Archbishop of Sydney

Remarks at a Panel Discussion of
"Your Most Obedient Servant: B. A. Santamaria's Selected Letters 1938-96"
(Miegunyah Press & the State Library of Victoria)

At the University of Sydney

By + Cardinal George Pell
Archbishop of Sydney
26/2/2007

INTRODUCTION

During his long life Bartholomew Augustine Santamaria produced more than his share of surprises.  After his death too he continues to provoke small surprises such as Father Ed Campion and myself appearing on the same platform to launch a collection of his letters.  While Ed and myself are regularly together at the Cathedral 10.30am Sunday Mass, he usually keeps his distance from Bishops.  I am delighted that he has relaxed his principle this evening for such a purpose and delivered such a spirited and benevolent party piece.

I too do not speak tonight as a dispassionate observer, but as someone who became a good friend of the letter writer during the last ten years of his life.  Indeed I could claim that indirectly my Oxford education is owed to Santamaria and his activities.

As a Ballarat seminarian and priest for 27 years my first bishop was Sir James Patrick O’Collins, who chaired the Australian Bishops’ Committee which supervised the Movement.  One of the Movement’s principal Catholic opponents was Max Charlesworth the philosopher and Bishop O’Collins sent me to Oxford in 1967 so I would be able to answer Charlesworth and his friends.  I have also explained this debt of mine to Charlesworth!

I first heard Bob speak at the Cathedral Hall in Ballarat soon after the Split when I was a teenager.  The hall was full, perhaps with 1,000 people and he kept us enthralled with his use of history, situating both the problems of the day and his solutions in the vast tides of continental politics.  Even to a teenager he was a spell-binder.  We wondered whether it was “five minutes to midnight”.  In fact Malcolm Muggeridge was the only public speaker I have heard whom I would rate higher.  Bob often spoke for an hour, never referring to his text which I never saw him open and delivering every word with perfect recall.  At one of his last orations at the Camberwell Town Hall he fluffed one line and I remember telling friends that I knew he was slipping!

Neither his writings, his letters nor his T.V. appearances quite capture this ability of his to hold the attention of hundreds of people for up to an hour, leave them wanting more and prepared to come back again next year.

Naturally I am going to speak about the religious dimension of these letters, rather than about politics, or economics, or Asia and the Communists.  This is of course a safer and more prudent course for me and I happen to know more about Christianity and things Catholic than the other areas mentioned.

CATHOLIC

Bob Santamaria’s first religious achievement was to have remained a faithful Christian and Catholic until the end.  This is not at all unique, but neither is it universal because a lifetime of struggle for good causes within the Church is no guarantee of a lively faith in old age.   One of Bob’s public opponents ten or fifteen years ago described himself as three percent Catholic then and I mention this, not to condemn, but as one example of what can happen.

Santamaria could claim no personal credit for being born into a good Catholic family, although I don’t believe his father worshipped every Sunday.  The Christian Brothers too did their bit and he remained deeply Catholic to the end, despite the Vatican disowning the Movement in 1957 and his organization being ostracized in most Australian dioceses.

More importantly he disliked a good deal of the Second Vatican Council and especially the unexpected consequences it unleashed, including the “opening to the left” and the Vatican’s “Ost Politik”.  As a consequence he was out of step politically with the popes between Pius XII and John Paul II and with nearly all the Australian bishops for forty years after the Split.  I remember hearing the comment (before 1978) that Bob would cite a number of popes up to Pius and then have to quote Alexander Solzhenitsyn, the Russian novelist who told the world about the Soviet Gulag.

In response to a query from Michael Davies of the U.K. in 1985, Santamaria wrote “Your question was actually put to me by Mindszenty but in a different way.  How can you reconcile to your members fidelity to the Holy See in matters of faith and morals with strong criticism of its policies of accommodation with Communism?”  I told him (Cardinal Mindszenty) that it had never occasioned any difficulty to them or to me” because of Dr. Mannix’s total fidelity to our cause.

More controversially and earlier in the same letter writing of the Roman decision after the Split, B.A. explained that he was never tempted to lapse (and I believe that) then adding “Being of Italian blood, I never had any illusions about the Curia and so was not disappointed, let alone hurt.  It has all happened so often – with Windhorst, Don Sturzo in Italy, the Cristeros in Mexico etc.”  I think he was deeply hurt, but not much surprised.

Three years later (1988) in writing to Robert Stove, who lamented the excommunication of Lefebvre while Curran and Kung remained in the Church, he claimed “In this matter, I adopt the tactical position I would not adopt at the time of the Labor “Split” …… I will stay in and fight”.

Later again in 1990 Santamaria won sympathy from some of his opponents and disturbed some of us, his friends, when John Lyons’ Good Weekend article quoted him as saying “religious doubt is stronger in my mind today than it has ever been”.

In reply to my letter to him, which was prompted more by his mistaken pessimism about the worth of his struggle, he confessed that the struggle on the faith question is “real and not a figment of the imagination”, adding “But when I said (to John Lyons) ‘I had to make up my mind’ which is as he reports it, he didn’t add what I added ‘But I have’”.

