Catholic World News News Feature

The Remarkable Life of B.A. (Bob) Santamaria December 27, 2001

By Peter Westmore

On Ash Wednesday 1998, a Catholic layman who had the most pronounced influence on public and religious affairs in Australia, died at the age of 82, surrounded by his family, in Melbourne, Australia.

For about a week, appreciations of his remarkable life filled the Australian media, and obituaries appeared in publications as diverse as the London Times, the Daily Telegraph and L’Osservatore Romano.

Yet the paradox was that this man, Bob Santamaria, who was posthumously honored with a State Funeral in St. Patrick’s Cathedral, Melbourne--concelebrated by 13 archbishops and bishops, and 160 priests--never held any public office in Australia, did not make a fortune on the stock exchange, did not run a media empire, and had even been disowned by many bishops and clergy in his own country.

Yet he was, by universal recognition, a moral force for good in public life--an Australian Solzhenitsyn, who not only enunciated the cultural, religious, and political challenges facing Australia as an outpost of Christian civilization on the edge of Asia, but built organizations to bring his vision to fulfillment.

BORN INTO CONTROVERSY

Born in 1915 in Melbourne, Bartholomew Augustine Santamaria was the first of six children of a Italian greengrocer, Giuseppe Santamaria, who had migrated to Australia from the Aeolian Islands, just north of Sicily, before the First World War. Shortly after his arrival in Australia, Giuseppe Santamaria met and married Maria Terzita, a young woman from the same islands, who had come to Australia earlier to look after her two brothers, who had fled the grinding poverty of the islands.

The Australia into which their eldest child B.A. Santamaria was born was overwhelmingly Anglo-Saxon, with a dominant Protestant ascendancy. Many still regarded Britain as "home". Italian immigrants--like the Irish--were treated as second-class citizens. As his own Christian name sounded foreign, very early in the young man's life it was contracted to "Bob."

Bob Santamaria was exceptionally proud of his Italian ancestry, and particularly of his parents: his father, who had completed only primary education, and mother, who had attended just a year or two of elementary schooling. His parents were Catholics in the Italian tradition. Bob Santamaria frequently said that despite their lack of formal education, his parents’ wisdom and common sense had inoculated him against the illusion that education, in itself, improved a person morally or spiritually.

He grew up in a working class suburb, surrounded by a secure and loving family, and was educated by the Irish Christian Brothers, then a magnificent religious order dedicated to uplifting the downtrodden Catholic minority through the excellence of their teaching and example. There he learned to read and write, learned his catechism, studied the classics and languages, and learned how to defend and explain the Catholic faith intellectually against Protestant, agnostic, and Marxist critiques.

Before he had graduated from college, the Wall Street collapse of 1929 had plunged the world into the Great Depression: a disaster which had tragic consequences for Australia. In the early 1930s, Bob Santamaria saw family breadwinners thrown out of work, unemployment officially pass 30 per cent (although it was actually much higher, as people stopped looking for work), many families evicted from their homes because they could not pay rent, and thousands of unemployed men walking the land looking for work or food. Inevitably, this was accompanied by the collapse of all faith in the "capitalist" economic system, and the ominous growth of Communist influence in the universities, the trade unions, and political movements established among the dispossessed and unemployed.

It was in this context that Bob Santamaria won a scholarship to Melbourne University, where he quickly established himself as a formidable writer and debater. Of particular significance, he joined the Campion Society, a group of young Catholic intellectuals named after the great Englishman who had been a favorite of Queen Elizabeth I at Oxford University, but converted to Catholicism, was ordained as a Jesuit, and died a heroic martyr’s death late in the 16th Century.

The Campion Society helped form a generation of Catholic intellectuals, and brought the young Bob Santamaria to the notice of Melbourne’s Irish-born Archbishop Daniel Mannix--who himself was no stranger to controversy, having played a leading role in the political campaign against conscription during World War I. Archbishop Mannix had argued against conscription, saying that the war was basically a trade war, and that in any event, young Australians had already enlisted to fight in large numbers. The archbishop was savagely attacked by the then-prime minister, W.M.(Billy) Hughes, who attempted to win a referendum on conscription by appealing to the predominantly Protestant electorate to defeat the Catholics, led by Archbishop Mannix. Hughes was defeated; but the battle left deep scars in Australian society.

THE FIRST BURST OF PROMINENCE

The outbreak of the Spanish Civil War in 1936, following on the effects of the Depression, led to an extraordinary polarization in Australia, where the forces of the secular Enlightenment were firmly aligned with the Republicans, while the Catholics aligned themselves equally firmly behind Franco’s Nationalists. The most famous debate on the Spanish Civil War took place at Melbourne University in 1937. Santamaria, one of the three speakers on the Nationalist side, was reported as saying: "When the bullets of the atheists struck the statue of Christ outside the cathedral in Madrid, for some that was just steel striking brass. But for me, those bullets were piercing the heart of Christ the King."

