The year 1939 marked the end of the Depression era, and saw the final plummet of Western Europe into World War II. After Hitler’s invasion of Czechoslovakia in March, another World War was widely regarded as inevitable, and dread of the coming conflagration overwhelmed any sense of relief which might otherwise have been felt at the passing of a torrid decade. In Victoria, Archbishop Mannix insisted that there was still hope for peace;1 but the Advocate, while echoing his sentiments, discarded altogether its previous policy of opposition to Australian military participation in overseas conflicts.2 Alone of the Catholic papers, the Catholic Worker maintained an isolationist stance until mid-year, asserting that, unless the people voted otherwise in a referendum, Australia should not be committed to following Britain into a European war.2 However, Bob Santamaria, who was no longer involved with the Catholic Worker, concurred with the more common viewpoint that non-involvement as a practical option was simply not open to Australia.
If a European war breaks out, it will be a war which will involve the whole world.4
From the Papacy came desperate calls for a world-wide Catholic peace campaign, and in response the Australian National Secretariat of Catholic Action began organising Australia-wide demonstrations of support. These culminated in several large peace rallies on 28 May, Pentecost Sunday. In Queensland there were mass gatherings; and in Adelaide a Catholic peace meeting filled the Town Hall to overflowing.5 In the Wagga Wagga diocese of New South Wales a peace petition was signed by 5,000 Catholics.4
Easily the most impressive demonstration, however, was the giant Peace Rally which packed sixty thousand people into Melbourne’s great Exhibition Building. Among the impressive array of guests were Archbishop Mannix; the Prime Minister of Australia, Mr. Robert Gordon Menzies; the Premier of Victoria, Mr. A. A. Dunstan; and the Lord Mayor of Melbourne, Coroner A. W. Cole. The meeting endorsed unanimously a motion put by Bob Santamaria, and seconded by Denys Jackson, calling on the Federal Government to do all it could to help avert ‘another world catastrophe, the end of which would be the doom of European civilisation’. This motion was accepted by Mr. Menzies on behalf of the Government. He spoke eloquently on the need for universal good-will; and he explained that, although a non-Catholic, he was attending the gathering in order that ‘the movement for peace should have the full moral authority of the community*7 The following morning a cablegram was sent to the Pope on behalf of Archbishop Mannix, informing him of the success of the Peace Rally?
The Pope who received this message was not, however, the same Pope as had so resolutely guided the Church through the turbulent decade which was now approaching its end. Pope Pius XI, bom Achille Ratti, had died after a short illness on 10 February 1939. He had been the outspoken foe of all the great evils of the age: of unrestrained Capitalism, of Fascism, of Nazism, of International Communism. He had promoted Christian social principles and Catholic Action with untiring insistence. He was loved throughout the Catholic world, and the grief which accompanied his death was more than the sentiment of mere convention. In Australia, Denys Jack- son mourned his passing in one of his finest editorials:
We, the children of his household, are pierced with a sharp sword of sorrow, a numbing pain of loss… He was our fearless leader, inspiring us with courage, strength, and tenacity, filling us with loyalty, faith and hope, in a chaotic world. He is dead, and our sorrow the world does not realise?
Pius XI was succeeded by Eugenio Pacelli, his Secretary of State, as Pius XII. The new Pope embarked on a pontificate during which the forces threatening the Church and Western civilisation were to become less diverse in kind, but no less fearsome in power, than during the reign of his predecessor.
Meanwhile, the Australian National Secretariat of Catholic Action pushed forward steadily towards its pre-set goals. It began its programme for 1939 by holding an eight-day Federal Conference of Catholic Action Organisers from all States of Australia and New Zealand, which began on 20 February. The Conference broke no new ground, with most of its resolutions simply endorsing or reinforcing policies previously formulated by ANSCA. It served an important function, however, in that it brought together all the key operatives of Australian Catholic Action! and enabled the relationships between them to be consolidated on a personal basis.
