The eighteen months which followed the conclusion of Melbourne’s Eucharistic Congress saw the world declining further into disorder. This was the time of the resumption of German rearmament; of the reoccupation of the Rhineland; of the Italian invasion of Abyssinia. The League of Nations, the hope of so many for permanent world stability, was shown to be impotent; and once again mankind was forced to recognise the possibility that a world war might break out. It was the Abyssinian affair, above all, which dragged Europe to the brink of armed conflict.
Mussolini launched his invasion of Abyssinia in October 1935, being impelled by no apparent motives other than a desire for empire and for military glory. His action, which had been threatening for some time, appeared likely to provoke military counter-measures from Britain, which was supported by France and Russia; and it moved the League of Nations to call for an international trade boycott against Italy. No armed reprisals eventuated, however, and the League sanctions proved ineffective. The aggressors emerged triumphant.
The Australian Catholic weeklies, in common with the press everywhere, evinced alarm at the worsening international situation. On the Abyssinian question, however, an unexpected stance was taken by the Melbourne Catholic papers. It seems unlikely that this reflected any significant division within the Catholic community; but it did indicate the extent to which Denys Jackson’s views on foreign affairs had become paramount in the Victorian Catholic media.
Of those Australian Catholics who took any interest in the Abyssinian issue, the great majority in all likelihood agreed with Archbishop Mannix, and with P. S. Cleary in Sydney. Both these spokesmen disapproved of the Italian action; both were nevertheless cynical of the motives of the opposing Great Power block; and both were adamant that Australia should not become militarily involved. Cleary, in the Catholic Press, referred to Abyssinia as ‘the last free country in Northeast Africa’,’ and portrayed it as the unwitting victim of ‘the immoral, imperialistic, unscrupulous politics of three European bandit nations’.1 He advocated full Australian support for the League of Nations trade boycott.3 Dr. Mannix was less outspoken, but he also believed that the Italians were unjustified in making war ‘on the unfortunate Ethiopians’. However, he maintained that part of the blame lay with the Treaty of Versailles, which had ‘left Italy with no possibility of expansion of territory . . .
What has happened in the case of Italy will, unless I am a false prophet, happen before long with Germany as well.4
The attitude of the Advocate at first differed only marginally from that of Archbishop Mannix. In July, when the conflict was simmering, it maintained that there was ‘little to be said in defense of Mussolini’s present attitude’. However it referred unflatteringly to Abyssinia as a ‘half-savage empire, which is the chief centre of the slave-trade in the world to-day5; and it insisted that Australia had enough to do ‘without accepting the responsibility for the repression of Fascist tyrannies at the other side of the world’.’ The turn of phrase in this editorial suggests that it was written by Denys Jackson, although he now shared the leader-writing with P. I. O’Leary, who at the beginning of 1935 had replaced him on the paper’s full-time staff.4
When full-scale warfare broke out, however, Jackson became unashamed- ly pro-Italian, and his aversion to Fascism was subordinated to his disgust at the state of affairs prevailing in Abyssinia. In his editorials and ‘Sulla’ articles alike, the Abyssinians were dismissed as ‘slave-raiding barbarians’,7 unworthy of sympathy; the British and French were condemned as imperialistic hypocrites, concerned only to safeguard their Suez Canal trade artery; and the Soviet Union’s show of moral indignation was treated with scorn. The Italians, on the other hand, were presented as being fully justified in retaliating so decisively against Abyssinian ‘provocations’. Indeed, Jackson averred, Italy was doing civilisation a service.
Abyssinia is unlikely to become civilised except with the help of Europe; and, among European peoples, it is to Italy that the task of helping her should fall, in virtue of her colonial and economic needs?
