Archbishop Daniel Mannix
Daniel Mannix was the Catholic archbishop of Melbourne, who celebrated his last Mass on the opening day of Vatican II (11 October 1962). He was educated at Sisters of Mercy and Christian Brothers’ primary schools, St Colman’s, Fermoy, and Maynooth (1882). In 1889 he continued his scholastic work at Dunboyne Establishment, qualifying for a doctorate of divinity (1895) and proceeding to a lectureship in philosophy and the chair of moral theology at Maynooth.
He was inaugural secretary (1896–1903) of the Maynooth Union, where he promoted discussion of socio-economic questions and delivered (1901) a paper on the land question, advocating freehold for tenant-farmers. He was appointed president of Maynooth in 1903 and made a monsignor in 1906. He was appointed to Melbourne July 1, 1912, and consecrated titular bishop of Pharsalus on October 6, 1912, taking the motto Omnia Omnibus (“all things to all men”).
Mannix soon became a workers’ hero, denouncing inequality of sacrifice and endorsing the justice of strikes, and eventually he became both the most revered and the most reviled figure in Australian history. The New York Irish World later referred to him as “Mannix contra mundum Britannicum tyrannicum, et Black and Tannicum.”
At the 1928 International Eucharistic Congress in Sydney, Mannix’s oration promoted lay Catholic action against the clericalism of some of the other Australian bishops. He founded the Catholic Central Library with William Hackett in 1923 and fostered the Catholic Evidence Guild and the autonomous Campion Society in 1931 (dedicated to the study of papal social encyclicals and Distributism). Its offshoot, the monthly Catholic Worker (1936) of B.A. Santamaria, was selling 55,000 copies by 1942. Eventually the Young Christian Workers, National Catholic Girls’ Movement, Young Christian Students, and National Catholic Rural Movement were mandated by the hierarchy as official Catholic Action and co-ordinated by a National Catholic Secretariat for Catholic Action (1937). He mustered the other bishops behind B.A. Santamaria’s Catholic Social Studies Movement (1941); Santamaria, while still in his twenties, became Mannix’s major political adviser, ultimately seeing him three times a week. Controversies following the 1954 Labor split saw a condemnation of ‘the Movement’ as impolitic and theologically unsound from the Vatican, but Mannix backed the National Civic Council and the Democratic Labor Party: “Rome has blundered again,” he said; “Santamaria is the saviour of Australia.” During his tenure, the diocesan faithful increased from 150,000 to 600,000; churches from 160 to 300; students in Catholic primary schools from 21,792 to 73,695; secondary pupils from 3126 to 28,395; priests increased by 237, brothers by 181, nuns by 736; 10 new male and 14 female orders were introduced; 10 seminaries and 7 new hospitals, 3 orphanages, homes for delinquents, the blind and deaf, hostels for girls, etc. One could speculate that this had something to do with the five hours a day in frequently spent in prayer (quoted from James Griffin, “Mannix, Daniel (1864–1963),” Australian Dictionary of Biography, Volume 10, Melbourne University Press, 1986, pp 398–404; at Dictionary Link).