A few of the decisions of the Conference did call for slight alterations or refinements of ANSCA’s plans and procedures. One resolution suggested that historical topics be excluded from the basic first-year studycourses, thus requiring the Secretariat to break away from standard Campion Society approaches. Instead, the life-situation ‘enquiry method’ (or ‘enquete’) was to be favoured, with study centring on the problems which members encountered in their everyday milieux. Other recommendations resulted in the establishment of an ANSCA Bulletin for Leaders in August;10 and in the foundation of an ANSCA Publications Department in mid-year.” A further motion called for a ‘Social Justice Information Bureau’ to be set up in the diocese of Maitland, which incorporated the Newcastle industrial area. The Bureau was to disseminate material dealing with Catholic social principles, ‘with particular reference to . . . the mining industry’.12
The general work of the National Secretariat was facilitated by the creation at the beginning of 1939 of an independent Melbourne Diocesan Secretariat of Catholic Action, to oversee the detailed development of the movement in the Melbourne archdiocese. Initially the D.S.C.A. existed only on a skeletal basis, under the control of its Irish-born Ecclesiastical Assistant, Father T. O’Sullivan. However, in April the positions of Director and Honorary Assistant were filled by Ken Mitchell and Alban Pisani, the then Presidents of the Campion Society and the Assisian Guild respectively.13 The Diocesan Secretariat was the nominal patron of the Melbourne Peace Rally of 28 May; and it did in fact try to mount a further Catholic peace campaign in August and September, before the outbreak of war caused its efforts to be cut short.14
ANSCA remained preoccupied during 1939 with what was essentially the preliminary stage of Australian Catholic Action. Apart from the May peace demonstrations, the only one of its enterprises to excite public interest was a lecture-tour by the English Catholic writer. Dr. Halliday Sutherland, which it sponsored, and which began in October. The; main part of the Secretariat’s energies continued to go into preparing the ground for the future specialised Catholic Action movements; and here it met with varying degrees of success-.
The most productive area of ANSCA’s operations proved to be, somewhat surprisingly, that occupied by the rural movement. By June of 1939 ‘at least thirty’ Catholic rural groups were functioning in Australia, six of them in the Wagga Wagga diocese, and a large proportion of the remainder in Victoria.15 Their rapid proliferation was reminiscent of that of the C.Y.M.S. rural branches earlier in the decade. In July a tour of N.S.W. and Queensland by Bob Santamaria, as Director of ANSCA’s Rural Department, revealed the beginnings of the rural group movement in the dioceses of Goulbum, Lismore, Maitland, Toowoomba, Rockhampton, and Townsville. Where Santamaria expected to be addressing small meetings of twenty-odd farmers at his various stopping-places, he was ‘amazed to find in each diocese anything from fifty to seventy or eighty’.14 In June a national Catholic rural monthly, Rural Life, was launched under the editorship of Ted Hennessy.
It would appear that ANSCA’s Catholic rural group movement had tapped a large, but hitherto unsuspected, reservoir of need. Few Catholics were numbered among the large land-holders; and the small fanners had been among the first to suffer and the last to recover from the Depression. They had shown little sense of class solidarity, and had individually fought the harsh battle for survival on their impoverished holdings. In the Catholic rural movement they found a source of collective strength and of ideological reinforcement such as the ordinary parish structure could not provide. The movement, on the one hand, stressed the material benefits which could accrue from mutual assistance programmes and co-operative ventures; and on the other it idealised, Belloc-style, the potentialities of small landownership for the living of a fully Christian life.17 Rural Life, which had a practical rather than a romantic emphasis, contained much useful information on land management and on the establishment of co-operatives.18
In other sectors of its activities ANSCA did not find the going so easy. One major obstacle which it encountered was the Legion of Mary, a multipurpose organisation which, since its foundation in Dublin in 1921, had spread all over the English-speaking world. It had reached Melbourne in 1932;” and by May of 1938 in Victoria had sold 5,000 copies of its Handbook alone.20 During 1938 its Victorian membership ‘practically doubled’-21 and a two-day Retreat which it conducted for its members in January 1939 was the largest such ever to have been seen in Melbourne.22
