From Maynooth to Melbourne
Edward Norman
Daniel Mannix: The Quality of Leadership: a Biography B. A. Santamaria (Melbourne University Press £25)
Alittle under ten years after the death of Archbishop Mannix, Pope Paul VI said he was 'a different man for a different age'. Mannix, who actually lived to be 99, and died just four months from his century, had only just outlasted his ability to adapt; what was remarkable about his life was his success in retaining a purchase on the shifting events and ideals in which the generations of Irishmen and Australians he knew were set. The first half of his life, up to 1912, was spent in Ireland, in the great theological seminary of Maynooth, of which he became President; the second half was in Australia, where he became ArChbishop of Melbourne. This study, by Mr Santamaria, confines itself largely to the Australian life — a life begun around the time most men would have regarded their public work as approaching comple- tion. Indeed, the first 40 years of Mannix's extraordinary career is compressed into a mere seven pages.. This book is not, there- fore, a biography: it is a study of the activism and organisational skills of a man who Santamaria greatly admired, and who served with him closely in a number of Catholic and Labour Party enterprises in Australia, (and particularly in the National Civic Council, of which the author is President).
Mannix lived to see most of the things for which he had laboured set aside or disrupted, as the succeeding generations each carved a fresh niche for themselves. He had been a leading supporter of the Irish Republican cause — not when he was still in Ireland, but, in classic exile fashion, when he moved to Australia — and lived to see a new Ireland which in many things disappointed his hopes. He had come to oppose Communism as the contemporary form in which materialism and the enslave- ment of the intellect presented themselves, yet he lasted long enough to see the Catholic Church develop, as he believed, dangerously compromising accommoda- tions with its foe. He had espoused the causes of the Australian Labour Party, but had to witness, and himself take part in, the great split in the party during the 1950s.
Perhaps above all, he had promoted Catholic denominational education in Au- stralia as the guarantee of Catholic faith and morals; here he did not quite live long enough to see his work undone. As Santa- maria writes of the Catholic schools he founded, 'neither he nor anyone else could have predicted that within less than a decade, as a result of the theological anarchy which swept the Catholic Church after Vatican 11, the same schools would largely denude themselves of the doctrine which was the sole justification for their existence and for the struggle he and so
many other bishops had waged.' Mannix died in 1963, in the mist of the Vatican
Council sessions which 'he was too old to attend. But had he belonged to almost any time in modern history, his sheer longevity would have obliged him to see cherished ideals discarded. It is the way of things. All life, as Newman said, is change.
In Mannix, however, there was another quality which gave him an international prominence. He was somehow by nature unavoidably controversial. He took up issues which other men took up easily enough, but in his keeping they became rancorous. It is difficult to see why this was the case — and we get no hints in the present study. Santamaria has written a very good book, but it is not about the man; it is a study of his public career. There is almost nothing here about Man- nix's private life, which was, it is true, kept very private. But beyond the barest account of his home in Ireland and the schools he attended, the reader learns nothing about his character and interests. There is a fascinating glimpse towards the end of the hook, where we discover that the Archbishop had a horror of physical contact with others; and that is all. From what can be known, Mannix was a gentle and saintly person, whose inexperience of public life, after so many years in an Irish seminary, made his eventual forays into the real world somewhat uncoordinated and ungainly. For the first 40 years of his 'life, he showed no interest in public issues at all, not ,even Irish ones.
Two episodes illustrate Mannix's con- troversial nature. During the Great War, he had spoken forthrightly in support of the anti-Conscription movement in Austra- lia. It indicated his conversion to hard-line Irish Republicanism. As a consequence, the British Government banned him from visiting Ireland in 1920 — at the height of the Troubles, when the government feared his presence would exacerbate an already inflamed situation. Mannix ignored the ban, and was in the event arrested on the high seas by two British destroyers as he tried to make for a Southern Irish port. He was landed in Penzance, offered accom- modation at a posh London hotel at the government's expense (which he declined), and finally left for Rome. But it was not a martyrdom. In London even Cardinal Bourne, leader of the English Catholic Church, refused to meet him. Then in 1925 he visited Ireland in the hopeful circum- stances of the new Free State Government. This time it was the Irish Catholic hierar- chy, and the Irish government, which rejected him. The reason was that he came as a partisan Republican to see Republican politicians; he had repeated meetings with de Valera, who at the time was the sworn enemy of the new Irish government. What Mannix seems to have lacked was ordinary political sense. Perhaps it was an indication of interior spirituality, of a strangeness to the world of affairs. If so, we do not learn enough of his character from this book to be sure.
Despite that failure, Santamaria's study is a valuable assessment which offerg ba- lanced and well-considered insights into Irish-Australian and Catholic history dur- ing the first half of the century. The author's own involvement with many of the events does not — as it might with lesser writers — diminish his objectivity in his assessment of Mannix, nor does his parti- san commentary on Australian politics destroy his credibility, for it is open and declared. 'Stand by your friends,' Mannix himself once said, 'especially when they are dead, and when all the world is against them.' Santamaria has listened to his words.
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