Daniel Mannix Lecture 2004

by Rev. Tim Costello.

Presented at The Copeland Theatre, Melbourne University 14 October 2004

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My preparations for this evening's lecture led me to the discovery that I have a few things in common with the esteemed Archbishop Daniel Mannix.

Firstly and probably most significantly we share some Irish Catholic blood.  His was probably more obvious than mine!  But one of my foremost forbears came out as an adventurous 17 year old from County Leitrum in 1841.  His name was Patrick Costello.  He ended up a publican in Swanston St., managing the Traveller's Rest and finally ran for the Legislative Council. Unfortunately he was sacked after his first sitting and charged with orchestrating the crime of "impersonating the dead' for the elections.  He was tried by non other than Sir Redmond Barry, whom he hated as much for his Protestantism as for his hypocrisy.  It seems that Patrick lived in Carlton very close to the mistress Sir Redmond kept on the side.

 Secondly I discovered that Archbishop Mannix and I share a birthday.  March 4^th saw both of us born into this world; admittedly his was 91 years before mine!

 Thirdly we share little regard for the conventions that say that clergymen should restrict all their work and passion to the confines of the Church.  Mannix is quoted as saying:  Churchmen should not keep "themselves to sacristies.ä  I say a hearty Amen to that!  He certainly let his political influence be made felt.  Whether it was on the matter of conscription in World War 1 or the state of the ALP in the 1950's Mannix was strident, passionate, and had no fear of the ire of those in power. Some of the sermons I have read from Mannix get my heart pumping:  such as the one in 1932 when he told Australians that millions of men and women in the world were starving while the world was full of wealth.  Socialism and communism were not the solution, being based on the false philosophy of atheistic materialism: .But he hoped human beings under divine providence would find a better system than the capitalist system.  If they did not, Mannix prophesied the slow suicide of humanity.

But tonight I want to speak through the prism of yet another man whose insights have warmed my heart on many occasions.  A man who looked at history with the eye of pity, and the eye of love.  As with me and Archbishop Mannix his life-long point of reference was the church, and more significantly the Galilean carpenter whose vision for life opened up a world of spiritual possibilities.  I speak of the historian Manning Clark.  His renowned A History of Australia is a passionately debated vision of our history. He sees the process of change as driven by unceasing conflict between generosity of vision and inevitable human frailty. He sees  Australians as people of great goodwill and deep sinfulness, of expansive ideas and small-mindedness, of patriotic independence and a fearful allegiance to Empire.

It was particularly his auto-biographies The Puzzles of Childhood and The Quest for Grace which helped me do what I have struggled to do since boyhood; that is, to interpret the human story, and my story as an Australian, through the prism of faith.  To see in the events around us the hand of the unseen, to search for theological answers to the deep questions that haunt us in the small hours of the morning:  Questions like: What is death? Where is God in the suffering of innocents?  What can satisfy my deep soul hungers?

Manning Clark looked at history through the story of his parents: his father the "outsider", the working-class boy from St Peter's who made it onto a ladder of opportunity through the church and went all the way on scholarship to Moore College, Sydney.  Now we are talking about the buckle of the Bible belt or at lest the Anglican belt: the powerful fiefdom of the Jensen brothers who to this day wield enormous influence over Australian Anglicans.  One only has to look at last week's Synod decisions in Fremantle to see this.  Manning Clark saw his father as a divided man.  Attracted to all those who were the enlargers of life.  Always uncomfortable in the presence of the straighteners and the frowners.  But for his whole life he played the game, never challenged the authorities, sat in backwoods in parishes and simply loved people and received the love of people. Manning Clark says his father liked stories about the hypocrisy of deans, archdeacons, bishops and archbishops, especially archbishops.   My father he said had a sympathetic eye for Catholics and eccentrics, but was careful not to let anyone know what he was thinking.

His mother had her "certainties".  She was the inheritor of the faith of man and women who believed God had planted in them the "heroic ingredients" she was British, she was Protestant.

