There is a moment, towards the end of this biography when the subject, Archbishop Daniel Mannix (1864-1963) is in his nineties, when any thoughtful reader will pause. Commenting on the Archbishop’s decision to buy his first electric razor at such an advanced age, his friend, Father Hackett said that Mannix didn’t like to be touched. I think that is terribly sad. No matter what you may think about the priesthood and its scandals, it seems to me to be a dreadful thing not to have the comfort of human touch in old age. This one small snippet from the book really brought home to me what a lonely life is imposed by the Catholic priesthood…
Daniel Mannix was a man associated in my mind with destructive authoritarian power wielded from the pulpit to interfere with Australian politics. He died when I was a child, but his protégé B.A. Santamaria (1915-1998) was active long after that, and the name of Mannix used pejoratively often made its way into the newspapers and books when I was old enough to take an interest in politics. But elsewhere in the book Niall comments on the man’s loneliness, and this, I think, is her achievement in this book – not only does she tell the story of his life to correct so many of my erroneous impressions, she also shows the human price he paid for the way he lived it.
Mannix was born in Catholic Ireland to a family of six at a time when it was customary for a son to be gifted to the priesthood. Daniel was the clever one and in time off he went to the seminary at Maynooth. He was ordained in 1890 but never had a parish: he became an academic at the seminary instead and remained there until – in his forties, and without consultation – he was despatched in 1912 by the Vatican to be Coadjutor (archbishop-in-waiting) to the Archbishop of Melbourne. Niall begins her book by noting that Mannix had his personal papers destroyed after his death, so there is no record of what must surely have been dismay. He was passionately interested in Irish nationalism, and to the consternation of some in the church had been to some extent intemperately involved. He was – publicly – a supporter of Sinn Fein, an admirer of the then radical Eamon de Valera and an opponent of making the Irish language compulsory for Matriculation. Mannix was an Irishman, with a keen interest in Irish politics. But off he went to Melbourne…
Catholics in Melbourne then, were almost exclusively Irish Catholics, disdained by the Protestant majority as a matter of course and automatically considered suspect in the matter of loyalty to Britain. Nobody was expecting a local man to replace Archbishop Carr because all the archbishops were Irish then, just as all the Governors-General were Brits. But the Irish Catholics were delighted with their new coadjutor who was tall, handsome, beautifully spoken and an impressive orator, and the rest of Melbourne looked on with apprehension.
As well they might. When Mannix entered the political fray over WW1 conscription, he brought (most of) the Irish Catholic vote with him and Prime Minister Billy Hughes‘ referendum was defeated. Twice. Notwithstanding the disastrous Easter Rising in 1916 in the middle of the war. Mannix was a man of power.
As anyone with more than a passing interest in Australian politics knows, Mannix went on to support B.A. Santamaria who led the crusade against communists in the ALP, which led to the Labor Split in 1955. Mannix was therefore influential in keeping Labor out of government for 27 long years. It might seem surprising if you know about the toxic enmities of the era to read in Niall’s biography that Mannix and Calwell (the Labor Leader of the Opposition) remained friends, but there was precedent. Niall tells us that Mannix kept his friends for life, but also that friendships could transcend politics: Mannix had reached out to Billy Hughes on the death of his only daughter and the two were reconciled.
Aside from these personal touches, what is so interesting about this portrait of Mannix is (for me) the discovery that the man was quite liberal in many ways. He was pro Santamaria and his anti-Communist activities, but he refused to quash the opposing Catholic Worker. He never deviated from his belief in the right to exercise one’s individual conscience. He is on record reassuring dissident priests who feared repercussions from Santamaria’s Movement that in his diocese
no priest should be afraid to say what he thinks… I do not agree with you but I respect your right to take that position. (p.314)
Paradoxically perhaps, this Cold War activist opposed Menzies when he tried to ban the Communist Party.
Mannix thought that the church was too fussed about sex; and although it was a rare example of failure to influence his flock, in 1942-45 he told his teachers to be frank and open because he ‘wanted people to be able to talk about sex without feeling ashamed or embarrassed’. (p. 212) It seems amusing now, but we can imagine the shock when he told principals of girls’ schools that ‘Sexual curiosity is good and natural… All of us are too puritanical in matters of sex.’ (p. 213). Niall says that ‘there is no reason to think that Mannix questioned priestly celibacy‘ (p.213) but he was apparently an approachable confessor. He was good at listening.
