This is a slightly
summarised version of a talk given by historian Edmund Campion. It is
a presentation of a chapter from his book 'Australian Catholics'
(Viking 1987). We thank him for permission to include it here.
In the life of a city,
institution, or church, there come moments when a bystander can read
what is really happening in these places. Such a moment, for example,
was the 1928 Eucharistic Congress Procession in Sydney. It drew the
biggest crowd seen since the Federation March of 1901. 18,000 people
marched, and many, many more watched. Many of the watchers were
women, for the Legion of Mary were the only women who actually
marched. A group of Maoris from NZ took part, but there were no
aborigines among the marchers. You can read what is happening in a
church in an event such as this.
Another such event was
the Catholic Life Exhibition held in Melbourne in 1955. Its purpose,
said the organisers, was 'to show that the Catholic Church is unique
in the complexity and extent of its activities.' Denys Jackson called
it a 'Spiritual Industries Fair'. The 200,000 visitors wandered
between stands staffed by nuns and priests eager to talk about their
particular religious order. The Catholic Education Office gave
evidence of the growth of Catholic schools in Victoria - from 41
pupils in 1841 to 88,000 in 1955. There were stands for the Victorian
Catholic Lawn Tennis Association, the Legion of Mary, the Holy Name
Society, the Catholic Scouts, the Catholic Evidence Guild, and even
one for the Catholic Walking Club.
Also
represented at the exhibition were lay movements founded some 15
years earlier: the National Catholic Rural Movement (120 parish
groups. 4.000 members), the Young Christian Workers (17 dioceses,
5.000 members) and the Young Catholic Students (240 schools in 23
dioceses. 6,000 members). These movements shared a common approach
learned from European Catholic Action. While other church bodies
sought converts or existed to protect members from moral contagion.
Catholic Action groups aimed to change society. Their role was to
form men and women in the Gospel and in christian social principles
so that they could transform the world in which they lived and
worked, making it more human and hence more christian. Where other
movements were auxiliaries to the clergy — the Legion of Mary, for
instance, helped conduct the parish census - Catholic Action
movements concentrated on the specific vocations of the laity in the
world. This development of lay spirituality has been one of the
highlights of the 20th Century Catholicism. Catholic action brought
it home to Australian Parishes. In small groups everyday Catholics
examined critically the contradictions of society, assessed them in
the light of christian principles, and searched for ways to change
the world. They hereby discovered a lay vocation with revolutionary
potential.
The Beginnings of
Catholic Action in Australia
In
looking at the origins of Catholic Action
Australia, we must remember Kevin T. Kelly,
who corresponded with Cardijn and in 1939 published a pamphlet on the
YCW (Jocists) that sold 15,000 copies in 6 months In the same
year, Paul McGuire and English priest John
Fitzsimons published a book.'Restoring All Things' - the first major
English language publication on Jocism.
When Kevin Kellv went
away to the war. the initiative for starting YCW in Australia passed
to a young priest, Francis Lombard, who had begun a Jocist group for
boys in Northcote Parish in 1939. By 1941 the YCW had supplanted the
Catholic Boys League (CBL), which, until then, had dominated the
Melbourne Catholic youth scene.
Lombard
had flair. Throughout the 1940s he held annual youth rallies at
Xavier College
with the YCW prominent in them. They rivalled the annual Eucharistic
festivals at Sunbury and the St. Patrick's
Day parades. An activist himself, Lombard was able to call on the
intellectual power of other priests, such as John F. Kelly, who
edited The Chaplain.
While keeping the small
leaders' groups characteristic of Jocism, they ensured that the YCW
became a mass movement through its sporting teams. Thus in October
1943 when there were 47 leaders' groups, there were 4.000 general
members. 51 teams in the YCW football competition and 38 teams
playing cricket.
The year 1943 also saw
the appointment of Frank McCann as first full-time organiser and
national secretary of the YCW Outside Melbourne there were already
leaders' groups in Newcastle(N.S.W.), Brisbane. Mackay (Qld.). Wagga
Wagga (N.S.W.). Toowoomba (Qld.) and Ballarat (Vic.)
