By Andrew Hamilton
It is axiomatic that you cannot tell a book by its cover. But in the case of Mannix – Brenda Niall’s splendid new biography of Archbishop Mannix – the dust jacket certainly tells a lot about Daniel Mannix and the challenges facing his biographers.
Suffused with a purple wash, it displays a vigorous Archbishop wearing his trademark purple biretta.
Purple is telling. In the Roman world, it was reserved for emperors whose inscrutability was part of their dramatic presentation. Their personal lives were the stuff of hagiography or of gossip, never of self-revelation.
In the Catholic world, purple is the colour of Lent. It is a time for focusing on what matters, away from the merely colourful, and was once a time for shrouding the faces of statues. It is a time of waiting for the death and resurrection of Christ, aware that here we have no lasting city.
The subjection of private life to the public image, an austere focus on what mattered, and watchfulness, are central to the understanding of Mannix.
Niall begins appropriately by describing a bonfire, ordered by Mannix, of his private papers after his death. For biographers, as for archivists and historians, it was a scandalous act of iconoclasm. Yet this barbarism was not about the smashing of images but about the preservation of a public image from taint by personal revelation.
Brenda Niall’s central challenge was to uncover the personal face of Mannix from his public speeches, his actions and from the responses of people to him. She does this modestly and penetratingly, raising questions and looking for consistencies and for surprises. She takes us far beyond caricatures of Mannix as authoritarian and intransigent Catholic or as political reactionary.
She gives full weight to the dramatic public self-presentation of Mannix – the top hat or biretta and cassock, the presence, the gift for eloquent, rhythmic prose with the deadly phrase, and the silent pause. He could control an audience and shift the perception of events. He could turn high seriousness, such as his arrest at sea, into farce. All that he did was theatre, laden with symbol. The imperial Mannix was impenetrable but penetrating.
Beneath this masterful mask, however, is glimpsed the face of a complex human being who won popular affection as well as respect. The British reprisal killings after the Eastern Uprising changed him. They sharpened his mistrust of England and of the motivation behind the Great War into a barely controlled rage. He argued fiercely against conscription in the 1917 Referendum, and railed against the exploitation of struggling workers by the wealthy.
After the war, he endorsed Sinn Fein against limited home rule, and travelled to the United States to support de Valera. He was the international face of the Irish struggle.
Through this period he moved from being a distant Bishop to the hero of tribal Catholics who were mostly working class. His contrarian, almost bolshie streak, shows itself elsewhere in his disdain for Church leadership, particularly as shown by Rome and its emissaries. His sympathy for the underdog was consistent – for Jews under Hitler, for workers, for immigrants and refugees. It also fuelled his opposition to Communists, whom he saw as persecuting the poor in Russia, killing nuns in Spain, and manipulating workers in Australia.
Mannix focused on what mattered. This showed in his neglect of what mattered less to him: entertaining and being entertained, using the telephone, attending to his own comfort, popular devotional practices, developing amicable relationships with other Church leaders of other churches. But it was also shown in his prosecution of the causes that did matter: the freedom of the Irish from British rule, the encouragement of an active Catholic laity, both in Ireland and in Australia, a just Australia, and – in his last years – a Church free from clericalism and sanctimonious speech.
In pursuing his goals, he showed extraordinary trust in the often young men who came to him with projects they were ready to give their lives to: de Valera in the Irish cause, the founders of the Catholic Worker, Santamaria in his understanding of Catholic Action, and the 15-year-old Percy Jones in his plan to study for the priesthood, study Church music in Rome, and return to animate Church music in Melbourne.
In Mannix, the strong focus on what mattered took away any anxious need to control detail. Mannix declined to visit his priests because it could express a lack of trust in them. Nor did he penalise them if they disagreed with positions he took. He was also ready to let go of projects he strongly supported, such as sex education in schools and serious formation of Religious, if they were resisted by those responsible for implementing them. He could also let go of past enmities, enjoying in later life a friendship with Billy Hughes, just as Malcolm Fraser, another private, decent man did with Gough Whitlam.
Lent is a time of waiting. Mannix was watchful. Niall offers the haunting scene of the Archbishop in his old age sitting quietly with companions at Queenscliff, looking out over the heads, noting the passing of ships whenever the conversation led in directions he did not wish to take. That watchfulness characterised his private and public communication, both through word and dramatic gesture. It may also have reflected the life of a man who had sharply experienced exile from family and country and the gap between hopes and realisation. He knew that ships that came in on the flood tide would leave on the ebb tide. We might wonder at what ran through his mind and heart as he looked out to sea: how much of it was sadness, how much loneliness, how much wisdom, how much was prayer. Mannix made sure we would never know. It was not what mattered.
On finishing the book, I idly imagined the then Archbishop meeting the now Pope. Both are masters of public symbols. But whereas Mannix put on the trappings of office to conceal his inner life, Pope Francis discards them to reveal his loves and his desires. He is as expressive as Mannix was impressive. I suspect each would have recognised the other’s mastery of performance and warmed to the performer. – Courtesy Eureka Street.
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