Most unusually for his time, Mannix argued for the abolition of corporal punishment in schools (but as many people I know can attest, this message passed by both nuns and brothers for long years after his death). He was alert to Nazi anti-Semitism long before most other people; he was open-minded about Asian immigration. It would be fascinating to know what influences had led him to these positions, but he left nothing behind that reveals the reasons.
There is also nothing to suggest that he knew anything about the sexual abuse scandals now revealed, but there were offenders who were ordained under his watch, including the notorious Father Kevin O’Donnell. Mannix was a laissez-faire administrator, but Niall says there has been insufficient work done to show whether such crimes were any more or less numerous than under the interventionist Archbishop Gilroy in Sydney. (p. 218). People will draw their own conclusions, perhaps, about the Mannix papers burned by his successor, but it was Santamaria, appointed Mannix’s official biographer, who went through those papers first and removed those of interest, keeping them to himself until his death in 1998 when his family passed them on to the diocesan archive. If there were dubious reasons for this insistent privacy, they are lost to history.
According to Online Opinion,
it has been observed by Cardinal George Pell that no other figure in Australian history has inspired as many biographies as Daniel Mannix, with the sole exception of another Irish-Australian, Ned Kelly.
However, I haven’t (and probably wouldn’t) read any of these other biographies – it is Brenda Niall’s brilliance as a biographer that made me want to read this one. So I can’t be sure that she is the first to reveal the astonishing Vatican campaign to cut Mannix down to size. I use the word astonishing advisedly: I read Susan Howatch’s Starbridge novels about the Church of England in the 20th century so I had some idea of the less-than-Christian shenanigans of church politics, but the Vatican’s strategy to destabilise Mannix’s leadership takes the prize for sheer bitchiness…
In 1933 the Vatican took exception to his criticism of General Eoin O’Duffy, a supporter of Mussolini and a threat to the first de Valera government. As was the case so often, Mannix was eventually shown to be right to be critical of this drunken buffoon, but Pius XI sent his man Archbishop Giovanni Panico to destroy Mannix’s Irish power base in Australia. Panico did this by appointing Australians to senior positions regardless of merit or their own personal preference, and by transferring Mannix’s staff elsewhere. In the case of his loyal deputy Monsignor John Lonergan, who was forced to replace the intellectually mediocre and stubborn Bishop Norman Gilroy who was made Archbishop of Sydney, the decision was cruel. Gilroy was a young man of forty who had thrived in the demanding desert parish of Port Augusta. Lonergan was in poor health.
No sooner had the appointment been made than Lonergan collapsed from a heart attack. He died some months later, without having been consecrated a bishop, and without leaving Melbourne. Mannix farewelled ‘the bishop that never was’ with a heartfelt tribute. The requiem mass, which was sung by Mannix himself, and the panegyric, showed the affection and respect in which Lonergan was held. (p.239)
Panico went on to elevate Archbishop Gilroy to Cardinal, giving him a vote in the election for a new pope. Well, Mannix wasn’t always tactful, and he did polarise opinion, but he was not only Gilroy’s intellectual superior, he also led his church through a period of enormous expansion, from 160 churches in the diocese in 1913 to 300 in 1963 when he died. And not just churches: during his leadership he set up the Corpus Christi seminary; expanded primary and secondary schools including the elite St Kevin’s College for bright boys from poor backgrounds; welcomed numerous orders of nuns and their convents; and the hospitals too. From the start he campaigned for state aid for the schools, as a matter of religious freedom and national identity and finally persuaded Menzies to agree to it (a policy never since abandoned, leading to the shocking taxpayer-funded disparity between government schools and private schools which exists today). By any measure, love him or hate him, Mannix was the spiritual leader of Australia’s Catholics, and the appointment of Gilroy was a calculated insult. The chapters about Panico, titled ‘The Vatican Chess Game’ and ‘The Cardinal’s Red Hat’ are the most interesting in the whole book.
I should say that I expected to take my time over this biography, as I usually do, reading a chapter every other day. But not so, I could not put it down, and read it in three days. No wonder Brenda Niall is Australia’s pre-eminent biographer!