To me and to an old school class mate Jim McClelland who didn’t have much faith he concluded “I can say the Nicene Creed today with stronger conviction than ever”. 

In discussing this issue with me he spoke of the silken thread of faith, under pressure, but which never broke for him.

Faith in the supernatural is partly supernatural itself and I am sure that B.A.’s decision to remain with Christ and the Church was nourished as much by his regular prayer, daily worship and habitual kindness as by his formidable intellect.

I blessed Bob on his deathbed when he was semi-paralysed and unable to speak.  But he did manage to bless himself, slowly and with difficulty.  His endurance in faith laid the foundations for his other achievements and I remain delighted and grateful that Providence allowed me to preside at his funeral and give him the send off into eternity which he deserved.

LAYMAN

As a layman B.A. Santamaria was the best known Catholic in Australia from Archbishop Mannix’s death in 1963 until his own death in 1998.  His contemporaries were so used to this fact that many were surprised when reminded that there was no lay figure in the English-speaking world in the twentieth century with anything like his influence or public position.  Catholic Australia was then dominated by the clergy.

When he entered Catholic public life in the 1930s there were no school boards, parish councils and diocesan finance councils for lay people, as these were fruits of the Second Vatican Council in the 1960s.  Catholic leadership was entirely clerical, apart from the nuns and brothers.  The Vatican was then a long way from endorsing the separation of Church and State and Pope Pius XI had only concluded the Lateran Pact with Mussolini in 1929, so allowing Catholics full participation in Italian public life.  For many years after the fall of the Papal States to a united Italy in 1870 Catholic participation in politics was forbidden.

Pope Pius XI in the ‘30s had begun to encourage the lay apostolate, which developed into Catholic action and the action of Catholics, the social and individual apostolates and political activity which was not apostolic or linked to the bishops.

All this background simply serves to emphasise how historically unusual and avant-garde Archbishop Mannix’s sponsorship of this brilliant young layman into leadership positions in the Church was when it began.

There is a wealth of information in these letters which portrays the contending forces wrestling with and refining their positions on Catholics in public life.  We are wiser now as a result of these struggles and of seeing their longer term consequences.  It is not surprising to see B.A. writing in 1938 that “the whole matter of Catholic Action is probably as great a mystery to a large number of priests as it is to the vast majority of laymen”, but Mannix and Santamaria anticipated much of Vatican Two’s endorsement of lay activity, not simply to run the parish councils but to “penetrate and perfect the temporal sphere of things through the spirit of the gospel” (Decree on the Apostolate of the Laity. Par 2.).  The layman was to bring Christianity into the market place according to the Council; he was, in Pope Paul VI’s words the Church’s “bridge to the modern world”.  Thirty years earlier Santamaria was attempting this (although I am not suggesting that Vatican Two reversed the 1957 separation of the hierarchy and clergy from direct political action, despite clergy involvement in movements like liberation theology).

STATE AID

Santamaria also made a major contribution to winning “state aid” for Catholic schools, i.e. in obtaining federal and state government finance so that Catholic schools could continue.

This was a struggle that lasted for over eighty years and was the major cause of Catholic dissatisfaction with Australian life.  The denial of government funding was an injustice and bitterly resented.

I am not interested in claiming that B.A.’s was the major contribution, much less discounting the influence of Mannix or Bishop Cullinane’s Goulburn Catholic school strike or the regular lobbying of Archbishop Jimmy Carroll.   These are not issues for tonight and many different clergy and public figures contributed positively to the end result like Menzies, Whitlam and Fraser, just as there were conspicuous opponents like Calwell and McMahon.

In 1952 before the Split Santamaria wrote to Mannix anticipating that State Aid would be possible “within the next six years”.  Whether this is evidence of a plot to takeover the ALP I don’t know, but it would be a surprise to me if someone founded a political group which did not intend to produce social outcomes.  B.A. was not an historian nor simply a commentator on affairs.

But the major break through occurred only in 1964 with grants for Catholic school science blocks from the Menzies’ government.  In 1966 Bob told Senator Vince Gair “After all, throughout 1963 I was engaged personally in dealing with them on the education question over several meetings.  The ‘science block’ legislation emerged out of personally thrashing out the different aspects of the problem face to face”.  There is not the slightest reason to doubt any of these claims and Archbishop Mannix was aware of what was promised by Menzies, the break-through to the Promised Land, before he died in November 1963.

Santamaria’s strong preference was for per capita grants for students and he always remained clear headed about funding developments, claiming in 1967 that then, as earlier, “the political realities will determine the situation, not the good will of any political party”.

For Santamaria the Catholic schools in the Promised Land were a bitter disappointment.  In 1983 he foresaw Catholic schools “becoming a dutiful appendage of the State”, exactly what the bishops of 1872 opposed.  For him, Government money produced ecclesiastical bureaucracies which took power from the bishops so that the faith of two generations was threatened by the unexpected consequences of Vatican II and the disintegration of the family.  With an irony that equals his self description as “Your most obedient servant”, he concluded the letter to Des Moore which I have been quoting with these words “So we do not exactly reap what we thought we were sowing”.

