God and Caesar: Selected Essays on Religion, Politics, & Society

Introduction

Introduction Democracy in Australia has been good to the Catholic community , who spread over the entire continent, nowhere constituting even a local regional majority. Since 1986 Catholics have replaced Anglicans as the largest denomination , a little over one-quarter of the population. They welcomed the separation of church and state, initially as some protection against an Anglican–Protestant majority, quietly ignoring the encyclical of St. Pius X Vehementer nos of February 1906, which condemned the separation of church and state as “a supreme injustice ” done to God. They realized, as in the United States, that their democracy was fundamentally directed against neither God nor their religion. Anti-religious passion has rarely burned brightly in Australia. No Catholic church, for example, has ever been destroyed by an Australian mob. Religious practice is lower than in most parts of the United States, but militant secularism is also milder. It has been suggested that the Australian temptation is to trivialize Christ and not to crucify him. Certainly the separation of church and state does not prevent substantial commonwealth and state government money being spent on the capital and recurrent costs of religiously based schools, Catholic, Protestant, Jewish, Muslim, and others. In most parts of the English-speaking world outside Britain and Ireland, the Catholic faith was planted by Irish immigrants who had no emotional attachment whatsoever to the Crown and the system that treated them so poorly over the centuries in Ireland . There was therefore little sentimental attachment to any alliance of throne and altar as there was in many parts of Catholic continental Europe, and most Catholics over the course of the twentieth century voted with the workers’ party, the Labor party, or the Democratic party. This is now changing or changed.  The sectarianism that plagued history in Australia recurrently until after the Second World War was a clash of English versus Irish and Protestant versus Catholic much more than any struggle between secularism and religion, although the most significant tension today is between a secularizing liberalism and a new JudeoChristian coalition, whose most active members are Catholics and evangelical Protestants. Australia has no equivalent of Puritan New England in the seventeenth century, not even in the colony of South Australia, and no contemporary equivalent of the Bible Belt in the Southern states of the U.S.A. Born during the Second World War, which concluded victoriously for the Allies before I was aware of the strife, I was a teenager in the fifties during the height of the Cold War, an admirer of Pope Pius XII and the Catholic cardinals, such as Wysziński, Mindszenty, Stepinac, Beran, and Slipyj, who publicly opposed the Communists. In my state of Victoria in southeastern Australia, Catholic life was dominated by the archbishop of Melbourne from 1917 to 1963, the Irishman Daniel Mannix. He was an admirer of Pope Leo XIII, believing Catholics had been slow to exploit the opportunities opened to them by democracies and critical of “sacristy priests” who thought that religion should not venture much further than the church building. Like Cardinal Moran of Sydney and Archbishop Duhig of Brisbane, he established himself as a major public figure and used this as one means of encouraging and strengthening Catholic involvement in public life in Australia. Mannix’s central priorities were religious, and at his death in 1963 his flock had a depth of faith and level of religious practice rarely equaled in Christian history.Vocations to the priesthood and religious life abounded. His encouragement of education, which had continued for ninety years without government money through the staffing of the schools by religious orders, provoked a social mobility into the middle classes comparable to—and possibly surpassing —that achieved in the United States.  introduction When he arrived in Australia there were still job advertisements explaining that Catholics and Jews need not apply. The discriminations and separations were real, if generally mild, and he inspired confidence and loyalty in his largely Irish-Australian congregation with his regular commentary on public affairs. The two greatest controversies of his long episcopate were his successful opposition to conscription in the two referenda of the First World War and his public support of the anti-Communist union activists (who, working from “Industrial Groups” within the Labor party, became known as “Groupers”) expelled from the Australian Labor Party after the 1954–55 Split, who then formed the Democratic Labor Party. In the second struggle he was...