Perhaps by coincidence, there is another book about Mannix, just released. Authored by James Franklin, Gerald O Nolan and Michael Gilchrist, it’s called The Real Archbishop Mannix, from the Sources and it’s published by Connor Court Publishing. According to Wikipedia, Connor Court Publishing publishes books on religion, global warming scepticism, culture and education. A member of the IPA (Institute of Public Affairs) sits on its editorial board and its authors include Cardinal George Pell, Peter Costello, Tony Abbott and Jeff Kennett. I haven’t read this other book and have no comment to make about it, but my advice is, be careful, if you’re buying, to remember the title and author that I’m recommending here … you might be disappointed if you accidentally bought the wrong one. (Sometimes when I’m in a bookshop, I go browsing for a book I’ve just read about but can’t remember its title or author).
For another review, see Eureka Street.
Author: Brenda Niall
Title: Mannix
Publisher: Text Publishing, 2015
ISBN: 9781922182111
Source: Review copy courtesy of Text Publishing
Availability
Fishpond: Mannix
or direct from Text Publishing (where you can also buy the eBook) and all good bookshops.
PS Be careful of delivery charges and/or loading up the purchase price to cover ‘free’ delivery; it’s a heavy book.
ANZ LitLovers LitBlog 
I’m curious what prompted you to read this book. It sounds a fascinating portrait
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By: BookerTalk on March 28, 2015
at 9:29 pm
Easy to answer that: Brenda Niall’s name. I saw the bio in the publisher’s catalogue, saw her name, and immediately thought ‘yes please.’ I have read her biography of the Boyd family when I re-read The Cardboard Crown and it was just brilliant.
But also, Mannix was one of those names that just kept cropping up all the time when I studied politics, and I was curious to know how it was that a Catholic archbishop had so much power and influence. There’s no one around like him now, the ones who have unelected power now are the filthy rich and the media barons.
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By: Lisa Hill on March 29, 2015
at 12:05 am
This sounds like a fascinating biography! I was brought up Catholic and Catholic-educated, so I have all the usual Catholic hang-ups. I love it when I hear/read about someone in the Church who might have given me what I was seeking. Mannix sounds like that person. The other thing is: none of us are perfect; we are all plural,possessing a nice and a not-so-nice side. It sounds as if this biography has done a complex person justice, and made me think how much I would have loved to have known him.
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By: Louise Allan on March 28, 2015
at 11:23 pm
Hi Louise, I think you would also like reading Brenda Niall’s account of interviewing him, she says herself that she was awestruck.
The other thing that’s interesting, that I forgot to mention in the review, is the portrait of early Melbourne. I mean, can you imagine thousands turning out these days for a St Patrick’s Day parade, and cheering the clergy?? The man was a celebrity before celebrity culture was invented!
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By: Lisa Hill on March 29, 2015
at 12:08 am
Ms Hill!
Re loneliness in priests life[come! come!]. I have been a priest for 40 years including parish home missions, heavy parish pastoral work in hospitals,schools.nursing homes and inevitable door knocking and 5 year stint at a major Sydney Necropolis at Rookwood cemetery/crematorium, consoling Sydney’s bereaved[up to 9 funerals per day]
Beside teaching in day and boarding schools 24/7 I ran a dormitory as housemaster of 110 noisy adolescent boys. In-between all that, my superiors sent me on postgrad studies to Jesuit Ateneo de Manila University.
Frankly loneliness was a luxury. Fear of being touched by the way is no reserve of some celibate,but as behavioural psychology corroborates:
#Haphephobia (also known as aphephobia, haphophobia, hapnophobia, haptephobia, haptophobia, thixophobia) is a rare specific phobia that involves the fear of touching or of being touched. It is an acute exaggeration of the normal tendencies to protect one’s personal space, expressed as a fear of contamination or , and extending even to people whom its sufferers know well.afflicts married as well!
After a hemiplegic stroke in 2002 and bowel cancer i am now in successful rehab and still not a lonely broken hearted celibate but like Mannix have hours in prayer and meditation-no lonliness with God as companion
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By: Father John George on March 30, 2015
at 8:37 pm
LH: This comment was edited for relevance.