From ANSCA’s point of view, the problem with the Legion was its explicit ambition to make its parish branches (‘Praesidia’) the organisational bases for every category of Catholic lay activity, including Catholic Action.23 Yet the Legion was of its nature unassimilable into the proposed structure of Australian Catholic Action, except as an ‘auxiliary’ organisation assisting from outside the movement proper. This was so because ANSCA’s plan called for vocationally stratified movements, whereas the Legion mingled Catholics of all classes and all vocations. ANSCA regarded Catholic Action as a difficult and highly specialised apostolate; yet the Legion, by dint of the range and diversity of its interests, could not hope to give it more than superficial attention. Furthermore, the Legion’s Handbook reveals that it had none but the most elementary kind of intellectual consciousness; and that its conception of Catholic Action was tied to the simple needs of the Irish parish, not to the Papal campaign to re-Christianise the pagan industrial society of Europe. However, refusing to recognise its own limitations, it persisted in its set course; and ANSCA was disturbed to note that it was continually establishing branches ‘among boys, girls, men and women in which it is often directly competing with Catholic Action bodies’.24 Eventually the Secretariat formally requested the Hierarchy to make an authoritative ruling defining and limiting the Legion’s sphere of activity.25
Other and more serious difficulties were encountered when ANSCA sought to launch a Young Christian Workers’ Movement, which was to be an Australian equivalent of the Belgian/French Jeunesse Ouvriere Chretienne (or J.O.C.). This plan, which had been endorsed by the February Conference of Catholic Action Organisers, involved the establishment of a single national Catholic Action movement for young working-class males in the 14-25 year age group. The architect of the scheme was Kevin Kelly, who in November 1939 was appointed by the Belgian J.O.C. Headquarters as the official Australian representative of the world Jocist movement.26 The trouble arose from the fact that in Victoria the field of organised Catholic youth activity was already occupied by two well-functioning bodies, the Catholic Boys’ Legion and the Catholic Young Men’s Society.
Kelly’s plan envisaged the eventual dissolution of both these existing organisations, and the assimilation of their membership and their functions into the Y.C.W. His reasons for this were set out in an A.C.T.S. pamphlet which he edited. Young Christian Workers (31 July 1939), wherein he equated the C.Y.M.S. with a Belgian Catholic youth organisation which had been taken over and re-constituted by the Jocists. The implication of the analogy was that the C.Y.M.S. could not be made into an effective Catholic Action body without being totally re-formed, as it was too sport- and social ly- orientated; too inward-looking and implicity defensive; and too set in its traditions and structures, to serve as an efficient vehicle of the militant social apostolate.27 However, it was essential, in the view of Kelly and of ANSCA, that the proposed Y.C.W. take over, firstly, the best potential leaders from within the C.B.L. and the C.Y.M.S.; and at a later date, the mass working- class membership of both. It needed the leaders to make up its trained, militant elite- and it needed the masses in order to become a popular movement in its own right, capable of transforming society from the factory floor upwards. The Y.C.W., by its very nature, had to displace or take over the other two bodies before it could hope to prosper.
During 1937 Kelly had gained a firm foot-hold within the Catholic Boys’ Legion. Dave Nelson, the President, proved a valuable ally; and he in turn transmitted an enthusiasm for Jocist methods to Father Francis Lombard, a recently-ordained curate who operated a Catholic boys’ club in the parish of Northcote.28 Furthermore, a J.O.C. ‘ginger group’ of Kelly’s colleagues had been working systematically within the Legion to promote the Jocist scheme.” In 1938, as a result of their efforts, ‘nearly all’ the members of the Boys’ Legion Committee came to agree ‘that discussion groups along J.O.C. lines should be established in each boys’ club’. However, this proved too much for Father Lanigan, who at the end of May dismissed all the lay members from the Committee, and forbad the use of the J.O.C. prayer in meetings of associated clubs.30 Lanigan regarded the Legion as his own creation, and as his by right to command. His own vision of its functions did not extend beyond sporting and social activities; and he had apparently come to suspect that the Catholic Action enthusiasts were conspiring to take effective control of the organisation away from him. His purge of the Committee did not eradicate the Jocist influence within the Legion, but it did greatly restrict it.
