A Radical Christian Conservative

Running the Showis a wonderful collection of documents, where we can read for ourselves what B.A.S. was saying at various times, usually to his fellow workers.

His long personal history is still a minefield, or rather a series of minefields, ecclesiologically, personally and politically from the 1954 split in the ALP to the split within the NCC in the early 1980s. I do not ambition to blunder through them! These documents constitute a precious source of information for scholars, friends and opponents.

The introductions to each set of documents, written by the editor Paddy Morgan, are deeply sympathetic to B.A.S., but independent, and judicious in their evaluations. Morgan sees Bob as a “radical Christian conservative”. His concluding section entitled “commentary”, fewer than twenty pages, is a masterpiece; honest, shrewd and perceptive.

Santamaria was a strategist as well as a prophet; he was a lawyer with all the dexterity this can imply who saw his organisations working at different levels, public and private—when they were not operating secretly! Originally he was a young man in a hurry, who at the age of twenty-six formed the Movement, which was active across Australia, using the church’s parish structures to throw out the communist leadership, especially in the key unions, using much of their communist methodology, minus the lies and violence. By the early 1950s the Movement had 6000 members in 350 districts with 100 factory and union groups. Norm Lauritz’s talk on the start of the Movement is fascinating; a lot of it was new to me. For years the topic was buried in silence. There is even gossip that the communists urged Frank Hardy to write Power Without Glory, a novel many saw as based on John Wren, because they thought Wren was behind the Movement!

I think Morgan is right in pointing out that after the disaster of the 1954 ALP split Santamaria emerged as an entirely more formidable strategist and thinker, although politically he never enjoyed anything approaching the success of the early years. I believe he always had something of the Irish-Australian Christian Brothers about him. In Victoria many or most of his followers came through the Brothers’ schools and he shared their assertiveness, their conviction that they were entitled to a place in the mainstream of Australia life, their courage and perseverance. In a 1978 talk he paid a beautiful tribute to the Brothers, which also says a lot about himself:

“They [the brothers] took the children of a depressed social group, men and women who were in reality quite prepared to settle for being second-class citizens in Australia as their ancestors were in the Old World: dragged them up by their own boot-straps: set their feet on the rungs of the professions, the services, the Church: and made it possible for them to contribute the best they had in them to the building of Australia.
“That was the St. Kevin’s achievement [B.A.S’s Year 12 school]. It eventuated because, like every other great achievement, it is the fruit of a vision, a vision seen by the greatest Australian of his time, Daniel Mannix, Archbishop of Melbourne.
“A school is not buildings. It is teachers and pupils: the interplay of the moral and intellectual quality of the teacher on the potentiality of his pupils. The role of those teachers and those pupils in the Catholic History of Melbourne was then, and remains, unique.”

After the Split, with its consequent ostracism and abuse, not only did his interests and ambitions change, but there was more of the “Italian” evident in his work and writings; more of Sturzo, Gramsci and even Machiavelli than had been needed in the earlier more brutal and simple battles for union control.

These documents show a formidable intellect at work. He wrote a great deal and these two volumes represent only a smaller part of the total. But he was not primarily a writer or commentator; he was an activist, an organiser, a “doer”. Lenin’s question “What is to be done?” was a recurring one for him, which he regularly answered in practice as well as theory. In turn he headed five organisations: Catholic Action, the National Catholic Rural Movement, the Land Settlement Scheme, the Movement and the National Civic Council, across nearly sixty years.

His first interests had been in the struggle against communism in the unions, and in agrarian reform, which the then Governor-General Sir William McKell scathingly rejected as a proposal for “a sheep, a goat, three acres and a migrant”! Obviously there was more to it than that, but the two settlements in Gippsland and near Wagga did not prosper. Bob’s interests then turned to the struggle against expanding communism in South-East Asia and a more general battle with the corrosive forces of liberalism, embodied in the policies of men like Lionel Murphy. Later still he tried unsuccessfully to found a new political party.

He recognised the importance of the “culture wars” (a later terminology) in the universities as a new front-line struggle and recognised too the crucial struggle within the Catholic Church between those who accepted the Second Vatican Council and those who wanted to use it as a springboard for what he called the “wildest eccentricities” by appealing to the “spirit of Vatican Two”. He was scathing about the effects of liberal scriptural studies in the Protestant churches and resisted their spread into the Catholic communities. So too he clearly saw the damage done to traditional Catholic morality, especially sexual morality, by appeals to personal conscience.