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By: Father John George on March 30, 2015
at 8:46 pm
An interesting theory, that his dislike or fear of human touch was pathological. However, it may equally have been a fear of intimacy, even the innocent intimacy a man shares with his barber. (Apparently Mannix always cut his own hair too, but that could equally have been because he was not a vain man. Niall says that he lived simply, as far as his position allowed him to. Father Hackett, his friend, said that Raheen was unheated, in Melbourne’s winter!)
On the other hand, (page 45), Niall writes that the men at Maynooth were taught that ‘The priest must be a man apart from human ties. That was clericalism, destructive then and ever since.” And she also says that Panico’s redeployments took Mannix’s friends from him, and he outlived his much younger companions Father Hackett and also Monsignor Lonergan. She doesn’t suggest for one moment that his faith was lacking, not at all.
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By: Lisa Hill on March 30, 2015
at 10:31 pm
Ms Hill
[LH This comment has been edited for length and to comply with this blog’s Comments Policy on Language and Manners]
…I suggest reading Fr Jean-Baptiste Henri (1802-1861) French Roman Catholic preacher… [who] wrote on the priesthood and its apartness … [and I thank Panico [despite shenanigans] for much needed acculturation of the Australian Church versus outpost of mother Eireaan -as an Aussie I salute the memory of “bluey Gilroy”
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By: Father John George on March 30, 2015
at 11:59 pm
Apologies,the priest;s name was:
Jean-Baptiste Henri-Dominique Lacordaire (12 May 1802 – 21 November 1861), often styled Henri-Dominique Lacordaire, was a French ecclesiastic, preacher, journalist and political activist. He re-established the Dominican Order in post-Revolutionary France.
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By: Father John George on March 31, 2015
at 12:04 am
All I can suggest is that perhaps you might read Brenda Niall’s book.
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By: Lisa Hill on March 31, 2015
at 12:38 am
I bought it in kindle days ago – I pointed out her appalling anachronism on Eureka Street.
[LH See http://www.eurekastreet.com.au/article.aspx?aeid=42470#.VRmKDbuJjIU for the extensive comments there too]
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By: Father John George on March 31, 2015
at 1:10 am
It’s hard to imagine now how religion was unquestioned, even in relatively recent times. There are so many memories I could impart here, about the questions I asked, and the answers I was given and pretended to accept, knowing there was no point in questioning further. The laws of the Church were a given in our lives, and there was no point in complaining. I remember well the adulation the clergy were given—I remember the day the Archbishop of Tasmania dined with us and how privileged we felt. His name was inscribed on the Foundation Stone of the house my father built. I can well imagine someone like Mannix would be a ‘celebrity’ in that era.
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By: Louise Allan on March 29, 2015
at 12:27 am
[LH This comment has been edited to remove an image of excessive size]
Religion unquestioned? Try 2000 year RCC timeline of questioners and dissenters, not forgetting Iosif Vissarionovich Stalin and ilk.
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By: Father John George on March 30, 2015
at 9:25 pm
With all due respect, Father John George, it is the author of this book Brenda Niall who has made the point that for most of the 20th century Catholics held the church in such respect that they did not question its teachings, and she is writing about the Mannix era, long before the year 2000. Religion has been questioned since the Reformation, since Darwinism, since Karl Marx, and no doubt at other times and contexts too, but Niall is writing about the loyalty of Irish Catholics in Australia during the Mannix era.
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By: Lisa Hill on March 30, 2015
at 10:15 pm
Father, I think you missed my point. There have been many who questioned the Church, as Lisa noted above, and those who famously broke away from the Church because of its hypocrisy or because it wouldn’t allow a more enlightened/Scientific view of the world. I was talking about the ‘everyday’ Catholics, for want of a better term—people like the ones I grew up surrounded by, who followed the Church’s teachings because Catholicism was the only ‘true’ Church. People like the nuns who taught me, the priests who said Mass each week, and my grandmother, who said grace before every meal, never missed Mass, and wouldn’t use contraception even though she couldn’t cope with the children she already had. There were many who didn’t question the Church’s teachings or the authority of the clergy. Even more heartbreaking are the cases where that trust was abused—where children courageously tried to tell their parents about a paedophile priest and were not believed because of the unquestioning faith the family had in the Church and the men of the cloth.