In the short term, the C.B.L. setback was a major blow to Kelly’s Y.C.W. plans. An alternative source of access to the 14-18 year age group existed in the Catholic Youth Movement, and in an organisation which succeeded it, the ‘League of Catholic Youth’. The latter was an explicitly Catholic Action body which was formally inaugurated on 26 February 1939 ‘to combine and co-ordinate over fifty groups of Catholic young men and women, hitherto carrying on their activities independently’.3’ However, while these discussion group federations could furnish the Y.C.W. with some of its leaders, they could not provide it with a mass basis. Only the C.B.L. and the C.Y.M.S. could do that.
The C.Y.M.S., for its part, had no intention of going into extinction, whatever the desires of ANSCA. It had received fair warning of the forthcoming challenge to its existence in a C.Y.M.S./Campion correspondence controversy which had broken out in the Advocate in December 1936. The issue of contention was whether or not the C.Y.M.S. could become an integral part of Australian Catholic Action when that movement was formally inaugurated. Campion writers had asserted that the Young Men’s Society was inherently unsuitable as a framework for a Catholic Action organisation; C.Y.M.S. supporters had insisted that this was not the case.32
To the C.Y.M.S. leaders the controversy revealed that, in the Campion perspective, their Society was expendable. Adding to the danger was the fact that the established C.Y.M.S./Campion joint discussion groups tended to regard themselves simply as Campion branches.33 Clearly, if the Young Men’s Society were to survive as a vital movement, it would have to construct its own study-group network, and break all dependence on the Campion Society in this regard.
Already, in August 1936,34 a C.Y.M.S. Catholic Action Sub-Committee had been formed to report on the Society’s potential role in the lay apostolate movement. Now, in consequence of both the Campion challenge and the Spanish War dispute, its deliberations acquired a new significance and a new note of urgency. The branches were combed for suitable study-group leaders; and in mid-1937, at a meeting of ‘thirty or forty enthusiasts’, the ‘C.Y.M.S. Legion’ was brought into being.35
The primary functions of the Legion were to encourage the establishment of study-groups in association with existing C.Y.M.S. branches, and to see to the training of their leaders. Standish Michael Keon, an outstanding C.Y.M.S. athlete and debater,34 was appointed its Secretary. By March 1938 the Legion had study-groups operating in connection with twenty-four of the forty metropolitan C.Y.M.S. branches, and with six of the sixty country branches, at a time when total Society membership was in the vicinity of 5,000.37 The success of the groups is attested to by the fact that eighteen months later their numbers in Melbourne remained unchanged.3*
ANSCA was pleased at the progress of the C.Y.M.S. Legion,3* seeing it as an excellent source of future Y.C.W. leaders. Furthermore, Kevin Kelly and other Campions assisted it by giving lectures when called upon.4* They obviously failed to recognise it as a potential threat to their long-term plans.
In mid-1938 the C.Y.M.S. found a further important source of strength in the matter of Catholic Action in Father A. M. Crofts, an Irish Dominican who arrived in Australia at that time. Crofts came from a country where the C.Y.M.S. was the official Catholic Action organisation for young men; and further to that, he himself had written one of the leading English-language texts on the social apostolate, Catholic Social Action (1936). He subsequently became a staunch ally of the Victorian C.Y.M.S. in its determination to be integrated into, but not extinguished by, the formal Catholic Action movement.