McCann was to work from
the offices of the Australian National Secretariat of Catholic Action
(ANSCA) in Melbourne. Established in 1937 by the bishops. ANSCA's
role was to develop specialised movements on the Jocist model. The
Sydney archdiocese soon rejected this model and opted for a
clericalist approach to the lay apostolate.
Catholic Action and
Class Structures
ANSCA's
founders were two Campion Society men. F.
K. Maher and B.A. Santamaria. Maher, who
taught Santamaria at school, was the senior of the two. He began to
produce booklets on the theoretical basis of Catholic Action
which came to be regarded as the most comprehensive literature
available in English. Jocist-style Catholic Action followed the class
structures of modern society. Accordingly Maher put his energies into
developing movements for adult and young workers. He drew on the
critique of industrial society developed in Catholic circles during
the 1930s. This opposed the agglomeration and giantism of modern
industry and called for worker participation in management.
Thus the first Australian
bishops' Social Justice statement in 1940 pointed to the disparity
between 1.5 million Australian workers on a weekly wage of less than
five pounds and the 1,000 taxpayers who averaged 170 pounds per week.
The statement called for changes in the wage system, especially
through industry control by occupational groups. Social Justice
statements, drafted for the bishops principally by Santamaria. became
an annual feature of Catholic life until the mid-1950s. In 1940
Santamaria was able to write, 'the grave problems with which the war
will confront the workers arc already being tackled by Catholic
workers themselves.'
The National Catholic
Rural Movement
Santamaria's primary task
in ANSCA was to develop a farmers' movement. In February 1940 farmers
from Victoria and the Riverina met at Xavier College and founded the
National Catholic Rural Movement(NCR MI Although he was a city
intellectual, as NCRM secretary Santamaria could inspire rural
workers with the national dimensions of their vocation. In turn their
actual farming experience kept the young secretary's feet on the
ground.
The NCRM set
itself to reverse the flight to the cities by stimulating a rural
revival Catholic agricultural colleges at Abergowrie (Qld 4. Woodlawn
(N.S.W.) and Tardun (W.A.) were already making a contribution. Among
intellectuals there was a strain of back-to-the-land romanticism, as
evidenced in the rural commune, Whitlands. which tried to create a
new Christian synthesis of cultivation, culture and religion at a
sort of lay monastery in the hills north of Melbourne. In 1950 the
NCRM inspired a model farming Maryknoll, near Nar Nar Goon in
Gippsland (Vic.) which mixed urban and rural living, fanning two-acre
Mocks, members could also work in local or nearby industries. In 1957
a similar model opened at San Isidore outside Wagga Wagga (N.S.W.).
The Difficult Question
about Politics
Such ventures
demonstrated that Catholic Action movements were out to change the
social, political and economic structures of Australia. The NCRM
manifesto claimed that the organisation was 'completely outside the
political sphere'. Another ANSCA publication, This is Catholic
Action' was equally definite:
Leaders of Catholic
Action may not be leaders in any political movement. Politics may not
be discussed at Catholic Action meetings.
Yet what was politics?
What was a 'political movement' ? If you were going to change the
world, how could you steer clear of politics? And indeed the view
that Catholic Action aimed to change the world was authoritatively
proposed by the bishops in their 1947 statement 'Catholic Action in
Australia' where they proposed aims for the future of the Snowy River
scheme.
Nevertheless, the bishops
strongly rebutted the idea that Catholic Action was 'a political
force designed to place Catholics in positions of office and
influence in the political world'. Catholic Action, they maintained,
was 'expressly forbidden to intervene in the realm of party
polities'. Yet patently there was a tension between the desire to
'make history' in the Murrumbidgee and Murray Valleys and the
injunction to stay out of 'party polities'. This tension was to
become unbearable because of events on the rim of the national
secretariat.
The Fight against
Communism
Early in the 1940's
friends in the labor movement convinced B. A. Santamaria of a growing
danger that the Communist Party would soon control major sections of
the trade union movement. They asked him to invigorate Catholics to
resist the communist march to power. At the same time, in Sydney, P.