The same point of view obtained in the second Victorian Catholic weekly, the Tribune, of which Jackson had been made editor at the beginning of the year.* With regard to the Catholic Hour, however, representations by the Lyons government resulted in Jackson’s being instructed not to broadcast in opposition to Australia’s official policy, which was one of support for the League of Nations.1*
In the Australian context, the Abyssinian policies of the Melbourne Advocate and Tribune were virtually unique. While major differences of opinion existed within the community on the degree to which Australia should become involved in the conflict, in no significant sector was support given to the Italian action.” The fact that Jackson had been allowed to steer so individual a course was an indication of the extent to which the Advocate in particular had become reliant on his expertise in European affairs. This dependence was the price the paper had to pay for its abandonment of its pre-Depression insularity.
Within the Campion Society the Abyssinian War was a matter of little concern. However, there were two who did share Jackson’s views, in Valentino Adami and Bob Santamaria, the two members of Italian parentage. When the conflict erupted, Adami, the older, and, in Campion terms, the senior of the two, persuaded the Council to allow him to call a special meeting ‘so that all members might learn the true facts of the Italo- Abyssinian dispute’.’2 His address to this meeting was predictably pro-Italian
– ‘a great white-washing epic’, as it was later humorously described” Santamaria did not speak, publicly on the question; however, as editor ot the Campion Society’s internal news-sheet, he could not resist making one isolated snipe at the propagators of the anti-ltalian case; and he recommended that readers follow Jackson’s writings on the issue in the Advocate and the Tribune.’4
The effect of growing world insecurity on Victorian Catholicism was, as it had been during the previous six years, to increase popular reliance on the Church as the one great source of stability remaining on earth. In the Advocate’s final editorial for 1935! ‘What of the Night?’, the ‘tremendous vitality displayed by the Catholic Church’ was juxtaposed with the spectre of a dispirited world ‘whose splendid edifices are toppling on their foundations of sand’.15 As Catholic self-assurance continued to gain strength, so too did the Catholic actionist movement.
Predictably, the most notable beneficiaries of the tendency towards Catholic consolidation were the Campion Society and the C.Y.M.S. The latter Society, although remaining comparatively stable in numbers, continued to assimilate the new intellectual perspectives which had been introduced to it by the Campions. This was apparent in the sustained co-operation between the two bodies.
The Catholic Young Man, copies of which were distributed monthly to every C.Y.M.S. man in the State, featured an average of two Campion articles per issue throughout 1935. These were almost all historical in character, covering, among other topics, the Jesuits, Christopher Dawson, Erasmus, Galileo, the Inquisition, and the Reformation. The resignation of Michael Hynes as editor and his replacement in March by Francis J. Arkwright did not result in any perceptible change in editorial policy. In size the magazine varied between forty and fifty pages.”
The numerical strength of the metropolitan C.Y.M.S. stood at 2,050 in November 1935, an increase of 185 on the previous year.” The study- groups which it conducted jointly with the Campion Society apparently increased also: the Campions had nine affiliated suburban groups operating by the end of the year, most of which would have been directly or indirectly linked with C.Y.M.S. branches. They existed in the suburbs of Brunswick, West Brunswick, Camberwell, Clifton Hill, Glenhuntly, Kew, Malvern, North Essendon, and Parkville.”
In the country areas the Young Men’s Society continued to prosper. One of its highlights was the three-day Femvale Retreat conducted annually by the North-East Catholic Debating and Sports Association at a site near Tallangatta. The first Fernvale Retreat, held in the New Year of 1934 attracted sixty-five participants from C.Y.M.S. branches of North-East Victoria and Catholic Young Men’s Clubs from adjoining areas of New South Wales. The second, in January of 1935, was attended by 220; and for the remainder of the decade the annual attendance varied between 200 and 250. ”
The Campion Society re-organised itself at the beginning of 1935 placing the majority of its established members in two new groups, and putting the new recruits in two others. The most senior members, who previously had been concentrated in the First Central Group, were now distributed fairly evenly among the four, which were known as the Thomas More, Thomas Aquinas, Thomas a’Beckett, and Frassati groups. A small Philosophy Group of three, formed the previous year, was retained. Nineteen new members entered during 1935; but as a similar number either became inactive or transferred to the suburban study-groups, total membership remained at about seventy.20 One welcome source of membership loss was the religious life, which at the beginning of the year made its first exactions on the Society: John Heffey entered Corpus Christi College, Wiembee; John McCristal and John Vaudry began training with the Franciscans; and Percy Salmon entered the Christian Brothers’ novitiate.”