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By: Louise Allan on March 30, 2015
at 11:25 pm
[LH This comment has been edited in order to comply with this blog’s Comments Policy on Language and Manners, and for relevance and length]
…
But as myself an everyday catholic under Irish priests and Irish Patrician brothers in 1940s etc I contest the notion of a mindless herd of catholics caricatures…
I still believe the catholic church is the true church (and have used “faith seeking understanding/questioning) and fully uphold all its teachings and have studied and discussed all at 2 secular universities and one trendy liberal uni O/S with stacks of questioning – but believe all that the RCC authoritativey teaches.
…
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By: Father John George on March 31, 2015
at 12:57 am
Ok, you’ve had your say but your tone is disrespectful to me, to Louise and to the author. This is not a place for diatribes about the Catholic religion, and it’s not a place where I let unpleasant comments stand. It is late now, but in the morning I shall consider editing your remarks to a reasonable length and an improved standard of courtesy.
[LH Update, later: editing done. Please note that in seven years of blogging this is the first time I have ever done this, and it grieves me. Please also note that a further most unpleasant comment was deleted in its entirety].
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By: Lisa Hill on March 31, 2015
at 1:06 am
Yes, that confirms what Brenda Niall says, that there was unquestioning loyalty.
And the fame! He had his portrait painted twice, there’s a photo of the Clifton Pugh one in the book.
Whereas today, I don’t know the names of any clergy except for Pell, and he’s shot through to the Vatican, doing the accounts there or something.
(Hey, now that I’ve read Niall’s chapters about cutting Mannix down to size, I wonder if Pell was whisked off to Rome to stop him causing trouble here? Or save him from trouble here??)
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By: Lisa Hill on March 29, 2015
at 12:33 am
[LH This comment has been edited for relevance and length, and to remove an image of excessive size]
… His Eminence is now Prefect of The Secretariat for the Economy = a dicastery of the Roman Curia with authority over all economic activities of the Holy See and the Vatican City State. …
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By: Father John George on March 30, 2015
at 9:37 pm
Thank you for sharing this information, Father John George.
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By: Lisa Hill on March 30, 2015
at 10:02 pm
Sorry to see The Real Archbishop Mannix: From the Sources recommended against on the basis of not having read it and guilt by association. Some idea of what’s in it here: http://www.spectator.co.uk/australia/australian-notes/9508132/australian-notes-246/
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By: James Franklin on April 23, 2015
at 3:02 pm
Hello James, I am not in the habit of recommending books I haven’t read… and I make no apology for that.
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By: Lisa Hill on April 23, 2015
at 5:37 pm
umm, I just read the THE REAL ARCHBISHOP MANNIX and I note it was published before the Brenda Niall book. Furthermore, it is a collection of primary source material from Mannix himself as correctly noted by Michael McGirr in his review in the SMH. Perhaps this amateur reviewer needs to do research before relying on Wikipedia.
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By: Tony Kremer on April 23, 2015
at 3:28 pm
Hello Tony, I am not sure what your objection is. Stating that my information came from Wikipedia is a clear signal to my readers that it may not be reliable. Everybody knows that while many of Wikipedia’s articles are written by professionals with expertise in the subject matter they write about, it does not have the same authoritative status as, say, the Britannica (though sometimes WP is more up-to-date and often it has Australian content which would never make it into the Britannica).
However, since it’s quite clear from the context that Wikipedia was my source for the information about Connor Court Publishing and its conservative agenda and the composition of its editorial board, would it perhaps not have been more helpful for you to have provided the correct information if indeed Wikipedia is wrong?
After all, all I was doing was making my readers aware that there are two recent books about Mannix in the marketplace, and to make it clear that I was recommending the one that I had read, not the one that I hadn’t.
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By: Lisa Hill on April 23, 2015
at 5:44 pm
[…] Carroll, see my review of Spirit of Progress and a Sensational Snippet Brenda Niall, see my review of Mannix Christos Tsiolkas, see my review of The Slap and The Guardian’s review of Merciless Gods […]
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By: 2015 Melbourne Prize Shortlisted Essays Now Online | ANZ LitLovers LitBlog on November 9, 2015
at 7:13 pm
[…] Mannix by Brenda Niall (Text Publishing) – Deepdene, Vic, see my review […]
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By: 2016 Victorian Premier’s Literary Award winners | ANZ LitLovers LitBlog on January 28, 2016
at 6:24 pm