Daniel Mannix

Irish-born cleric and Australian politician

• Born: March 4, 1864
• Birthplace: Charleville, County Cork, Ireland
• Died: November 6, 1963
• Place of death: Melbourne, Victoria, Australia

Mannix became the hero of working-class Roman Catholics for his articulate and outspoken views in favor of Ireland and against British and Protestant influences in Australia that he believed threatened their rights to equality and justice.

Early Life

Daniel Mannix was the son of the former Ellen Cagney and Timothy Mannix, a prosperous tenant farmer in Ireland’s County Cork. He was the first of eight children, of whom three died in infancy and another died as a young man in New York. Educated at first at the parish school and then by the Christian Brothers, he enrolled at a classical school, a preliminary to entering the priesthood, at the age of twelve. He was a studious lad; while later boarding at St. Colman’s College, Fermoy, he won a scholarship to Maynooth Seminary, where from 1882 his academic achievements set a standard by which all other students came to be measured.

Resembling his tall, slim mother in appearance, Mannix was ordained on June 8, 1890, and, after a year’s postgraduate study, taught logic, metaphysics, and ethics at Maynooth. Qualifying for a doctorate of divinity in 1895 and receiving rapid promotion, first to the chair of higher philosophy and then, at the age of thirty-one, to the chair of moral theology, he also became a contributing editor to the Irish Ecclesiastical Record. By 1903, Mannix was college president.

During this time, Mannix acquired a reputation as a cold, abstemious, but competent administrator, a disciplinarian who held himself apart from the Gaelic revival then in progress. His main achievement was to gain affiliation for Maynooth to the Irish National University (established in 1908) and a seat on the senate for himself.

Life’s Work

Mannix was forty-eight and president of Maynooth. The future looked very promising. Some imagined that he would succeed Archbishop William Walsh of Dublin. The Vatican, however, agreed to the request of Archbishop Thomas Carr of Melbourne that Mannix be appointed his coadjutor and his successor. A former vice president of Maynooth, a recognized scholar, and a firm believer in the value of a Catholic-run school system, Carr had held the archbishopric since 1886. He never consulted Mannix about his coming to Melbourne, and Mannix never questioned his appointment.

On his arrival in Melbourne on March 23, 1913, Mannix was incensed to find a policy of compulsory, free, and secular education in operation. In 1870, state aid to church schools had been abolished and continuing attempts, especially by Catholics and Anglicans, to have it restored were unsuccessful. Convinced that secular education was a “great stain upon the statute books of this free and progressive land,” Mannix made its removal a paramount objective. Though state aid was not reinstated in his lifetime, he never ceased to confront politicians with the issue.

In the 1911 census only 3 percent of the Australian population were recorded as Irish born but more than 22 percent were Roman Catholics, most of Irish descent. Surprisingly few approved of the Irish rebellion (the Easter Rising) in 1916; their sympathy was aroused, however, at Great Britain’s tough response. Although official church policy was to stay on the sidelines, Mannix opposed Labour prime ministerWilliam Morris Hughes’s proposal to introduce conscription for overseas service when recruiting numbers started to fall during World War I. Mannix argued, among other things, that by removing troops from Ireland, Great Britain would have enough men to continue the fight against Germany without drawing on more Australians.

Although in favor of supporting Great Britain in the war, Australians narrowly rejected conscription for overseas service in a referendum held on October 28, 1916. Expelled from the Labour Party for contravening the spirit of its platform, which was opposed to compulsion, Hughes led a “Win the War” party to victory at elections held the following May. Yet, despite a bitter campaign in December, a second referendum was lost by an increased margin. Once in favor, this time Victoria was opposed.

It is difficult to know how important Mannix’s role was. Hundreds of thousands attended mass rallies to hear him exercise his renowned sarcastic wit, and yet a majority in the more populous state of New South Wales voted no in both referenda without Mannix to lead them. Hughes was not quite the ogre Mannix painted him. He had privately intervened on Irish demands for independence with British prime minister David Lloyd George, and he had quickly given assurances that Australia would not follow New Zealand’s lead by requiring priests to argue for exemption before a magistrate. There is no doubt, Professor Patrick O’Farrell writes, that Catholic influence was much stronger in the Labour Party after the expulsion of Hughes and his followers: Only three out of twenty-four federal members of Parliament who left the party were Catholics. This did not result, however, in the more Catholic-minded party that Mannix desired.

Despite Vatican displeasure, Mannix continued his attack on Great Britain’s Irish policy. In mid-1920, he was feted in the United States for his views, appearing at Madison Square Garden in New York City with the Irish Republican leader, Eamon de Valera . Mannix’s planned visit to Ireland, however, was aborted by the British government. In a dramatic move, he was taken from the passenger steamer en route and landed by destroyer in England. Thus thwarted, he went on to Rome, where he persuaded Pope Benedict XV to censure British conduct in Ireland. Mannix never faltered in his support of de Valera and the republican cause. By 1925, when he was able to enter Ireland freely, he was said to be the only episcopal supporter of de Valera in all of Ireland and Australia.

During World War II, Mannix defended Irish neutrality, but by that time communism, not the British, absorbed most of his attention. Again he went on the attack. In line with Vatican policy, in 1937 the Australian National Secretariat of Catholic Action had been established. A decision was taken in September, 1945, by Australian bishops to expand its political wing, the Catholic Social Studies Movement, which became known simply as the Movement. One of its founders was his protégé, Bartholomew Augustine Santamaria, who proposed that the Movement copy its enemy’s organizational methods by creating cells with which to infiltrate the labor movement and counter communist elements. Once its existence became public during the mid-1950’s, the activities of the Movement caused a rift among Catholics and a split in the Labour Party far more damaging than that of 1916-1917.