The external work of the Campion Society continued to expand rapidly. On 24 January 1935 a film review section written by Campion men made its first appearance in the Advocate. Talks had to be given on the Catholic Hour, articles prepared for the Catholic Young Man, and numerous lectures organised for Communion Breakfasts, C.Y.M.S. gatherings, sodality meetings, and other Catholic functions. Monthly addresses were delivered at Father Murtagh’s parish of North Essendon; and in June a Triduum at East Brunswick, organised by the Campion Society in co-operation with Father J. H. Cleary and the local Catholic Men’s Cub, drew audiences of ‘at least two hundred on each night’. Gerard Heffey alone gave nearly thirty lectures oyer a six-month period.22 The result was that, whereas a year before Maher had been seeking new activities with which to occupy members,23 by the end of 1935 he had to admit that it was now ‘not possible to fulfill all the requests to give lectures’. He hoped for the establishment of an official national Catholic Action bureau to help reduce the Society’s work-load.34
In north-eastern Victoria the Wangaratta Campion Society embarked on a new venture late in 1935 when it began posting a monthly circular, Epistles and Postscripts, to Catholic State school teachers. The monthly circulation, beginning at fifty, was eventually to pass the thousand mark – although only a small proportion of the recipients were paying subscribers.2* The authors were Ted Hennessy, Alt Gerrard, and Eileen Ryan, all State primary school teachers stationed in the district. The periodical was concerned mainly with Catholic Action, the world situation, the need to exert a Christian influence in secular schools, and anti-Christian or anti-Catholic attitudes alleged to be evident in some State primary school text books.34
Among the clergy and religious the prestige of the Campion Society continued to grow, with notable allies being Fathers Murtagh, James Cleary, Bernard O’Connor, O’Sullivan, Gleeson, Considine, Conquest, Sylvester O’Brien, OFM. Dr. Beovich, Brother Jerome of De La Salle, Malvern, and, of course Father Hackett23 The Campion Council had become increasingly conscious of the value of close co-operation with the clergy, and had resolved that henceforth new suburban groups would be established ‘only where a priest, preferably a young priest, agrees to look after them and to assist them in their discussions’.2*
The Corpus Christi College students were addressed during the year on the work of the Campion Society and the Catholic Evidence Guild.” One social studies group at the College, formed the previous year among a half-dozen second-year students, remodelled itself early in 1935 along Campion lines, adopting a study-programme with a more historical/cultural and less philosophical emphasis than previously. The inspiration for this change had come from John Heffey, whose accounts of his year in the Campion — related ‘mostly in an ecstatic strain’ — and of the Society’s close ties with the younger clergy, fired the enthusiasm of many of his fellow- seminarians.30 Thus the Campion idealism consolidated its hold on the imaginations of the future diocesan clergy of Victoria.