The inevitable clash between the C.Y.M.S. and ANSCA finally came in mid-1939. The Secretariat, having decided that the time had arrived ‘to draw out the best members [of the C.Y.M.S.] and to make them into the nucleus of a J.O.C. type of Movement’,41 invited the C.Y.M.S. General President, David Sherriff, and the General Secretary, Reginald Hodgkinson, to attend at its offices.43 The Directors assumed that neither these two, nor the Board of Management, would have any objection to handing over their best Legion men to ANSCA, to be trained as leaders for a movement which was intended eventually to replace the Young Men’s Society. The naivety of this assumption reflected the long-standing inability of the Campion leaders to recognise the other Society as being anything more unique, or more important, than a debating and sporting union. Needless to say, ANSCA’s request was politely but firmly refused. The Secretariat was at last forced to acknowledge belatedly, and somewhat grudgingly, that the C.Y.M.S. ‘gave one of the best examples of the loyalty which an organisation, despite methods which even its members admit to be imperfect, can arouse in those same members’.43
This decisive rebuff forced ANSCA to shelve for the time being its schemes for an Australian Y.C.W. Archbishop Mannix was consulted on the dispute, but having for twenty-six years maintained a relationship of mutual respect and loyalty with his Young Men’s Society,44 he was not prepared now to sanction its dissolution. ANSCA had no option but to revise its plans, and to allow for two young men’s Catholic Action movements being formed in Victoria, one based on the C.B.L. for boys 14-18 years, and the other on the C.Y.M.S. for young men aged 18-30.”
After this matter had been settled, and with the assistance of Father Crofts, the C.Y.M.S. began re-drafting its Constitution into a form consonant with the juridical requirements regulating Catholic Action organisations, using as its model the Irish C.Y.M.S. Constitution.44 When the revision was completed early the following year, it received a provisional mandate from Archbishop Mannix to function as a Catholic Action body. Thus the perpetuation was assured of a Society which constituted one of the most powerful, popular and productive elements in the Victorian Catholic tradition.
Ironically, at the time the C.Y.M.S. was achieving its victory over ANSCA, the organisation to which Australian Catholic Action owed its inception, the Campion Society, was in a state of decline. For the best part of a decade it had stood unchallenged in the forefront of Victorian Catholicism, infusing into it new vigour and new ways of thought, and rallying all to the banner of Catholic Action. Now the very magnitude of its own success was proving to be its downfall. Most of the Campion’s outside work of lecturing and organising had gradually been taken over by ANSCA, its direct offspring. Furthermore, the new Catholic intellectualism which the Society had propagated throughout Victoria had been absorbed to the point of saturation. The vital new insights of 1931 had become the common wisdom of 1939; the intellectual trails blazed by the Campions had become well-used thoroughfares. Ideas as such were now less in demand than their translation into action. The Campion Society was faced with the threat of redundancy.
Internal changes had also played their part in dissipating the Society’s creative impulse. Most of the Campion’s achievements during the decade can be traced back to the initiatives of a small internal elite, which had changed little in composition since the days of the First Group. Now, however, the ‘patriarchs’ of the Society – men such as Maher, McInerney, Heffey, Jack- son and Kelly — were fully occupied in other fields of the apostolate: in the Catholic Worker; in ANSCA; in the infant Jocist movement; in the Catholic media. Furthermore, the majority of them were married and had growing families. During the course of 1938 most of the ‘Old Guard’, as they had come to be called, had deliberately faded from the Campion scene, leaving the leadership in the hands of younger men. The final signal of their passing was the formation on 10 August 1939 of the ‘Campion Institute’, a kind of Campion Old Boys’ Association.47
The new generation of Campion leaders was lightweight compared with the old, and displayed little of the drive and imaginative vigour which bad originally carried the Society to prominence. The general deterioration began to impinge on the consciousness of members about the end of 1938 with Orders of the Day lamenting in November that ‘we have quite definitely lost our position of pre-eminence. The real enthusiasm for Catholic Action comes from other quarters’. During 1939 the Society’s traditional self-confidence was displaced by an introverted and self-critical spirit, coupled with a nostalgia for the days of glory which were now recognised to be in the past:
To have been in the Campion in those years is something of which any man might well be very proud and grateful.48
In April 1939 one member warned that the Society had ‘come to the parting of the ways’. It had to choose ‘nothing less than its part in the drama of Catholic Action, and its choice and what immediately follows will result in either greater glory or the grave’.49
The immediate future, however, brought the Society neither glory nor extinction, but merely a deepening langour. The old suburban study-groups, once nine in number, seem to have all disappeared; presumably being absorbed into the C.Y.M.S. Legion.50 The country Campion branches were occupied with the Catholic rural movement, or with other schemes associated with ANSCA, and now had few contacts with the Melbourne Campion; Even the Central groups had lost support, with there being six functioning in August 1939, where once there had been eight. Total metropolitan membership stood at about sixty.51
The Society now began to recede towards its natural home-ground, the University, and to see its role as simply that which it had set itself at the very beginning: namely, to provide a three-year course in Catholic thought and history for undergraduates. Even in this modest ambition, however, it met with frustrations, as it was no longer able to monopolise the field of Catholic intellectual activism at the University. Other Catholic discussion groups were operating on the campus during 1939; and in 1940 the Newman Society, after a brief internal struggle, decided to sponsor the University Catholic actionist movement.52 It variously absorbed or established ten study- groups,53 and in so doing, further constricted the Campion Society’s scope of activity.
