March 2021 Print

May 6, 1917 - November 6, 1963

By Desmond J. McDonnell

Born in 1864 and ordained in 1890, Fr. Daniel Mannix was the Rector of Ireland’s premier seminary at Maynooth when in 1912 at the insistence of the British government, his famous oratorical gifts caused him to be exiled from Ireland.

He had been heavily involved in upholding the Catholic cause in Ireland’s troubles at the time. For example, in 1903 he was visited at Maynooth by Edward VII, and in 1911 by George V. In 1914 Parliament in London had passed a bill for Ireland’s eventual independence. Bitterest opposition to this was led by Ireland’s Protestants (“Orangemen”) who eventually succeeded in keeping Ireland’s northernmost six counties under English rule. These counties are known in the south as the “Black North.” It has been credibly argued with plenty of evidence that England went to war in France in 1914 in order to prevent or avoid this looming loss of Ireland. Ireland thereafter slid down towards the civil war which erupted in Dublin at Easter in 1916 and which only ended with Irish independence in 1923.

St. Pius X’s Rome sent Mannix (made a monsignor in 1906) to Australia, naming him on July 1st, 1912 as Coadjutor (assistant archbishop with right of succession) to the Archbishop of Melbourne. At Adelaide he disembarked to come overland by train to arrive at Melbourne in time for the Easter of 1913. While he had been daunted at first by Adelaide’s heat, he was encouraged by his enthusiastic reception as a “world-class theologian and educationist” at St. Patrick’s Cathedral in Melbourne on Easter Sunday. This soon made him speak of his hopes to be a good Australian. In 1917, with the death of his predecessor on 6 May, Dr. Mannix succeeded as Archbishop of Melbourne.

Throughout World War I (1914 - 1918) he earned empire-wide press infamy by vigorously applying his already famous oratorical gifts to leading all opposition to the national referendum to legalize conscription for military service in the war—which he called a “sordid trade war”—in Europe and the Middle East.

Australia’s 1901 Constitution allowed military conscription only for the defense of the Australian homeland. Conscription for military service elsewhere could be legal only if permitted by a majority “yes” vote in a nationwide referendum. In two national votes in 1916 and 1917 the “yes” vote was narrowly defeated. In the national and British Empire press, Archbishop Mannix had been routinely painted as a traitor. In response, he was the focal point for Melbourne’s famous St. Patrick’s Day Procession of 1920, when over 20,000 Catholic Australian returned soldiers marched past his open car and behind 14 Australian Catholic Victoria Cross heroes riding on white horses.

To assure his own spiritual life and health, Dr. Mannix daily passed some five hours in prayer and meditation before the Blessed Sacrament, with an extra hour or two added when he was on annual holidays. For the sacrament of Penance he simply joined the ordinary confessional line each week, like any other ordinary penitent, at St. Francis’ church. In central Melbourne since 1841, this St. Francis’ is the city’s first and oldest Catholic church. People always came in great numbers to enjoy his great speeches and wit. Archbishop Mannix’s one worldly dread was that he might be given a cardinal’s hat, which would oblige him to travel often to Rome. Thus he often set out to annoy the Papal Nuncio. On one famous occasion, the Nuncio was trying to say how much he enjoyed Australia’s sunshine. Trying to remember this last word, he took up Dr. Mannix’s whispered offer of the word “moonshine.” Great was the Nuncio’s umbrage as the whole audience erupted in laughter.

In the 1920s Dr. Mannix made a few last trips abroad: notably in 1920 when he was infamously barred by the British navy from visiting his mother in Ireland; in the Holy Year of 1925 he led a pilgrimage to Rome, Lourdes and Ireland; in 1926 he attended the Chicago Eucharistic Congress. Thereafter Melbourne was very much his home. For the Victorian Centenary in 1934 his National Eucharistic Congress was the greatest of all his mass demonstrations: here a procession of 80,000 people passed to Benediction before, reportedly, half a million watchers.

He thought hatred of Catholics by Protestants to be an inevitable by-product of their babel of doctrines. He never entered their churches; he offered only courtesy, but never any fraternization. In 1916 he had defended Lutheran churches from wartime closure, but Luther himself was “a distasteful subject...impossible to quote in decent surroundings.”