Among the schools also the Campion influence expanded. In May 1935 the Society’s representatives met in conference with the principals of the Catholic boys’ secondary schools, and obtained their assurances of full support. As a result, ‘at least a dozen lads who left school during the year’ applied for Campion membership.3′ Furthermore, at the beginning of the year the Society’s closest clerical associate, Father Hackett, was appointed Rector of Xavier College. In July he set in motion a kind of College Campion group in the Bellarmine Society, a voluntary association of senior pupils which held monthly meetings on Campion lines, often addressed by Campion men. The Bellarmine Society was to function successfully throughout the decade, and was to be the means by which many Xavier school-leavers were channelled into the Campion Society.32
A further indication of the rapport which existed between the outlook of the Campion Society and that prevailing in the Victorian Catholic boys’ secondary schools can be found in the schools’ Annuals of the time. In the editorials, articles, and principals’ Annual Reports for 1935 there is evident a strong sense of world disorder, and a conviction that the Church alone could save civilisation. Father Hackett’s Annual Report for Xavier College spoke of men’s minds being ‘partly unhinged’, and of the forces of evil, impiety and irreligion growing ever ‘more blatant and brazen’. An article on the Campion Society in the Annual of St. Kevin’s College pointed to the Church as ‘the only institution which upholds the dignity of the human reason’, and as the only repository of the true values of civilisation. The editorial in the Annual of St. Patrick’s College, East Melbourne, stated that ‘society has never been perhaps in a state of greater chaos’; and it presented the Pope as the ‘one and only teacher who can and does show the nations the path along which they must go’. The St. Patrick’s College, Ballarat, Annual Report asserted that the ‘coming struggle’ was between ‘Catholicism and the forces of Anti-Christian political and social systems’. It urged all Catholic school-leavers, as a matter of urgency, to join ‘such associations as the Campion Society’.33
The extent to which this view of the world had been inspired by the Campion Society, and by other intellectual influences peculiar to Victorian Catholicism, can be gauged by comparing these Annuals wjth those for the same year from a comparable selection of Sydney Catholic boys’ schools. A different picture altogether emerges, being equally evident in the magazines and Annual Reports of Lewisham Christian Brothers’ College; Waverley C.B.C.; St. Ignatius’ College, Riverview (Jesuit); St. Aloysius’ College, Milson’s Point (Jesuit); and St. Joseph’s College, Hunters Hill (Marist Brothers). No interest in world affairs, no consciousness of ideological movements, no concern for Catholic Action is evident. The Sydney schools, it appears, conceived of their roles in a purely parochial context, much as had the Victorian schools during the ’twenties. Only in the Annual of Lewisham was Catholic Action so much as mentioned, and then it was misconstrued, Archbishop Kelly-wise, as involving simply ‘personal sanctification by prayer, the reception of the Sacraments, and the practice of Christian Virtue’.” It is obvious that the Sydney Catholic Colleges had not been exposed to the intellectual influences which had brought their Victorian counterparts to see themselves as staging-posts in a world-wide Catholic resurgence to save Western civilisation.
The steady expansion of the Victorian Campion Society resulted in the foundation in 1935 of an infra-Society news-sheet, Orders of the Day. Appearing for the first time on 13 August, the day of the Annual General Meeting, it had as its first editor the nineteen-year-old B. A. Santamaria. It was written in a forceful and impetuous style, and consisted mainly of snippets from overseas Catholic writers, oddments of news, and exhortations to the Campions to surge on to greater things. The inaugural issue announced that the Society had embarked on a Three-Year Plan to obtain three major objectives:—
1. To co-ordinate Catholic Action throughout the Commonwealth.
2. To hammer Catholicism into an impenetrable fortress on which heresy will shatter itself.
3. To mould the one and a half million Catholics of Australia into an organic unity ready to resume the Catholic Offensive.®
Orders of the Day presaged another more ambitious literary venture which was to result in a dramatic extension of the Campion Society’s influence. This was the Catholic Worker.
Talk of founding an Australian Catholic Worker had been in the air fbr some time before any positive moves were made to bring such a publication into being. The inspiration for the paper had come from the British and Canadian Catholic Workers, and more particularly from the American Catholic Worker, a radical and idealistic journal which had been launched in 1933 by a group of New York social reformers. By October 1934 Brian Harkin was handing out copies of this paper at the Catholic Evidence Guild’s pitch on the Yarra Bank,3* and was simultaneously sounding out opinion within the Campion Society on the possibility of founding a local equivalent.37
Nothing was done, however, until early in 1935, when Bartholomew Augustine (Bob) Santamaria, one of the most promising of the younger Campion activists, announced that he intended to bring into being an Australian Catholic’ Worker.3* Santamaria was the Australian-born son of an Italian immigrant family which had established a small grocery business in the Melbourne working-class suburb of West Brunswick. Educated at the North Melbourne Christian Brothers’ and at St. Kevin’s College, he had been Dux and School Captain of St. Kevin’s in 1931, and in 1932 had proceeded on an Exhibition to Melbourne University where he had embarked on an Arts/ Law course.