ANSCA did its best to find the Campions a new role. It suggested that the Society drop ‘the purely “discussion-group outlook”,’ and that it re-build itself as a general Catholic Action movement for the young middle-class — for those young Catholic men ‘who are definitely not of the working class milieu and yet do not go on to the University’. The Campions were not enthusiastic, however; and ANSCA was forced to report that it was ‘doubtful whether they are able or willing to undertake the considerable organising work required’.54
With the outbreak of the Second World War the curtains were finally drawn on the Campion era of Victorian Catholic history. On that third day of September when Australia’s committal to the conflict was announced; the Society was at Xavier College in the midst of its first Spring School. Even in its hey-day it had rarely, if ever, mustered such a large and impressive assemblage of friends and supporters. Among the 193 participants were Archbishop Mannix; Father J. Meagher, Australian Provincial of the Jesuits; Mr. F. J. Corder, leading Catholic intellectual and activist of the pre-Campion era; Michael Chamberlin, ex-C.Y.M.S. General President and founder of the Victorian Knights of the Southern Cross; Fathers Hackett and Murtagh; Frank Maher and Bob Santamaria; and a substantial representation of the total nine- year membership of the Society. The theme of the School was ‘Property for the People’; and the weekend was counted an unqualified success.55
Thus the 1939 Spring School served as a fitting last bow for the Campion Society, bringing together in one final display of camaraderie a major proportion of those who had figured prominently in the drama of Victorian Catholicism in the nineteen-thirties. As the gathering broke up, the Red Decade was flickering its last, and fiercer fires were searing the skies of Europe. The young men dispersed and prepared to go to war; and the Campion Society faded into obscurity.
NOTES
1 Adv. 6 April 1939, p. 2.
2 See, for instance. Adv. 20 April 1939, editorial; c.f. Eric M. Andrews, Isolation and Appeasement, Chapter 8, passim.
3 C.W. 6 May 1939.
4 Address to 28 May Peace Rally, Adv. 1 June 1939, p. 2.
5 Ibid., p. 5.
6 Ibid., p. 3.
7 Ibid., p. 5.
8 Copy of cable, A.M. 29 May 1939, Mannix papers, M.A.A.
9 Adv. 16 February 1939, editorial.
10 Adv. 31 August 1939, p. 23.
11 Orders of the Day, June 1939, H/B.
12 See the resolutions of the Conference, Adv. 27 April 1939, p. 26; cf. draft resolutions (differ slightly in detail), 8 March 1939, ANSCA files.
13 Interview with Mr. Ken Mitchell, May 1970; Adv. 10 August 1939, p. 7.
14 See Adv. 31 August-14 September 1939, p. 23.
15 Ibid., 22 June, p. 7.
16 Ibid., 10 August 1939, p. 7.
17 For the aims of the early Catholic rural movement, see Adv. 22 June 1939, p. 7; Rural Life September 1939.
18 Back-copies of Rurai Life are held at the National Catholic Rural Movement head auarters, Hawthorn, Victoria.
19 Adv. 26 January 1933, p. 9.
20 Ibid., 26 May 1938, p. 20.
21 Ibid., 2 February 1939, p. 32.
22 Ibid.
23 See Official Handbook of the Legion of Mary, Concilium Legionis Mariae Melbourne, 1939, p. 22.
24 ANSCA Report, 31 December 1940, p. 14.
25 Ibid., pp. 14, 16-17.
26 Adv. 16 November 1939, p. 23.
27 K. T. Kelly (editor), Young Christian Workers, A.C.T.S. No. 882, 31 July 1939 pp. 4-5.
28 Interview with Mr. D. Nelson, 22 November 1971. Lombard eventually became the driving force behind the Australian Y.C.W.