Significance

Daniel Mannix was not a humble man. During his presidency at Maynooth he got into a dispute with Father Michael O’Hickey, professor of Irish language studies since 1896, who wanted Irish to be made compulsory for university entrance. Postgraduate students supporting Hickey became so rebellious that Mannix closed the center and expelled five students, all ordained priests. Dismissed from his post, Hickey appealed to the Rota in Rome. By the time the tribunal concurred with Mannix that the matter was one only of seminary discipline, he had departed for Melbourne.

The rector of the Irish College in Rome, who was not consulted about Mannix’s appointment, believed in 1912 that Australia should direct its own destiny. The Vatican unwittingly, however, sent a man who came to believe that being Irish was almost synonymous with being Catholic.

From 1820, successive colonial governments had allowed the gradual establishment of a Roman Catholic Church hierarchy in Australia. Its early members were actually paid from the public purse. A shortage of English priests meant that the majority of priests were recruited in Ireland, and so by the 1890’s, powerful English Benedictine forces in Sydney had been silenced. From 1914, however, priests trained at St. Patrick’s College in Manly, Sydney, were outspokenly in favor of Rome’s policy of a native-born, locally trained clergy, and from 1930, Manly-trained priests were made bishops.

While allowing Catholic laity a greater say in church affairs, Mannix favored Irish-trained, preferably Maynooth, clergy. He was rude to the apostolic delegate Archbishop John Panico, whose arrival in March, 1936, was seen as a further attempt by the Vatican to limit Irish influence in the Australian church. In February, 1937, a Manly product, Justin Simonds, became the first Australian-born archbishop on his appointment to Hobart, Tasmania; in 1943, this was followed by the elevation of Sydney-born Norman T. Gilroy to the archbishopric of Sydney. Mannix remained, however, an unrepentant Irishman, a self-confessed supporter of the Sinn Féin.

Coming to Australia apparently crystallized Mannix’s Irishness. Whereas at Maynooth he was prepared to receive royalty, in Melbourne during the visit of Queen Elizabeth II in 1954 he would not relax his rule of declining invitations to Government House. He widened the rift between Catholics and Protestants by refusing to allow Catholic participation in any ceremonies including a religious segment. Partly because of his determination, the religious component was dropped from the trooping of the colors ceremony at military colleges and the traditional Anzac Day (April 25) service at Melbourne’s Shrine of Remembrance. Even on the death of his old antagonist, Dr. Frederick W. Head, the Anglican archbishop, he would not enter St. Paul’s Cathedral, waiting outside to join his funeral procession.

Mannix seemed to completely disregard the effect of his much-publicized anticonscription activities on the welfare of the ordinary Catholic worker, whom he claimed to represent. Discrimination by employers and landlords against those with German connections gradually embraced Catholics, who came to be regarded by some as disloyal, partly understandably at least in Victoria, where their archbishop made practically no concessions to the fact that he lived in a country where most were still happy with the British connection, nearly 80 percent were non-Catholic, and (even among Catholics) republican sentiments were minute. He accused others of sectarianism but constantly indulged in its practice himself. He did mellow in some ways: In 1937 he made conciliatory gestures to Hughes that resulted in the regular exchange of birthday greetings. He never gave way, however, on the big issues.

Despite his time at Maynooth and his acknowledged intellectual abilities, Mannix wrote (or at least published) no great works, not even any polemics on his strongly held beliefs. On the contrary, he destroyed almost all of his private papers that may have helped one to understand the man. It is interesting to contrast Mannix with his contemporary in Brisbane, Archbishop James Duhig. Duhig was also Irish-born; he became archbishop the same year as Mannix. He came to Australia at the age of thirteen, however, after his family first moved to Yorkshire, England, and then to Queensland. Perhaps that is why the more moderate position Duhig adopted was in many ways more attuned to the Australian way of thinking.

Unlike Mannix, Duhig took part in community activities and fostered good relations with other religious groups. Like Mannix, he never received a cardinal’s cap. Both experienced disappointment when in 1946 the cardinalship went to Archbishop Gilroy. Admirers believed it a tremendous insult to Mannix, but their efforts to achieve this honor for him were unsuccessful. With his death, the great Irish influence on the Catholic Church declined.

Bibliography

Garden, Don. Victoria: A History. Melbourne, Vic.: Nelson, 1984. A good general history of Victoria, helpful for putting Mannix and his activities into the Victorian setting.

Gilchrist, Michael. Daniel Mannix: Priest and Patriot. Melbourne, Vic.: Dove Communications, 1982. Gilchrist uses sectarian and state aid controversies to highlight Mannix’s role as priest and uses the issues of conscription, Ireland, and communism to show him as a patriot.

McKernan, Michael. “Catholics, Conscription, and Archbishop Mannix.” Historical Studies 17 (April, 1977): 299-314. McKernan shows the division among Catholic attitudes toward Mannix’s conscription stand.

O’Farrell, Patrick. The Catholic Church and Community in Australia: A History. Melbourne, Vic.: Nelson, 1977. Written by a well-regarded Catholic historian, this general history includes a substantial and diverse bibliography.

‗‗‗‗‗‗‗. The Irish in Australia. Sydney: New South Wales University Press, 1987. This study complements O’Farrell’s history of the Roman Catholic Church in Australia (see above).

Santamaria, B. A. Daniel Mannix: The Quality of Leadership. Melbourne, Vic.: Melbourne University Press, 1984. By a leading Melbourne Catholic conservative who from the 1930’s worked closely with Mannix and led the Catholic Social Studies Movement in its campaign against communism.