Although a member of the University branch of the Campion Society from the beginning of his undergraduate career, Santamaria had done little to distinguish himself in extra-curricular activities until 1934, when he began to play a prominent part in the Debating Society. During the same year he became one of the founders of the University Radical Club, essentially a non-ideological splinter group which had broken away from the Marxist-dominated Labour Club.39 Early in 1935 he made his first noteworthy contribution to the development of the Campion Society when he founded an affiliated study-group in his home suburb of West Brunswick* Later that year, as has already been mentioned, he was appointed foundation editor of Orders of the Day.
When it became apparent that Santamaria possessed both the determination and the capacity to carry through his resolution to launch a Catholic working people’s paper, a Provisional Committee of nine, composed predominantly of senior Campion men, was formed to oversee the enterprise.4′
The name initially chosen for the proposed paper was Hie Front, but this was later abandoned in favour of Catholic Worker.42 It was intended to serve as a bridge between the Catholic intellectuals and the mass of the people; and to be a means of showing how Catholic social principles applied to Australian problems. The Provisional Committee, in a circular to selected priests, promoted it as a potentially effective way of ‘combating anti-christian propaganda among the masses of Australians . . .
The present drift from the Church is becoming increasingly serious and we feel that unless stern measures are taken to fight Communism on its own ground—the popular press—the ground lost may become irretrievable.43
When preparations for the paper were well under way, Santamaria had a long and congenial audience with the Archbishop – the first time the two had met. Dr. Mannix steered the conversation around a variety of topics, everything it seemed except the Catholic Worker, and then concluded the session by off-handedly giving the enterprise his blessing: ‘You don’t need any permission from me; you’re free to start a newspaper any time you want to’.44
A Constitution was prepared, putting control of the paper into the hands of a Council of twenty, and below that of a smaller Central Committee The Worker was not to be an official Catholic publication, although a chaplain would be appointed on an honorary basis to ensure that it was free of moral and doctrinal error. It was to have no formal links with the Campion Society.
The first issue of the Australian Catholic Worker, written almost entirely by Bob Santamaria personally,45 appeared in the porches of Catholic churches throughout Victoria in the early morning of Sunday 2 February 1936. Its front page bore the large headline, ‘WE FIGHT*, and beneath it a dramatic
, f persecutions raging against the Church in Russia, Germany, Merico°China and Northern Ireland. Militancy, it proclaimed, was the need °f the °ur- we jjave been fighting for two thousand years. Victory has always
L18 a ‘ it will be ours again, for our leader is Christ the King, our standard is
been ours, w the Cross.
Consecutive articles rang with the same note of urgency. The Catholic was becoming increasingly isolated — he lived among men ‘who believe Birth-Control is a boon, Communism a possibility, sterilization and race suicide as advantages, and in materialism as an ultimate standard’. Everywhere the Eternal Faith was ‘at war with the new paganism’, and disaster could only be averted if every Catholic rose to the challenge of the times:
The day of the Sunday-morning Catholic is over. The man who goes to Mass because it is a mortal sin if he doesn’t; the man who avoids religious discussion because it is bad taste . . . this man is hardly fit to be called a Catholic. He belongs to the nineteenth century; we are of the twentieth.
On more topical matters the paper took a similarly radical stance. It supported the demands of striking seamen for better wages; and it called on the Government to ‘Gaol Sweat-Shop Owners’. At the same time it damned the Communist Party for inciting hopeless strikes simply to disrupt industry; and it vigorously denounced the Communist ‘Peace Front’ organisations. With regard to the international dispute over Abyssinia, it adopted a neutral position. It noted that the Italian Hierachy supported the Italian cause, whereas the American Catholic Worker opposed it. Australian Catholics, it stated, were free to make up their own minds on the issue.