29 Private memorandum of Kevin Kelly, 1 June 1938, quoted in memorandum, K. T. Kelly to author, 12 March 1972. The ‘ginger group’ (propaganda group) consisted of Kelly, Father James Murtagh, Eric Nilan, Tom Hogan, and Des Curran.
30 Ibid.
31 Adv. 9 February 1939, p. 7; 2 March, pp. 2-3.
32 See Adv. 17 December 1936-18 February 1937. The Campion correspondents signed themselves ‘Senex’, ‘Juvenis’, ‘Graduate’, ‘Zebra’, and ‘Prayer, Study, Action’. The C.Y.M.S. supporters were ‘Pro Deo et Patna’ (Michael Hynes), ‘Layman’, and ‘C.Y.M.’. Mr. Michael F. Hynes (Interview, 23 November 1971) recalls that, apart from himself, J. L. Cremean and Father Murtagh wrote in support of the C.Y.M.S.
33 The Clifton Hill joint discussion group certainly looked upon itself as a Campion group: Interview with Mr. D. Nelson, 22 November 1971.
34 Date given in 1937 C.Y.M.S. Annual Report, Catholic Young Man, January 1938 (a copy was among C.Y.M.S. papers, subsequently lost, which in 1967 were held in the Cathedral Hall, Fitzroy).
35 Adv. 24 March 1938, p. 7.
36 Ibid., 25 August 1938, p. 30. In 1938 Keon and J. L. Cremean led the C.Y.M.S. debating teams to a record string of successes at the Ballarat South Street Eisteddfod, the foremost debating and public speaking competition in the State: Adv. 27 October 1938, p. 31.
37 Ibid., 24 March 1938, p. 7. Legion membership is given as 250.
38 Ibid., 24 August 1939, p. 23, gives 24 Melbourne Legion groups and 200 members.
39 ANSCA or a Campion associate apparently wrote an article very favourable to the Legion, ‘Catholic Action Formation in the C.Y.M.S.’, in the Adv. 24 March 1938, p. 7.
40 See Adv. 3 February 1938, p. 23; 28 July, p. 30; 11 August, p. 30; 6 October, p. 30.
41 ANSCA Report, 31 December 1940, p. 10.
42 Interview with Mr. D. S. Sherriff, 26 November 1971.
43 ANSCA Report, 31 December 1940, p. 10.
44 Dr. Mannix’s first public appearance after his arrival in Australia, the day following his landing, was at the C.Y.M.S. Annual Picnic at Mentone. He reputedly never missed a C.Y.M.S. Annual Communion Breakfast unless he was away from Melbourne.
45 See ANSCA Report, 31 December 1940, pp. 8-9.
46 Interview with Mr. D. S. Sherriff, 26 November 1971.
47 Adv. 17 August 1939, p. 30.
48 John Moloney, The First Division’, Orders of the Day, 20 October 1939, H/B.
49 ‘E.S.M.’ (E. S. Madden), ‘Campion at the Crossroads’, Orders of the Day, 28 April 1939, H/B.
50 Adv. 24 August 1939, p. 23. A year previously the Society was claiming twelve Melbourne groups (Central and suburban) and 120-150 members: Adv. 25 Aug. 1938, p. 5.
51 Ibid., 24 August 1939, p. 23.
52 The Newman traditionalists wanted the Society to remain an essentially social body; the Catholic Action enthusiasts wished it to be involved in Catholic Action: Interview with Mrs. Loretta Kerley (nee Archer), 14 November 1971 (Loretta Archer was leader of the Girls’ Catholic Action Group at the University in 1939: see Adv. 10 August 1939, p. 7).
53 ANSCA Report, 31 December 1940, p. 13.
54 Ibid., p. 12.
55 Adv. 7 September 1939, p. 5.