{"id":8687,"date":"2015-04-29T14:39:39","date_gmt":"2015-04-29T04:39:39","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.socialpolicyconnections.com.au\/?p=8687"},"modified":"2015-04-30T09:41:11","modified_gmt":"2015-04-29T23:41:11","slug":"realities-and-surprises-a-very-personal-reaction-to-brenda-nialls-mannix","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.socialpolicyconnections.com.au\/?p=8687","title":{"rendered":"Realities and surprises: a (very) personal reaction to Brenda Niall\u2019s Mannix."},"content":{"rendered":"

Len Puglisi.\u00a0<\/strong><\/h1>\n

Len Puglisi is an urban environmental writer. During the Mannix era, Len was in regular contact with Catholic Worker men, most notably Gerard Heffey, and saw at first hand the dismay – hurt, even – they felt at being kept pretty much at a distance from their Archbishop\u2019s support.<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

\"photo<\/a>Before I sat down with this new book by Brenda Niall, what came to mind as lasting memories of Archbishop Daniel Mannix, Dr Mannix, or \u2018the Arch\u2019 as he was popularly called? In terms of decisive impacts on the Melbourne and Australian community, I could remember friend and foe alike speaking of three of his principal interventions.<\/p>\n

The first was Mannix\u2019s controversial and politically successful advocacy of the \u2018no\u2019 vote in the two referenda on conscription, against the attempt by PM Billy Hughes to dragoon young Australians to serve with the armed forces (for Empire and Country) in the First World War.<\/p>\n

Second was Mannix\u2019s determined dedication to furthering Catholic school education, including a strong commitment to poor children, leading in later years to the great political achievement of federal governments – contributing financially to support the schools.<\/p>\n

Third was the \u2018Arch\u2019s\u2019 intense and ongoing support for the position of Bob Santamaria in instigating action in the cause of fighting communism at large and especially the communist power in trade unions. This concerted action would eventually have the effect of splitting the Australian Labor Party. If \u2018beating communism first\u2019 is your number one political strategy, then this too would be counted an achievement.<\/p>\n

\"photo<\/a>There were also, of course, oft-repeated stories about the \u2018Arch\u2019s\u2019 personal habits: I knew of Mannix\u2019s daily walks from Raheen in Kew to St Patrick\u2019s Cathedral, wearing his signature top hat and black frock coat, handing out coins to local children along the way, and of lengthy sermons delivered at confirmation ceremonies at churches around the diocese.<\/p>\n

Enter Brenda Niall\u2019s book. It confirms that these are the most public realities of the Mannix era. But in a diligent and fine-grained analysis of this era, she is able to tell us much, much more.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s not my intention here to explain how Niall\u2019s book refined my understanding of these three public \u2018interventions\u2019 during the last half of Mannix\u2019s life (1913-1963), lived in Australia. She has subtly detailed, refined, and described the many nuances of all three. With this book, interested readers will be able to do that for themselves – and may see whether my initial thoughts were a \u2018fair enough\u2019 remembering!<\/p>\n

But are there surprises in what the book unearths about Mannix, the personality of the man, nnix, both the man and ch story that emerges from Niall’his interests and causes? Certainly there are! At least surprises for this reviewer who hardly ever followed the \u2018Arch\u2019s\u2019 activities as reported in Melbourne\u2019s diocesan newspaper, the Advocate<\/em>.<\/p>\n

Mind you, Niall\u2019s account doesn\u2019t leave the impression that he\u2019s a man, a fatherly-type, whom, in one of today\u2019s highest accolades, one might like to hug. But my words \u2018fatherly-type\u2019 are chosen to explain an absence in Mannix\u2019s personality, to emphasise something Mannix himself saw in Pope John XXIII. There\u2019s this surprise in Niall\u2019s text:<\/p>\n

Mannix spoke freely and often about his admiration for Pope John. He felt that he himself had failed in the qualities the new Pope had in abundance. Several of the young priests who came to Raheen in 1962 and 1963 heard Mannix regret that, unlike Pope John, he hadn\u2019t been a father to his people. Perhaps for the first time in his stormy relationship with the Vatican, Mannix felt an emotional closeness to the head of the Church. (p359)<\/p>\n

Further, regarding Mannix\u2019s personality traits, there are the many surprises in Chapter Nine, The Permissive Aristocrat<\/em>. This is a fulsome presentation of his many human sides, his style of \u2018reigning\u2019, and the spiritual and social formation of his contacts and his flock to whom he directed his attention. Clearly, too, Mannix waswatchful and took great care of the corporate life of the Melbourne Catholic Church as an institution. And this Chapter presents a highly informative cross-section of his social preferences and points of emphasis \u2013 attacking non-conformists for their \u2018blank and gloomy\u2019 Sunday observance his refusal of invitations to dine at presbyteries and homes, \u2018a good listener ready to learn and be amused, \u201cbut there was a line you never crossed with him\u201d\u2019. And so on, in rich personality-construction detail.<\/p>\n