The paper sold at one penny per copy, and within a few hours the first edition of one thousand was completely sold out. To the amazement of all concerned its sales had grown to twenty thousand by May, and to twenty-seven thousand by August.44 In Sydney, where Desmond O’Connor and the local Campions acted as vendors, five thousand copies per issue were being sold by mid-year.47 The Sydney ‘Catholic Speakers’ also distributed the Worker from its pitches; however, the Speakers received confidential instructions from Archbishop Kelly to have each issue censored, ‘at least informally’, by ‘Dr. Rumble or any of the Sacred Heart Fathers whom he might name’.4*
The Catholic Worker preached the gospel of Quadragesimo Anno and of Belloc, in a style popularised by Peter Maurin and Dorothy Day in the American Catholic Worker. It presented Capitalism and Communism as the main enemies of civilisation, equating the two as ‘illegitimate offspring of the same diseased materialism’.4* To Capitalism it granted the ‘exalted position of Public Enemy No. 1’, calling it ‘a system which is intrinsically more evil than Communism’.” It spoke of the family as the basic buildingblock of society, advocated child endowment and the ‘family wage’, and scorned the popular ethic which ‘identified love with lust’” and was ‘actually killing off a nation’ through the practice of birth control’.” It spoke out forcefully on questions of unemployment, working conditions, wages and housing; and it hoped, overall, to help bring into being a new economic order of the ‘Distributist’ kind advocated by Belloc, where ‘all owners are workers and all workers are owners’.53 It was delighted to be able to print in its issue of June 1936 a congratulatory letter which it had received from Belloc.
Most of the writing for the Catholic Worker was done by Bob Santamaria himself, on an unpaid part-time basis. However, certain frictions and personality conflicts developed within the Central Committee, the chief source of contention being the manner of Santamaria’s implementation of Committee policy decisions. The Council and Committee in effect represented the Campion ‘establishment’, of which Santamaria was no more than a fringe member, and the dominant figure on both boards was Kevin Kelly. Finally, on 22 October 1937, pursuant on a resolution put by Kelly, the Council abolished the editorship, and instituted in its place an Editorial Board of three – Santamaria, Gerard Heffey and Frank Keating.54 Shortly afterwards Santamaria relinquished this position also, and ceased to attend Committee meetings. The nominal reason for his doing so was his assumption of the Assistant Directorship of the National Secretariat of Catholic Action. It was held that the welfare of the Secretariat would best be served if its officers avoided commitments which could involve them in political controversy.
Assessed in terms of its original aims, the Catholic Worker was perhaps not as successful as its sales figures might suggest. It had been founded as a means of projecting Catholic social principles and the world-view of the Campion Society onto the existing Australian situation; however, much of the original vision appears to have been lost in the transposition. The Campion emphasised the cultural role of Christianity; the; Worker gave no attention to culture, Australian or general. The Campion denied the validity of the Marxist class-war thesis; so did the Worker, yet it used the language of the class war. The Papal social encyclicals called for social harmony and conciliation; the Worker was belligerent and uncompromising. Belloc tried to envisage fully Christian societies, and idealised rural life; the Worker fixed its attentions on immediate issues, and was almost entirely urban in its preoccupations. The American Catholic Worker sponsored extensive charitable works; the Australian Worker sponsored none. Thus however much it aspired to be an agent of positive social reconstruction, the Worker in practice was little more than an organ of social protest.55
The degree in which the Catholic Worker fell short of the Campion Society’s idealism was perhaps the degree in which that idealism was recognised to be impracticable. The type of historical romanticism which served well to fire the imaginations of young well-educated Catholics, and to engender a sense of Catholic social potency, was difficult to convert into realistic solutions to immediate problems. The Worker, recognising this, veered away from the mainstream Campion tradition in order to maintain its appeal among the ordinary Catholic working people of Australia.
