniel Mannix cast a long shadow over the Melbourne of my boyhood, as long as Eamon de Valera’s in Ireland. Both seemed survivors from another world (Mannix died in his 100th year in 1963). Their intertwined lives had a curious affinity, though by temperament de Valera seemed more fitted for the mitre while Mannix was an instinctive politician.
Consecrated in 1912, Mannix always remained a powerful but divisive influence both within and beyond Australia’s Irish Catholic community. In 1917 he successfully campaigned with passion and cunning against a second attempt to endorse conscription for overseas service by referendum. For this he earned the enduring enmity of Billy Hughes, the ex-Labor prime minister. Hughes considered prosecuting Mannix for sedition, citing his early support for de Valera’s Sinn Féin as evidence of disloyalty.
In 1920, having briefly joined de Valera's cavalcade in the US, Mannix was prohibited by the British government from entering Ireland and three British cities. When extracted from the SS Baltic near Queenstown and deposited in Cornwall, "the Pirate of Penzance" spent four months denouncing British coercion before big crowds outside the no-go zone.
As Mannix remarked with characteristic irony: “Since the Battle of Jutland, the British Navy has not scored any success comparable with . . . the capture without the loss of a single British sailor of the Archbishop of Melbourne.” On his way home, he drafted a message for Pope Benedict XV deploring Irish suffering and calling for a settlement.
Though stressing that the Irish alone should decide whether to reject the Treaty of 1921, his views and rhetoric echoed those of de Valera before, during and after the civil war. Shunned by most of the Irish hierarchy when he finally made it to Ireland in 1925, Mannix still played a crucial part in boosting republican morale and preparing the way for Fianna Fáil.
Citizen’s rights
Throughout his half-century in Melbourne, Mannix tirelessly pursued social and political causes, asserting his right as a citizen to engage in public debate when out of the pulpit. He was a brilliant publicist, using the press, radio and television to promote his message, and editing shorthand versions of speeches before publication.
He sponsored lay initiatives, such as Catholic Action, and deplored clerical dictation to the flock. Instead, he operated like a spy-master, collecting intelligence from a network of erudite Jesuits and Catholic intellectuals, and inspiring them to take their own initiatives.
Despite his authoritarian reputation, Mannix was, in author Brenda Nialls’s view, a “permissive autocrat” who seldom reprimanded or censored his subordinates. He was adept in negating dictation from Rome and withering in his dealings with more orthodox bishops, particularly Sydney’s prissy Cardinal Gilroy.
Mannix’s most celebrated lay protege was Bob (Bartolomeo) Santamaria, a greengrocer’s son and scholarship boy, trained in philosophy and law, who became the driving force behind Australian Catholic Action for three decades. Santamaria mimicked his communist adversaries by creating industrial “Groups” within the trades unions, backed by a secretive “Movement” designed to plant Catholic operatives in key positions throughout the Australian Labor Party.
In its relationship to the Movement, Catholic Action resembled the front organisations propagated in the 1930s by the Communist International. Santamaria’s campaign was quite effective: Australia had few communists, and no Labor leader could afford to alienate the Catholic vote.
When Bert Evatt nevertheless forced Santamaria’s acolytes out of the Labor Party in 1955, Santamaria, with Mannix’s blessing, formed his own party. Making adept use of Australia’s unique electoral system, the Democratic Labor Party was mainly responsible for keeping Evatt’s party out of office in several federal elections.
This was Mannix’s last hurrah: though reclusive and in his 90s, the archbishop’s public pronouncements persuaded many voters that a Catholic could support Labor’s rebels in good conscience. In an era when Catholic doctrine denied the validity of “individual conscience”, Mannix urged his flock to follow its dictates. Neither Santamaria nor Mannix was the other’s puppet, despite unfounded rumours of the aged archbishop’s senility.
Niall offers a vivid account of Mannix in Australia, drawing on her own youthful involvement in Catholic Action and as the research assistant (in 1959!) for Santamaria’s incisive biography of his mentor (published in 1984). As benign as Santamaria in appraising ambiguous evidence of Mannix’s actions and motives, she recreates the atmosphere and assumptions of a distant era, when religion mattered in Australia. She highlights Mannix’s unexpectedly progressive views on issues such as capitalism, feminism, sex education, anti- Semitism and “White Australia”.
Mannix’s archaic dress and Victorian formality gave extra dramatic punch to his recurrent radicalism, expressed at the very end of his life in his admiration for Pope John XXIII. Though unable to travel to Rome for Vatican II, Mannix lobbied shrewdly and eloquently against the rigid clericalism of the De Ecclesia scheme, bombarding reformist cardinals with his own elaborate critique in Latin.
Castle Catholic
Biographers (Niall is the ninth) have struggled to explain Mannix’s transformation after his departure from Ireland and the presidency of Maynooth College in 1912. At the time of his appointment to Melbourne, Mannix was widely regarded as a “Castle Catholic”, a cloistered academic careerist, without parochial experience or political influence.
Though eager to engage the clergy in social and economic issues through the Maynooth Union that he created for alumni, he avoided political controversy, apart from fighting off the Gaelic League’s attempts to make Irish a compulsory subject for university examinations. Strongly against clerical smoking, drinking and gambling, he was notorious for ruthless treatment of student and staff dissenters.
As the eldest son of a prosperous dairy farmer with a 10-room house near Charleville, Co Cork, Mannix showed no affinity with the restive underclass of rural Ireland, though his father Timothy and three uncles were prominent in the Land League. With up to 200 acres of good land, Timothy Mannix was no “peasant”, a condescending term favoured by his son.
So how did such a man abruptly become a champion of Australia’s poor, a progressive social critic, and an inveterate political meddler? Why was Mannix radicalised by “exile”, when so many emigrant bishops of Irish birth became ostentatious imperial patriots once in the dominions?
Catholic bourgeoisie
Less alert than Santamaria to the nuances of Irish history, Niall portrays Mannix as representative of a disaffected tenantry irrevocably alienated from British rule, though she wavers between designating the Mannix farm as “strong” or, less plausibly, “small” and “modest”. An enthusiastic hunt-goer with ever widening social connections, he might better be identified with the Catholic bourgeoisie that appeared to be steering Ireland towards contented Home Rule within the British Empire.
Mannix knew how to tease the mighty without being either offensive or obsequious, welcoming Edward VII to Maynooth by displaying the royal arms over the entrance and the royal racing colours in the refectory (a story doubted by Niall but confirmed by The Irish Times on July 25th, 1903). For Mannix, emigration released radical demons that, in the stuffy atmosphere of pre-war Maynooth and Ireland, had been prudently restrained.
These demons made Mannix attractive even to political adversaries. My own father, an atheist Friend of the Soviet Union strenuously opposed to Santamaria’s anti-communist crusade, was fascinated by Mannix’s perverse humanism. What other red-baiting prelate would have publicly opposed a referendum to outlaw the Communist Party in 1951 as a pointless abuse of liberty, or sent (at Brian Fitzpatrick’s suggestion) a telegram to US president Dwight Eisenhower seeking a compassionate reprieve for the Rosenbergs, condemned as Soviet agents, in 1953?
My father had previously tried to goad Mannix by smoking as he strolled down the aisle of St Patrick’s Cathedral on the occasion of his first marriage in 1932. For him, Daniel Mannix was a kindred spirit, a man of principle, courtesy and wit, whose delight was to subvert mere convention.
David Fitzpatrick, professor of modern history at Trinity College Dublin, is the author of Descendancy: Irish Protestant Histories since 1795 (Cambridge University Press)