J. Ryan MSC had perceived a similar danger and brought together a
loose alignment of anti-communist unionists. By the end of 1943
Santamaria was able to report that emergency action had disrupted
communist tactics for amalgamating and hence controlling several
unions, particularly in heavy industry. Not only had anti-communist
unionists been alerted on the shop floor, but radio broadcasts:
pamphlets and a weekly newspaper Freedom (from 1946 News Weekly)
publicised communist tactics.
Santamaria proposed
establishing an anti- communist force, 'a disciplined national
organisation which will be modelled completely on the Communist Party
and which will work on the same principles of organisation'. Through
a Jesuit in Perth, Harold Lalor, Santamaria's 1943 report to
interested bishops came into the hands of the security police, who
tried to infiltrate the new group, apparently without success. By
1945 Santamaria had a national body of 3,000 members 'ready to do any
active organised work required of them'. Its full title was the
Catholic Social Studies Movement but it was commonly known as 'The
Movement'.
Accepting formal
responsibility for the Movement, the bishops pledged funds of 10,000
pounds annually and determined that 'the Movement be controlled, both
in policy and finance, by a special Committee of Bishops'.
Orientation of 'The
Movement'
The Movement was made up
of small groups in the parishes with an interlocking network of
groups in trade unions and factories. Meetings were similar to
regular Catholic Action meetings, with Gospel discussion, educational
items and concern about local problems. There were, however, some
important differences. Each Movement member took a pledge of secrecy
and an atmosphere of crisis pervaded meetings — in 1951 Santamaria
wrote of 'the probability, which humanly speaking amounts almost to a
certainty, that Australia will be destroyed as a nation within less
than 20 years'.
The main thrust of the
organisation was clearly the winning of power in the unions and
politics. Groups were to carry out unquestioningly the directives of
national headquarters. Dissidents were told to accept central
authority, which spoke with the authority of the bishops, or get out.
Members had to gather intelligence about their workmates and fellow
parishioners. This information went into headquarters, where it was
collated. In this way a powerful anti-communist task force was
organised within the church. Its front organisations became the Labor
Party's Industrial Group movement, which relied heavily on the
dedication and self-sacrifice of Santamaria's men and women. Before
long considerable success was being recorded.
A Move towards Taking
Power
This success brought its
own problems. Because of the constitution of the Australian labor
movement, victory in union elections gave Movement members a voice in
the affairs of the Australian Labor Party. The possibilities of this
began to intrigue Santamaria. He saw that what had started as an
emergency strike force to halt communists could become an enduring
political apparatus. By the early 1950's he had taken the decisions
which would turn the Movement into such a political machine. National
headquarters in Swanston Street. Melbourne, now had nearly 30
fulltime staff, including three priests.
For his part Santamaria
was able to write to Archbishop Mannix in December 1952 that within a
few years his Movement would have taken over the labor movement and
there would be Movement members in state and federal parliaments.
Thus, wrote Santamaria. for the first time in the Anglo-Saxon world
since the Reformation, Australian governments would soon be
implementing Catholic social programmes. These included state aid for
Catholic schools and the settling of Catholic migrants on small
farms.
Criticism from within
the Church
The emergence of the
Santamaria political machine was not without its critics within the
church. Sydney churchmen had thought of the Movement as a temporary
expedient: they did not want it to go on forever, once communist
power was checked. As well, they disliked Santamaria's authoritarian
style of leadership Gerard Henderson has described him as a
'quasi-bishop'. As much as any prelate, he expected deference to his
opinions.
In YCW circles there was
considerable agitation that the Movement was getting the lion's share
of church money available for lay movements. The YCW critics, allied
to university Catholics, argued that Santamaria's machine made
improper use of church authority. They pointed to ambiguities in his
own position: he was at one and the same lime director of the
Catholic Action secretariat, secretary of the NCRM and leader of 'The
Movement'. Yet Catholic Action, by its charter, was supposed to keep
out of party politics.
In reply Santamaria
denied that he was engaged in party politics: rather, he said, he was
attempting the 'permeation' of all political processes. In recent
years, however, he has accepted his critics' point of view, writing
that what he was trying to do was to run a faction inside the Labor
Party.