Ironically, the Catholic Worker was not dissimilar in tone to established Labour organs such as the Victorian Labour Calk It was concerned almost solely with the material conditions of life; it was amateurish and simplistic in its economic analyses; and it sustained a constant note “ral outrage and militant protest against prevailing social evils. Like Australia: A Review of the Month of twenty years before, its Catholic social idealism was cut and moulded to accord with established Australian traditions of social radicalism. This compromise with the familiar might help to explain its popularity, which by any standards was extraordinary. By the end of 1938 it had ‘the best circulation in proportion to Catholic population of any paper in the English-speaking Catholic world’.* Even after that its sales continued to rise, until in 1940 they peaked at 55,000 per month.”
The Catholic Worker was bom into a Catholic milieu which was charged with apprehension, and the events of the months which followed its foundation did nothing to dampen the prevailing sense of alarm. In April 1936 the paper denounced one of the local newspapers, the Star, for welcoming the accession to power in Spain of the left-wing coalition of Manuel Azana. This man, it recalled, during his previous stay in office expelled the Jesuits and other monastic orders, broke off diplomatic relations with the Vatican, secularised the schools and attempted to introduce a system of atheistic education into Spain.
A month later, in highlighting an article in the Melbourne Argus which allegedly had spoken approvingly of the Bolshevik persecution of the Russian Orthodox Church, the Worker predicted that When it comes to a fight between Communism and Catholicism, the Argus and the others will align themselves with the enemy.
Within a few months the writers of the Catholic Worker were to feel that this prophecy was being alarmingly vindicated when the Spanish Civil War burst upon the world, and Australian public opinion began to polarise on the issue.
NOTES
1 C.P. 18 July 1935, editorial.
2 Ibid., 29 August 1935, editorial.
3 Ibid., 3 October 1935, editorial.
4 Adv. 17 October 1935, p. 12.
5 Ibid., 11 July 1935, editorial.
6 The reasons for Jackson’s being replaced appear to have been twofold: P. I. O’Leary was back to good health; and Father Moynihan was unhappy with the use Jackson was making of the leader-articles to promote his personal philosophy. Moynihan used as an excuse to dismiss Jackson his having stopped the presses to write a glowing obituary comment on Cardinal Bourne of Westminster (died 1 January 1935), who, Moynihan recalled, had been an outspoken public critic of Dr. Mannix during the years of the Conscription-Irish Rebellion controversies: Interview with Mr. D. G. M. Jackson, May, 1967.
7 Adv. 26 September 1935, editorial.
8 Ibid., 3 October 1935, ‘Sulla’.
9 Archbishop Mannix had arranged for Jackson to be given this position after Kevin Kelly had visited him (Mannix), had raised the matter of Jackson’s dismissal from the full-time staff of the Advocate, and had pointed out ‘that Jackson had given up a good position in the Victorian Education Department in order to take on ‘The Advocate” job.’ Memorandum, K. T. Kelly to author, 30 August 1973; endorsed by Mr. D. G. M. Jackson, telephone conversation with author, February 1974.
10 Interview with Mr. D. G. M. Jackson, May 1967; cf. Eric M. Andrews, Isolation and Appeasement, p. 24.
11 Eric M. Andrews, op. cit., Chapters 1 and 2, passim.
12 Council’s Report, Q.M., c. November 1935, H/B.
13 Comment at meeting with Mr. Gerard Heffey, Judge Arthur Adams, and Mr. Justice McInerney, February 1967.
14 Orders of the Day, October 1935, Box 6, Hackett papers, Jesuit Archives, Hawthorn, Victoria.
15 Adv. 26 December 1935, editorial.
16 Copies of the Catholic Young Man to August 1935 are held in M.A.A.
17 1935 C.Y.M.S. Annual Report, Catholic Young Man, December 1935. A copy of this issue was among papers held in the Cathedral Hall, Brunswick, Victoria, in 1967, but subsequently lost.
18 Council’s Report, Q.M., c. November 1935, H/B.
19 Souvenir pamphlets of Fernvale Retreats of 1933, 1934 and 1936, held by Mr. A D. Seaton, Albury; cf. Adv. 11 January 1934, p. 11; 7 February 1935, p. 9; 6 February 1939, p. 25.