I lived with the legacy of this divide in my own childhood.  I had lapsed Catholic grandparents in the working-class area of Ascot Vale and I had Menzies loving Presbyterian grandparents in the safe middle-class belt of Murrumbeena. There was no love for Mannix I might add in that home. My parents married in the local Presbyterian Church with numbers of my father's relatives including his only brother standing outside.  These were the days of deeply felt segregation.  Such deep loyalties and prejudices.

Manning Clark's personal experience of the insider-outsider experience follows him through his life and as it does with Mark Latham it colours his views on all that he sees around him.  For Clark it was the experience of Melbourne Grammar's bullies, the boys from Yarraside which dogged him.  "I think of them as the ones to whom Australia belongs, the types who rule Australia.  I never knew heart's ease in their presence.ä He followed many of them to Melbourne University.  And as a scholarship boy had to constantly prove himself as making the grade, as coming out on top of them at least scholastically.

What most intrigued me in the volumes of Clark's grand History was the theme he developed of the Kingdom of God versus the Kingdom of Nothingness. In a manner I have found in few other places he conveyed the emptiness of the rationalist attempts to define true enlightenment and emancipation from superstition.  But the legacy was spiritual nothingness, materialistic obsessiveness and a paucity of spirit.

Manning Clark wove into his History the story of people gave texture to the canvas.  He wrote of Archbishop Mannix as being: "too massive a man to be captured in a simple generalization by a scribbler.  Mannix was many things, and he spoke with many voices. He was the mystic who saw in the face of the Irish peasant the image of Christ.  He was the Irish patriot nursing a grudge against those guilty of that ancient wrong against the Irish people.  He was the priest who believed he had a divine mission to save all souls from damnation in his care.  He was the Jansenist who feared that the lusts of the flesh would condemn a human being to Hell for all eternity (The man had something more than immense charm) He said memorable things, using words and phrases which lived on because he spoke about things that mattered, and things that moved the human heart.ä (Vol 6 pg 33)

I am grateful for the sweeping story Manning Clark has told.  For finding the big epic picture in our short history and writing as the Thomas Carlyle of our history, writing about the things that really matter.  I resonated because the things that continue to matter to me emerge from this story:  I want to see Christian theology engage the political agenda of our time. I believe that unless we wrestle with the big questions such as reconciliation with the indigenous and the treatment of strangers and refugees then we have failed our Christian heritage.  We have simply made ourselves comfortable in the land. I want to be there like Manning Clark did, in the Dostoevskyian sense, when everyone suddenly understands what it has all been for.

In the meantime we need to find fresh ways of looking with the eye of pity and the eye of love in these times.  I am not sure either of the main campaigners in our election was big enough to take us there.  There was too much that appealed to self-interest thrown around which hit the hip pockets of all and sundry.  I despaired as I, along with others, in the world of aid and development sought to get both major parties to make promises to raise the level of our foreign aid.  In these times of enormous surpluses it simply did not interest either party.  It is not a vote getter.  If we had maintained our level of Aid at 0.32%, which was what we had in 1996 when the Howard Government came to power, and not reduced it to 0.26% the we would have given $3.7 billion more to the poorest in our world rather than blown that on election promises for Australians relatively well off.

The overall message of recent days in our national life is that our priorities are that we must secure our borders, and fight for regime change in lands not remotely connected to ours; we must keep those seeking refuge on bleak Pacific islands or remote desert barbed-wire fenced compounds: .but we simply must not bother about Poverty beyond a shrinking token gesture.  The connection between Terror and Poverty is not clear cut but it is also not dismissible as some of our more conservative journalists have made out.  I am convinced that much of the grievance between the world of the Terrorists and the Western world is over access to power and influence.  The hegemony of the western alliance with all of its rhetoric of freedom and lifestyles of indulgence and promiscuity confronts all the sensibilities of groups that feel disempowered. As do the constant reminders that Palestinians are being constantly displaced, bombed and killed by an Israeli government with the strong backing of the super power in the world today.

I am saddened that Manning Clark is no longer here to tell the story: to look with the eye of pity and the eye of love on the globalized world in which Australia now struts its stuff.  As never before, we need a grand story-teller to tie together our past with our future: to have a generosity of vision amidst the inevitability of human frailty.