In October 1953 fourteen
chaplains of national Catholic Action movements asked the bishops to
make a clear distinction between ANSCA and the Movement. They wanted
separate buildings, chaplains and administrative officers. If the
church was running a political machine it should be distinct from
Catholic Action.
Early in 1954 the
Movement moved into new headquarters and Santamaria was asked by the
bishops to choose between ANSCA and the Movement. He chose the
Movement — and his position remained vacant at ANSCA until the
secretariat was closed later in the year.
The Split in the Labor
Party
The Movement's Catholic
critics continued to argue against the propriety of church
sponsorship of a political machine. Then in October 1954
the ALP leader H.V. Evatt, himself
under attack for his inept reaction to the Petrov defection, publicly
denounced the Movement's activities. Santamaria believed he had the
numbers to defeat Evatt within the Labor Party; but the Sydney
bishops counseled local Movement members not to adhere to the
Santamaria line and he was defeated. Within the church controversy
exploded. The Sydney point of view was that as a church body the
Movement's political decisions were subject to the authority of the
local bishop Santamaria's view was that this not only infringed on
the legitimate autonomy of the laity but also rendered
impossible the concept of a disciplined national political force. He
began to move away from church control and when Rome adjudicated in
favour of the Sydney line, he and his followers set up the National
Civic Council (N.C.C.) in December 1957. It was designed,'he wrote
later,' as a purely civic body with no connection whatsoever with the
Church, completely independent of the Bishops, making its own
decisions on its own responsibility.' In substance the only change
was in its name: its members were mainly Catholic males; they met on
church premises; there were chaplains, prayers and pledges of
secrecy. As the Perth organiser wrote in 1958, 'we are still fighting
the same fight in exactly the same way.'This continuity between the
two bodies, once embarrassing, is today admitted.
The Direction taken by
the N.C.C.
There was, however, one
significant change. Although it received the open support of many
churchpeople, the N.C.C. did not speak with the authority of the
church. It could not compel consciences as the Movement had once
done. The N.C.C. and its political expression, the Democratic Labor
Party, became a powerful anti-Labor force enabling Catholics who had
moved away from their Labor origins to transfer their votes to the
non-Labor parties. Successive conservative Prime Ministers from R. G.
Menzies to J. M. Fraser, acknowledged their gratitude
While
retaining much Catholic support. Santamaría
was able to move into other fields with
great profit. In 1982 the N.C.C.'s annual income was $1.2 million.
Much of this went on public awareness campaigns ranging from family
matters to foreign policy and in support of right wing union
candidates. In recent years old associates have found their way back
into the Labor Party. But Santamaría, who
in 1953 wrote that every major institution of modern life was founded
on one or other of the seven deadly sins, remained unreconciled to
the modern world.
Consequences in the
Lay Apostolate
The consequences of The
Movement episode in Australian Catholic history, and particularly in
Australian lay Catholic history, are:
1. In post war years, the
Catholic population was moving up the socio-economic ladder into the
middle and upper middle class. The setting up of the DLP enabled
those Catholics to transfer their votes to another party, that
included the word 'Labor' — and when the DLP vanished, to transfer
them to the conservative parties.
2. Catholic Action
movements grew out of a systematic critique of Western capitalist
society. That critique had been developing since the 19th century. It
was a religious and social and holistic critique. This critique came
to an end. The Church had burned its fingers in what it had done and
the ideas were abandoned.
3. Loss of confidence in
episcopal leadership in the Australian Church can be dated from this
time. In 1950 Catholics trusted and liked their bishops, and went to
hear them speak. Movement people did what they did basically because
they thought that this is what the bishops were asking of them. They
now feel that this trust was somehow misplaced. This has extended to
become a loss of acceptance by Catholics of what the Church has to
say about secular matters.
4. The Lay Apostolate in
Australia lost heart
it gave up the hope
of changing the world — it gave up addressing the big problems
that confront Australian society
it gave up the
chance of speaking in the name of Christ to the world of Work. This
has taken a long time to get over. I would like to say that 1 feel
that we are seeing, in this seminar here, one of the earliest
sentences in a new chapter of the history of the Lay Apostolate in
Australia — and that this is why I am truly delighted to be here
today.