Daniel Mannix was 49 when he reached Australia in 1913. He had done rather well for himself in his native Ireland, progressing from his family’s tenant farm in County Cork to St Patrick’s College, Maynooth, where following his studies he embarked upon a solid clerical and academic career.
News of the transfer to Melbourne came as an unwelcome surprise, but Mannix was destined to make quite a splash in his new home. He became Archbishop of Melbourne in 1917 and down to his death at the enviable age of 99 he set about convulsing the nation’s social and political landscape. He grew to love Australia, but Australians were divided about whether Mannix’s presence on their shores was a blessing or a blight.
In this superb biography, Brenda Niall opts, rather wisely, to be even-handed in her assessment. It makes little sense, she writes, to see Mannix “in gloom or in rosy glow”.
Those who object to politically active bishops will not be Mannix’s greatest admirers. He claimed that when he voiced an opinion he was doing so as a private citizen. As Niall writes, this was unconvincing. He also chose some decidedly risky causes. Mannix’s initial reaction to Dublin’s 1916 Easter Rising was confusion. But in the wake of harsh British reprisals, he quickly found sympathy for the nationalist cause.
Over the coming years he would be a firm ally of Eamon de Valera and in 1920, when Mannix was en route to Rome, the two men shared a stage and an agenda at New York’s Madison Square Gardens in front of 15,000 people.
Mannix was no less provocative on Australia’s domestic front. During the First World War he engaged in a tussle with prime minister Billy Hughes over the conscription referendums. Hughes was furious and declared that anyone who supported Mannix’s No vote was marching “under the banner of the deadly enemies of Australia”. Since Mannix was acting out of principle and was no fan of Australia’s enemies, this was grossly unfair.
Undeterred, Mannix continued to annoy politicians for the rest of his life. He had exemplary compassion for the working man but detested communism and supported secretive initiatives that chimed with his world view. He was well within the sidelines when the communist issue tore apart the Australian Labor Party in the mid 1950s. Niall’s analysis of this episode and the historical hinterland is superb.
Through all this, there was always the small matter of being a flock-serving bishop. Mannix was not one for conspicuous intervention at the parish level (visitations were not his thing). But under his stewardship the number of churches in the archdiocese grew from 160 in 1913 to 300 at the time of his death.
Rome, on Niall’s account, was happy with such progress but frowned upon some of the archbishop’s other antics. We are told that a campaign was launched from the banks of the Tiber to diminish Mannix’s influence. Tellingly, the archbishop made no ad limina trips to Rome after 1925 and, just as significantly, he was passed over when it came to handing out cardinals’ hats.
Obstacles confront any biographer of Mannix. He decreed that all his private papers should be destroyed upon his passing. Such was his right but, in consequence, making up one’s mind about him becomes more difficult. Should we boo the troublemaking maverick or cheer the conscientious priest who refused to bite his tongue?
Either way, you’ll be fascinated by a man who left his academic cocoon and arrived in Australia “with nearly everything to learn” about the era’s social problems and political tussles. Perhaps, as Niall suggests, it was this sudden, shocking encounter with reality that produced such an energetic, divisive figure. Mannix would always be “an ascetic who did not want soft cushions”, but he had no intention of limiting himself to a life of silent contemplation. The results were mixed.
This article first appeared in the latest edition of the Catholic Herald magazine (28/8/15).
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