He was not an enthusiast for Jimmy Carter or the Vatican’s “Ost Politik”, that is, its opening up to communism, under Pope Paul VI. I remember a rather cynical priest friend of mine pointing out that until 1978 and the election of Pope John Paul II, Bob went from quoting Pius XII to quoting Alexander Solzhenitsyn.

These changing interests, his identification of new challenges, often bewildered some of his allies, who felt they had been passed by, and his opponents regularly ignored them, preferring to paint him as an immobile figure from the past, an obscurantist and medievalist.

He began his leadership role as a very young layman when the church was overwhelmingly clericalist, although Pius XI was a champion of lay “Catholic Action”. It was the good judgment of Archbishop Mannix that not only gave him room to move, but fostered and backed his leadership.

We often forget today how strong the Australian communists were in the 1940s in the unions, how they opposed the Second World War efforts, sometimes even after Russia became our ally through the Nazi invasion. In 1945 the communists still had a majority of ninety votes at the ACTU congress. Only the Catholic communities were able to produce thousands of working-class unionists dedicated enough to work to throw them out. We owe the Groupers a lot, and the comprehensiveness of their victory should not blind us to the years of dour struggle that were needed.

As an ignorant teenager in a family whose father had always voted Liberal and whose mother had been a Labor supporter I remember being shocked by the rout of the Anti-Communist Labor candidates in the Victorian state elections of May 1955. I had naively expected many of them to be elected.

With the passing of the years I always retained a substantial sympathy with Bob’s political positions, but I became increasingly convinced that his reading of the cultural challenges to Christian belief was correct and that he was also right about the struggle taking place within the church, even when he stated this in a somewhat “old-fashioned” way. I also came to see that he was one of the few people in Australia who might be able to do something to reverse the decline; or more correctly, that he was already working to shore up the church. The founding of AD2000 in 1987 represented a significant advance in this struggle.

B.A.S. was a pessimist, he was attracted to “crisis situations”, some of which he tried to provoke through pre-emptive strikes, and he did have an “urgent apocalyptic tone” on occasions, to quote his editor on all three points.

But he was right about communism and right to oppose it. It was good that he saw it defeated in Europe and Russia, while effectively disappearing even in Vietnam and China.

He was also right about the church, with his viewpoint vindicated substantially by both Pope John Paul II and Pope Benedict XVI. This is not to claim that the forces of orthodoxy have prevailed in the Western world, but the ball is still in play. While no gains are permanent, the situation in many places, especially in the USA, is healthier than ten or twenty years ago.

I remember reading or hearing that Bob explained once that he did what he did because Archbishop Mannix asked him! I knew there was more to it than that. These papers reveal his fundamentally religious motivation.

He used to quote Cardinal Jean Danielou that “history is the unfolding of God’s plan for man” and in 1953 he explained the Movement success in the unions in these terms: “It is true that normally He [God] acts through men, that therefore someone had to be chosen and that, in those critical years we were chosen.”

Twenty years later in 1973 the tone is different, as he quoted Machiavelli’s claim that every struggle was decided by “fortuna” (fate or destiny) and “virtu” (inner strength). He ruefully claimed that on three occasions (the 1954 ALP Federal Executive meeting, the talks to heal the ALP–DLP split in the 1960s and in the proposed DLP–Country Party merger) he lost by one vote.

He knew that the wheel of history turns unexpectedly and that the future is moulded not by apathetic majorities but by creative minorities, provided they are not too feeble to act. He wrote, “the law of Faith is not that ‘God is on our side’, but that so long as we try to be on God’s side we can never finally be defeated”.

He concluded, “those who are prepared to bear the burden may never see the victory. Like Mother Teresa and her companions, they are the victory. Their vision, their courage, their uncompromising faith will transform the world.”

I commend this selection of documents which reveal the mind and activities of a distinguished twentieth-century Australian, who made a remarkable political, religious and cultural contribution to our nation and church. He has been ably served by his editor in the selection and organisation of the contents and by the editor’s incisive commentary. I hope it finds a wide and sympathetic readership.

This is the speech that Cardinal Pell, the Archbishop of Sydney, made to launch Running the Show in Melbourne in August. A previous volume, also edited by Patrick Morgan, Your Most Obedient Servant: B.A. Santamaria Selected Letters 1938–1996, was published by Miegunyah/Melbourne University Press last year.