Then there was another surprise for me, the son of Sicilian parents who had something of a take-it-or-leave-it attitude to clerics: how far he was prepared to go to encompass not just the Melbourne diocese but also the Australia-wide church within a culture of \u2018Irishness\u2019 as God\u2019s gift to the Australian people, and how he kept his distance from Rome. Says Niall: \u2018It took two years for Vatican strategists to work out a way to diminish Mannix\u2019s power and to make the Australian church less Irish.\u2019 In Chapters Ten and Eleven, \u2018The Vatican Chess Game\u2019, and \u2018The Cardinal\u2019s Red Hat\u2019, she sets out how that \u2018game\u2019 was played, both in the period before and after the arrival of Archbishop Giovanni Panico, the Vatican\u2019s man in Australia from 1938. The chapters describe in labyrinthine and conspiratorial detail a story that the \u2018unknowing flock\u2019 of the Church might well have found, in the word of the time, \u2018scandalous\u2019.<\/p>\n

It may of course be no surprise to many that what emerges very clearly from the book is Mannix\u2019s special talent to spot people who had positions that he could nurture, encourage or perhaps manipulate in their advancement of political<\/em> agendas that he himself supported most earnestly: Eamon De Valera in the cause of Irish independence; and Bob Santamaria for his opposition to communism. Says Niall: \u2018Politicians watched him closely as the presumed deliverer of the Catholic vote\u2019(p. 4), and so it\u2019s no surprise then that he won over both Doc. Evatt and Robert Menzies to the cause of government funding for Catholic schools.<\/p>\n

But beyond all this, what emerges for me as the greatest surprises from the book are two-fold: firstly, Mannix\u2019s very early interest in the 1930s in (lay) Catholic Action, though quite what he understood by \u2018Catholic Action\u2019 by the laity is something that I feel was confounded by the style of his later support for Australian political interventions.<\/p>\n

And secondly, there was his determined response to the Secretariat of the Second Vatican Council on its original Schema De Ecclesia<\/em> paper (and through contacts with particular cardinals) in the deliberations of that Council. In a most informative Chapter Fifteen, \u2018The Final Act\u2019, one that I suspect Niall clearly enjoyed writing, Mannix\u2019s interest in theological development \u2013 an interest of his unknown to me \u2013 shows up in the year before his death in 1963.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s a radical and progressive stance that places him with the Church\u2019s most innovative reformers – the details of which Niall briefly outlines in pages 349-351, such as being against the Schema\u2019s excessive legalism, its use of particular images of the church, its unsatisfactory view of the role for the laity, its \u2018inopportunely proposed\u2019 notion of the union of Church and state, and containing nothing about the obligation of the Church to provide religious liberty to all people of good will.<\/p>\n

It seems that in the last few years of his life, Mannix summoned all his strength to confront some of the Church\u2019s deepest spiritual blind-spots. <\/em><\/p>\n

These two positions of Mannix have ramifications for the church in our times. Of Mannix\u2019s attitude to Catholic Action Niall writes (p. 224-25):<\/p>\n

All through the 1930s Mannix was stirring his fellow bishops to do something about Catholic Action. This initiative of Pius XI was designed to bring the laity into greater participation in the life of the church. [Sydney\u2019s] Archbishop Kelly saw it as a way to piety through prayer. Mannix had a much more vigorous idea of its possibilities. Leo XIII\u2019s encyclical Rerum Novarum <\/em>(1891) called on Catholics to work for social justice. Mannix wanted to strengthen the laity, to make leaders in the secular world. That had been his leitmotif <\/em>in 1917 when he (Mannix) wrote a foreword for the short-lived nationalist magazine, Australia<\/em> [the paragraph is quoted in full in text]…<\/p>\n

More than a decade later, Mannix was still waiting for an active, intellectually informed laity to assert itself. He wanted leaders to emerge, not under clerical direction but with their own sense of mission. He hoped that Catholic Action would show the way for a new, independently minded laity to change the world. The sufferings of the poor in the Depression of the 1930s were to be seen each day as Mannix walked to work. He gave coins to the needy; he helped fund St. Vincent\u2019s Hospital; he encouraged religious orders to undertake social rescue work. But until the laity asserted itself, he believed, nothing would really change.<\/p>\n

Overall, Mannix\u2019s input to the development of Catholic Action and social justice strikes me as while permissive, it was not without its limitations. Here I\u2019ll simply present a few comments, assertions and questions:<\/p>\n