A simple set of numbers preyed on the mind of Daniel Mannix when he began his long association with the Catholic archdiocese of Melbourne in 1913. In the 1840s the population of his native Ireland topped eight million. But in the wake of famine and misrule Ireland’s population sank over the succeeding decades to barely four million. These figures bred unhappy thoughts.
Mannix’s resultant turbulent priestly life in Australia is the subject of an easy to read biography by Michael Gilchrist. First published in 1982 and now issued in a revised and expanded edition with an approving foreword by Cardinal George Pell, it tracks the sparks that flew when Mannix aroused conservative hostility in Australia at a time when national grief, ennobled by Gallipoli, put a premium on loyalty and conformity. Gilchrist’s account also traces Mannix’s equally stormy retreat from anti-British disaffection.
Gilchrist presents Mannix’s career as a study in conviction politics. Despite hostile pressure the archbishop would not compromise where matters of justice or conscience were involved. Truth, for Mannix’s generation, was not relative.
The enforced Hibernian diaspora of the 19th century darkened the outlook of Mannix’s Australian flock at the start of his incumbency. The archdiocese had an embattled Irish-Australian hue. There was a Protestant ascendancy to be fought in the antipodes just as there was in Ireland and the struggle took many disparate forms. Mannix embodied resistance on the official denominational front just as his parishioner John Wren, a man with whom he had little in common outside the noxious ambience of sectarianism, masterminded the struggle against the excesses of Protestant morality by conducting illegal totes and investing in the racing industry.
Mannix was already advanced into middle age and serving as President of Maynooth College in County Kildare when the Melbourne archdiocese headhunted him to lead a campaign in support of state aid for its parochial schools. A bold pressure group strategy to secure state aid was devised and pursued using legitimate democratic methods but soon proved to be counterproductive.
The state aid campaign ratcheted up sectarian animosity in Melbourne during the Great War as did the Easter Rebellion in Ireland. The tension energised wartime opposition by Mannix, now enthroned as archbishop, to attempts by Prime Minister Billy Hughes to introduce military conscription for overseas service.
Mannix hoped to see the end of the murderous link between Ireland and the embattled British Empire. He supported the establishment of a united and