Now comes Daniel Mannix: Priest and Patriot (Dove Communications, $29.95, 278 pp) by Michael Gilchrist. It is a light, chatty book of anecdotes rather than analysis. Its tone is set by the profusion of illustrations of Mannix – sixty-seven photographs or cartoons of him. Such abundance suggests a fan club production or the mindless reverence of one of those Mickey Mouse cults.

Yet if the archbishop is a hero to his latest biographer, he is nevertheless not portrayed as an unblemished human type. Mannix was one of the most idolised public speakers Australia has known. Throughout his life he could draw thousands upon thousands of people to hear his wit and wisdom. It is an everyday fact that successful public speakers are frequently coarsened by their own success. Gilchrist makes it clear that this happened to Mannix. The flattering laughter of obsequious audiences led him on and on, until he heard himself saying things he later regretted. Vulgarity was the price the Maynooth scholar paid for being a leader of the people.

Having established that, Gilchrist moves on to other things. Yet it is precisely here that Mannix challenges our understanding. The history of Australian Catholicism – and hence the history of Australia – will never be understood until one gets down to the reasons why Mannix was necessary to the Irish Australians. He was not one of those popular leaders, like O’Connell, who create new ways for the people to act. Rather, he was a leader who seized on and spoke out the people’s half-understood longings. He was the public face and insistent voice of a people who, until then, had been submerged and disregarded. With Mannix as their spokesman, no one could ever again simply ignore them.

Perhaps I am being unjust to Gilchrist in criticising him for writing his book in his own way. To be fair, he isolates and identifies the principal challenge which Mannix confronted. It is contained in a speech by Herbert Robinson Brookes, the financier who set up an anti-Catholic secret army in 1918:

The public must teach that man of foreign extraction, that man who hated the very nake [sic] of England, that the patience and long-suffering of this community had been tried too long. Retribution must follow him and his supporters and their name must pass out of Australia.

In 1923, the Minister for Defence, Mr Bowden, was even more pointed:

This was a Protestant country and it was their pride that they had absolute liberty of conscience under the Union Jack. If any man thought that the flag was not good enough for him, let him get out.

What people like Brookes and Bowden were saying and what Catholics were denying, was that Australia was essentially a British community, a part of the British Empire without a destiny of its own apart from England. Any move to develop an Australian national sentiment or to put Australia before the Empire was resisted as treasonable. Such Britishness was given religious sanctions by its close association with Protestantism, the religion of the British Crown. In these years Protestantism was an expression of British imperialism.

The reality of this made suggestions for shared religious services questions of political commitment. Mannix was rigid in his opposition. In part, this came from his refusal to condone the hegemonial view of papers like the Argus and people like Brookes, that the way to be a loyal Australian was to be a British Protestant.

That is not the whole story, of course. Mannix was typically episcopal in wanting to keep tight control over his people by isolating them from alien styles of thought. He encouraged initiative but he could also be quite authoritarian. Gilchrist tells (for the first time, so far as I know) the story of the crushing of Father Mangan. Mangan was an independent priest who queried the archbishop’s financial dealings. In reply, Mannix addressed the priests of the diocese for eighty-five minutes, raking Mangan with what Gilchrist calls ‘sustained, scathing oratory’. Reading Gilchrist’s account, it is impossible not to feel sympathy for the hapless Mangan, nor to think that Mannix was using his episcopal advantages in debate quite unfairly. Gilchrist also manages to convey in his narrative something of the clerical sycophancy that cocooned the archbishop and encouraged his prelatical style.

The Demon of Discord by Margaret M. Pawsey

MUP, $19.95, 183 pp

Another new book compasses the same sort of questions. Margaret M. Pawsey’s The Demon of Discord (MUP, $19.95, 183 pp) is a work of rigorous and exemplary scholarship that is also a joy to read. It deals with the Victorian Catholic community in the middle years of the last century. Curiously. she finds within that community figures just like Father Mangan 100 years later and a bishop (Goold) who would crush as in a nutcracker anyone so unwise as to question his financial administration, however muddled and wasteful it might now seem to have been. There is no record of the Apostles as good businessmen; but that is not a popular thing to say to their successors.

If they are not famous businessmen, the Australian Catholic bishops are known as school builders. The school system they put together a century ago survives robustly today. That is why there are so many centennial histories of schools and religious orders currently in circulation. Too many of these are quite uncritical (sometimes, one suspects, mendacious), unlovely productions of the local newspaper’s press. Even if you can find out how to obtain them, they are a penance to read, so that one is frequently reminded of Lord Acton’s dictum that the man who cannot endure boredom lacks the vocation to be either an historian or a fisherman.

St. Bede’s College and its McCristal Origins 1896–1982 by Leo Gamble

St. Bede’s College, 417 pp

Leo Gamble’s book on St. Bede’s College, Mentone (Vic.) (St. Bede’s College and its McCristal Origins 1896–1982, St. Bede’s College, 417 pp) is a very large, heavily illustrated history of this De La Salle Brothers school, written by a former dux of the school, now a master there. One was prepared for boredom; but one was wrong. This is an intelligent school history, written with grace and judgment and with what you might call adult love. Difficulties are faced, failures admitted, and even personal problems of some of the staff taken out of their cupboards and aired. The achievement of the school is thus honestly assessed; and somehow the honesty of its telling adds to its stature.