He was popularly regarded as one of the four most clever men in the world. His fruits were abounding: over his fifty years, his diocesan faithful increased from 150,000 to 600,000; churches 160 to 300; 10 new male and 14 female religious orders were introduced; these staffed 10 seminaries, 7 new hospitals, 3 orphanages, etc.

During World War II (1939 - 1945) he rescued the world-famous Vienna Boys Choir from wartime internment (i.e., imprisonment). He thus acquired their choral services in St. Patrick’s Cathedral. In 1943 he personally befriended the famous 1890s “Heidelberg school” leading artist Arthur Streeton who had defended him from a newspaper bigot attack. He helped win Streeton’s conversion to the Catholic faith. Archbishop Mannix was one of the only six who attended Streeton’s funeral near his home in the Dandenong Hills later that year.

His greatest interest was in the educational and spiritual advancement of his Catholic people (then 25% of the population). He routinely opened churches, institutions, convents, libraries, schools, etc. To create work during the 1930s Depression, he had the spires of his St. Patrick’s Cathedral magnificently completed. This work was finished in 1939. He patronized the famous American architect Walter Burley Griffin (the designer of Canberra as the national capital) to design his Newman College which he had opened at Melbourne University. He also routinely invited religious orders to establish in his archdiocese, for example, the Trappist Monastery at Tarrawarra in 1954.

In the realm of national politics, Archbishop Mannix was never one to be intimidated into hiding in the ranks of any local National Bishops’ Conference. Only after his time did this post-Vatican II episcopal disease called “collegiality” arise to scourge the Church’s once robust and responsible episcopal leadership. Thanks to this “collegiality” each “ordinary” was ever invited and enabled to view his NBC “as a rabbit views a briar patch,” i.e., as somewhere to hide from his leadership responsibilities while everywhere the Church has been crumbling into ruins. The post-Vatican II Church chaos of chronic National Episcopal Conferences producing reams of unreadable (i.e., unread) documents mercifully arrived too late to trouble Archbishop Daniel Mannix.

Not that he was ever afraid to involve the Church in his strongly anti-Communist national politics. From the late 1930s onwards, Archbishop Mannix staunchly backed the work of one Mr. B. A. Santamaria (1915-1998) who organized a “movement” to combat the spread of Communist power and controls over the national and state trade unions.

In the mid-1950s, Mr. Santamaria’s “movement” caused the Communist-influenced Australian Labour Party to be split into pro- and anti-Communist factions. Their opponents, the Conservatives’ “Liberal” Party of Mr. Menzies then enjoyed a “Golden Age” of unbroken rule from 1949 to 1972.

After 1963, when Melbourne’s Mannix-led “Golden Age” had ended, only one bishop, Bernard Stewart of Sandhurst, remained as the only strongly anti-Communist Australian Catholic bishop. In the 1970s this Bishop Stewart added to his cathedral the spires which today gloriously tower from his cathedral over Bendigo. Indeed they remain today the focus for an annual Christ the King pilgrimage to Bendigo from Ballarat.

Archbishop Mannix’s ambitions for his archdiocese were vast, as for example was his seminary in the suburb of Waverly. Sadly this, his last establishment undertaking, was overtaken by the horrors which overwhelmed the Church after 1962.

From his hilltop episcopal palace of Raheen over the river in the suburb of Kew, Archbishop Mannix walked every morning through the riverside parks and inner suburbs to his office near St. Patrick’s Cathedral behind Parliament house. His tall, lean, black-clad figure was a familiar morning sight to motorists...and a target for beggars. For these, when he was about to set off on his daily morning walk to the Cathedral, he routinely received from his housekeeper a handful of two-shilling silver coins.

Thanks to Archbishop Mannix and his God-granted longevity and clarity of mind, his archdiocese was largely sheltered from the spiritual rot of Modernism ever spreading over the rest of the Church during his fifty years.

 He routinely bought up old mansions for convents and religious orders and for use as retreat centers. All in his Archdiocese were invited to take an annual retreat, usually a weekend, in one of these retreat centers. In his time, many of his laity took up this invitation.

 Archbishop Mannix had worked very well indeed. After 1963 no other archdiocese in the world gave the “new” Vatican more trouble with anti-Modernist and anti-chaos complaints than what had been Dr. Mannix’s Archdiocese of Melbourne.

For even as late as in 1963 Melbourne still had as Archbishop one who, fifty years previously, had been named to his post and for his work by a papal saint: Pope St. Pius X himself!