20 A 1935 membership list, H/B, gives 68 names, but neglects to include at least two who were then active in the Society.
21 Council’s Report, Q.M., 6 March 1935, H/B. Vaudry and Salmon were apparently in affiliated suburban groups, as their names do not appear in-any Central group membership lists.
22 Council’s Report, Q.M., c. November 1935, H/B.
23 See minutes, Q.M., 16 October 1934, Council minute-book, H/B.
24 Council’s Report, Q.M., c. November 1935, H/B.
25 Interview with Mr. A. L. Gerrard, 22 November 1971.
26 See Epistles and Postscripts, February 1936 (No. 4) to December 1936 (No. 14), Box 6, Hackett papers, Jesuit Archives. The September 1936 (No. 11) issue is missing
27 Council’s Report, Q.M., c. November 1935, H/B.
28 Ibid.
29 Ibid.
30 See letter, Justin McCarthy (a member of the group) to Gerard Heffey, 24 April 1935, H/B.
31 Council’s Report, Q.M., c. November 1935, H/B.
32 See Bellarmine Society reports and membership lists in Xavier College Annuals, 1935 ff. (copies held at the College).
33 See 1935 Annuals held at the respective Colleges; Annuals of St. Patrick’s College, East Melbourne, are in the Latrobe Library.
34 1935 Annual of Lewisham C.B.C., p. 17 (report of an address given at a Retreat). For other incidental references to Catholic Action, see pp. 27, 43. Annuals held at the College.
35 Orders of the Day No. 1, 13 August 1935, Box 6, Hackett papers, Jesuit Archives.
36 See C.E.G. minute-book, M.A.A., entry for 28 October 1934, for the first record of American Catholic Workers being distributed.
37 Paul McGuire to Kevin Anderson, 15 November 1934, Newman Convention box, M.A.A., tells that Harkin ‘seems enthusiastic for a Catholic paper along the lines of American Catholic Worker.’
38 Kevin Kelly is sure that the enterprise began with a definite statement of intent by Bob Santamaria.
39 Farrago 14 June 1934.
40 Council’s Report, Q.M., 6 March 1935, H/B.
41 The members were: Santamaria (‘Editor Elect’), Kelly, Maher, Harkin, Stan and Leo Ingewersen, John Moloney, Charles Bradley, and Virgil Cain. The last two were not Campion members, but were University men. See circular, The Front, 30 May 1935, Box 6, Hackett papers, Jesuit Archives.
42 Ibid.; cf. Orders of the Day No. 3, c. November 1935, Box 6, Hackett papers, Jesuit Archives.
43 Circular, The Front, 30 May 1935.
44 Interview with Mr. B. A. Santamaria, February 1967.
45 Ibid.
46 Catholic Worker 2 May 1936; Orders of the Day, August 193t>, Box 6, Hackett papers, Jesuit Archives.
47 C.W. 2 May 1936.
48 Edmund O’Donnell, Secretary to Archbishop Kelly, to Peter Gallagher, Master of the Catholic Speakers, 14 February 1936, Box ‘Evidence’. S.A.A.
49 C.W. 2 February 1936.
50 Ibid., 29 February 1936.
51 Ibid., 2 February 1936.
53 Ibid., 6 June, 1936.
54 Memorandum, ,K. T. Kelly to author, 30 August 1973. Kelly actually put his motion ata meeting on 1 October, and was not present at the 22 October meeting.
55 Niall Brennan, who became a member of the Catholic Worker committee in the late 1930s while an undergraduate, and whose association with the paper continued intermittently until after the 1955 Labor ‘Split’, has some caustic comments on the inner workings of the Committee in his autobiography, A Hoax Called Jones (Sheed & Ward, London, 1962), pp. 75-6.
56 Paul McGuire in The Sign (Passionist monthly, U.S.A.), December 1938, cited Adv.
17 CW. February 1941, cited in Design for Democrats, by ‘25 Men’, The Catholic Worker’, Melbourne, 1944.