Santamaria’s verdict on our schools is incomplete and substantially mistaken, but the story and its challenges is far from over.  Today’s task is to ensure that his grim predictions do not eventuate completely.

CATHOLIC REVIVAL?

During his life time Santamaria never became a revered elder statesman within the Australian Catholic community, a status he almost achieved in Australian public life in his last years.  He always remained much too influential, too effective in the fight to reverse the decline in Australian Catholicism to be dismissed from active duty and patronised in this way.

To recognize these difficulties publicly today is now the received wisdom across the spectrum of religion and irreligion, but twenty or thirty years ago it took some courage to point out such problems.  The increase in absolute numbers through migration obscured the percentage declines, most never recognized too clearly what was happening until they realized their children were not worshipping regularly (and sometimes their grandchildren were not even baptised), but there was also a feeling that it was an implied criticism of the Council, disloyalty, to point out the disappointing realities.  The new Catholic bureaucracies often exiled and persecuted orthodox dissenters, who were also liable to the devastating critique that they sounded just like Santamaria.

Today we have some reasonable idea sociologically of where we are, principally through the five studies of the late Brother Marcellin Flynn, F.M.S., which catalogued the rise of ignorance and confusion and the decline of commitment and practice in the Catholic schools between 1972-1998.  The Redemptorist sociologist Father Michael Mason has done similar work on the wider Catholic community, culminating in his recent revelations on Generation Y.  It is sobering to realize that 35% of 13-29 year old Catholics believe in reincarnation but 41% of Baby-Boom Catholics do!  This mistaken belief is four times as prevalent among us as among the Anglicans and double the percentage among other Christians.

One of our own Sydney atheists Paddy McGuiness, who is both pro-Catholic and pre-Vatican Two, wrote this weekend that the Catholic Church “succumbed belatedly to the Reformation in the 1960s”.  In fact the rot has run much further and the challenges are much deeper now;  i.e. agnosticism, multi-form superstition and pick-a-box morality.

At one stage I feared that the Church in Australia might collapse as radically as the Church did in Holland and French-speaking Canada, mainly because of hostile outside pressures, but also because of our own mistakes.  This danger has now been avoided in most parts of Australia, and Santamaria, as much as any other individual, helped achieve this comparative stabilization.

I hope that our present efforts to improve the situation will be so effective that scholars in the future will say that the fears of collapse we entertained were as illusory and misplaced as the earlier fears about the Communist presence in the union leadership (the danger then was significant and the fears justified).  But I am not entirely sure that B.A.’s last crusade within the Church will be as successful as his work in the unions.

Santamaria saw all this happening and realized what was coming.  His remarkable capacity to analyse problems and trends, set them in the contexts of history and the wider world, was clouded neither by his hostility to particular ideas nor by sentimental attachments to his friends and allies.

I am not sure how many organizations B.A. started, although they were many, but he insisted on the importance of clear cut policy and disciplined organization (this was in a 1981 letter which acknowledged that most apostolic laity then were demoralized)  and often quoted the Russian dictator Vladimir Lenin,  “The question, as always is ‘What is to be done?’”  (1988)

Therefore as he replied in 1990 in a devastating riposte to Father Brian Fleming, S.J., then personal assistant to Archbishop Little, who had accused him of politicizing theology “I took the extremely risky step of staring AD2000 at the age of 73”.  AD2000 is of course a religious magazine, which continues to thrive today.  We owe it a lot.

A couple of years earlier in 1988, just before the magazine appeared, he acknowledged to Gary Scarrabelotti that he had waited for five years for some one “to have a go” because linkage with the National Civic Council would be a two edged sword, providing effective long term control while potentially alienating some likely supporters.

AD2000 tapped into the revival of Catholic life led by Pope John Paul II, becoming part of a world-wide web of orthodoxy, spreading information and ideas, bringing encouragement to those struggling in isolation and so reminding the Roman authorities that there did exist in Australia some local capacity to continue the struggle to improve our situation. 

This struggle for the heart of Catholicism has now been taken up by a significant minority of young Catholic activists and by most of the reduced number of young Catholic priests.  AD2000’s role is still important, but initially it was fundamental and indispensable.

CONCLUSION

The publication of these letters has enhanced the reputation of Bob Santamaria as a writer, thinker and strategist with a rarely equalled knowledge and understanding of contemporary life.  The public sees more of the courteous and kindly man his friends were privileged to know and something more of his edge.  I am not sure that he said publicly that Pontius Pilate was a gentleman in comparison with a number of United States bishops!

 In 1986 B.A. replied to an allegation that he hated the Church, by writing “I love both my Church and my country.   Right or wrong, I cannot stand by if, in my view, one is injuring the other”.

 He was a distinguished patriot and churchman, an effective and stylish warrior to the end in the “culture wars” which still engulf us.

 It was my privilege to admire him, become his friend and to learn much from him.