Manning's Children: Responses to Rerum Novarum in Victoria 1891 To
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Manning’s Children: Responses to Rerum Novarum in Victoria 1891 to 1966 by Race Mathews, B.Ed. (Melb), M.A. (Melb), PhD (Monash) A thesis submitted in fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Theology MCD University of Divinity March, 2014 Contents Chapter 1 ............................................................................................................ 4 Introduction ................................................................................................................ 4 Chapter 2 .......................................................................................................... 39 The Precursor: Henry Edward, Cardinal Manning .................................................... 39 Chapter 3 .......................................................................................................... 58 Moran: ‘The Rights and Duties of Labour’ ................................................................ 58 Chapter 4 .......................................................................................................... 80 Mannix: The Man ..................................................................................................... 80 Chapter 5 .......................................................................................................... 99 Mannix: The Episcopacy .......................................................................................... 99 Chapter 6 ........................................................................................................ 120 Frank Maher and the Campion Society .................................................................. 120 Chapter 7 ........................................................................................................ 139 Kevin Kelly and the Campion Consensus .............................................................. 139 Chapter 8 ........................................................................................................ 152 Prelude to ANSCA.................................................................................................. 152 Chapter 9 ........................................................................................................ 167 ANSCA: The Maher Years 1938-46 ....................................................................... 167 Chapter 10 ..................................................................................................... 176 The Santamaria Hegemony ................................................................................... 176 Chapter 11 ..................................................................................................... 193 Santamaria and the YCW ....................................................................................... 193 Chapter 12 ..................................................................................................... 213 Mission Creep and Political Debacle ...................................................................... 213 Chapter 13 ..................................................................................................... 234 The YCW Co-operators .......................................................................................... 234 Chapter 14 ..................................................................................................... 259 Conclusion ............................................................................................................. 259 Bibliography .................................................................................................. 270 2. Abbreviations ACCCS Association of Catholic Co-operative Credit Societies ACTU Australian Council of Trade Unions ALP Australian Labor Party ANSCA Australian National Secretariat for Catholic Action CBL Catholic Boys Legion CSM Catholic Social Movement CSSM Catholic Social Studies Movement CYMS Catholic Young Men’s Society CDC Co-operative Development Society CEC Co-operatives Education Committee CMC Co-operatives Management Committee CPA Communist Party of Australia CUHC Credit Union Historical Co-operative DLP Democratic Labor Party ECCA Episcopal Committee on Catholic Action ECCSSM Episcopal Committee of the Catholic Social Studies Movement JOC La Jeunesse Ouvrières Chrétienne NCC National Civic Council NCGM National Catholic Girls Movement NCRM National Catholic Rural Movement THC Trades Hall Council VCCA Victorian Credit Co-operative Association WFTU World Trade Union Federation YCW Young Christian Workers YCWCCCS YCW Central Co-operative Credit Society 3. Chapter 1 Introduction This thesis examines responses by Australian Catholics, predominantly in Victoria, to the social teachings of their Church, culminating with the creation by the bishops in 1938 of the Australian National Secretariat for Catholic Action (ANSCA), and their subsequent adoption and promotion through it of a political and economic philosophy called Distributism. Underlying the main narrative is a fundamental divergence of opinion about the efficacy and significance of the formation of the Catholic conscience through Catholic Action, as on the one hand introduced by the founder of the Young Christian Worker’s Movement (YCW) and future Cardinal Josef Cardijn and enhanced by the philosopher priest Don José María Arizmendiarrieta, and on the other repudiated by Australia’s ‘controversial Catholic layman’, B.A. Santamaria.1 A key reference point and yardstick throughout is the ‘Evolved Distributism’ of the great complex of worker-owned co-operatives founded by Arizmendiarrieta in the middle nineteen-fifties, at Mondragón in the Basque region of Spain, and the basis currently of processing by the Vatican of proposals for his canonisation.2 The approach is through serial biography – to capture through the prism of emblematic reformers the attendant clash of ideas, circumstances, aspirations and ambitions, in both the clerical and lay spheres. Quotation has been preferred to paraphrase, and protagonists and researchers to the greatest possible extent speak for themselves. Episcopal giants of the stature of Cardinals Manning and Moran and Archbishop Mannix provide context for a retrieval from varying degrees of unwarranted obscurity of laymen so notable in their day as, among others, the influential Campion Society members Frank Maher, Kevin Kelly and Murray McInerney and the ‘YCW Co-operator’ activists Ted Long, Bob Maybury, Frank McCann and Leon Magree. Inspired by their faith to seek through credit unions and other co-operatives an alternative social order reflective of its papal encyclicals, 1 T.R. Luscombe, Builders and Crusaders: Prominent Catholics in Australian History (Melbourne, Vic: Lansdowne Press, 1967) 175. 2 ‘Cause for canonisation of Fr Jose Maria Arizmendiarrieta the Apostle of Cooperation’. As accessed 14/1/14 at http://www.canonizacionarizmendiarrieta.com/en/ 4. these young Catholics truly were ‘Manning’s children’. The example of their dedication and its short to medium term outcomes is seen to challenge the Australian Church to resume its endorsement and advocacy of Distributism, in the evolved form to whose feasibility Mondragón so comprehensively now attests. About Distributism Akin to the hedgehog of Isaiah Berlin’s essay on Tolstoy, Distributism ‘knows one big thing’.3 Its basis is the passionate conviction that a just social order can be achieved only through a much more widespread distribution of property. Distributism favours a ‘society of owners’ where property belongs to the many rather than the few, and correspondingly opposes its concentration in the hands either of the rich, as under capitalism, or of the state as advocated by some Socialists. In particular, ownership of the means of production, distribution and exchange must be widespread. Other than in the case of sole proprietors or hands-on partnerships, labour should hire capital rather than capital labour. ‘Distributism’, in the view of the US Social Catholicism studies scholar, Jay P. Corrin, ‘represented the single most important synthesis of Catholic social and political thinking to emerge in the English-speaking community in the early twentieth century, and its values had a telling impact on Catholic intellectuals in Britain and America’.4 As noted by the prominent and exceptionally well-connected lay Catholic writer, Maisie Ward, in her 1944 biography of her fellow author and co-religionist, G.K. Chesterton: In Australia, Distributism has given a fresh slant to both Labour and Catholic leadership. … Most important, however, of all the Australian developments has been the approval by the Australian Hierarchy of the main Distributist 5 ideal as the aim of Catholic Action. 3 Isaiah Berlin, The Hedgehog and the Fox: An Essay on Tolstoy’s View of History, (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1953). 4 Jay P. Corrin, Catholic Intellectuals and the Challenge of Democracy, (Notre Dame, Ind: University of Notre Dame Press, 2002) 3. 5 Maisie Ward, Gilbert Keith Chesterton, (London: Sheed and Ward, 1944) 446-447. 5. Distributism, in its distinctively Australian form as refined and elaborated in the deliberations of Catholic bodies including the Campion Society, ANSCA, the Catholic Worker magazine’s Council and Central Committee, and the YCW, was spelled out to definitive and succinct effect by the scholar priest Fr James Murtagh in his 1955 study, Australia: The Catholic Chapter. Murtagh identified as its fundamental principle ‘the restoration of property to the average citizen’ and as its slogan ‘Property