Manning Clark, later to become one of Australia’s foremost historians, was present at the debate as a fellow student. He later described the occasion as one of the three most formative influences in his life. He wrote:

From that time, Catholic Truth and the Enlightenment were to engage in never-ending war on the battlefield of my heart. That night, too, I had the first intimation of what had to be done. I had to shed the shallow hopes of childhood, to shed secular humanism, Protestantism, and liberalism ... to see them as ideas which would melt like the snow-drift, because they did not stand on entrenched ground.

That occasion also marked a turning point for Bob Santamaria. A short time later, he was asked by Archbishop Mannix to become Assistant Director of the National Secretariat of Catholic Action, a body set up by the Australian Catholic hierarchy to encourage the laity to become involved in public affairs, under the inspiration of the Church. One practical result of this opportunity was that Bob Santamaria drafted the annual Social Justice Statements on behalf of the hierarchy. These statements addressed many of the great issues of the day, drawing on the social teachings of the church and the social encyclicals, but applied to Australian conditions. The statements, which were best sellers in Australia, dealt with issues of justice between employer and employee, post-war reconstruction, the centrality of the family in community life, social security, peace in industry, Australia’s population, food, urban centralization, and many other issues. All this was done 20 years before the Second Vatican Council set the Church’s course firmly toward engagement in the world.

However, in the early 1940s ,a new problem arose which increasingly preoccupied the time and efforts of Bob Santamaria. The Communist Party, using the Leninist cell method of organization, had taken advantage of the crisis of the depression to organize within many of the largest trade unions in Australia. In the late 1930s and early 1940s, Communists captured control of a number of key unions, causing deep concern to many Labor leaders, because in Australia, trade unions are directly affiliated with the Labor Party, and send delegates to its conferences. Because of the wartime alliance with the Soviet Union, there was a real fear that the union movement would fall under complete Communist control, and in due course, this would extend to the Labor Party itself.

The danger was formidable. Several Labor leaders approached Bob Santamaria, telling him that their own efforts to counter the threat had been largely unsuccessful, and asking him to mobilize working-class Catholics against the growing Communist presence in the unions. Santamaria relayed their concerns to Archbishop Mannix, who encouraged him to engage in this work.

Many accounts have been published in Australia of what happened at this time, but perhaps the best appeared in Australian Accent, a book written by a leading newspaper editor, John Douglas Pringle, in the late 1950s. He wrote:

Even before the war, the Catholic hierarchy in Australia had become seriously perturbed by the growth of Communism and particularly by its hold on the industrial unions. Half-hearted attempts had been made to teach Catholic members of trade unions, and particularly those who were also members of Catholic Action, that it was their duty to play a leading part in the fight against Communism by attending union meetings and voting against Communist candidates. During the war, the concern of the bishops greatly increased.

Their concern was not without reason. Although the number of avowed Communists in Australia remained extremely small, the Communist Party, taking advantage of the apathy of the ordinary trade unionist and the favorable atmosphere of the war-time alliance with Russia, obtained remarkable successes in infiltrating the big unions.

By the end of the war, their strength was positively alarming--and not only to Catholics. Between 1945 and 1948, the Communists either controlled or virtually controlled the powerful Ironworkers’ Federation, the Sheetmetal Workers Union, the Amalgamated Engineering Union, the Waterside Workers’ Federation, the Seamen’s Union, the Federated Clerks’ Union, the Australian Railways Union and part of the Building Trades Union.

What is more, they were using their power openly to disrupt industry along the seaboard by a serious of vicious strikes which at one time threatened to bring Australia to a halt.

At the time, said .Pringle, Bob Santamaria had worked out a strategy for fighting Communism in the unions:

His plan was to use the many devout Catholics in the Labor Party and the trade unions to fight Communism, by setting up small groups within unions who would mobilize the anti-Communist vote in union elections. In the late 1940s, these were given official endorsement by the Labor Party as ALP [Australian Labor Party] Industrial Groups.

THE STRUGGLE FOR LABOR

At the nucleus of this fight were small groups of members of the Catholic Social Movement, an organization which Bob Santamaria had formed in 1941, and which had been formally supported by the Catholic hierarchy of Australia since 1945. These groups, organized on avocational or geographic basis, met regularly. Their meetings opened and closed with a prayer, and discussed a passage from the Gospels, in addition to the work each group was undertaking in the labor movement. The structure of these meetings remains unchanged to the present day.

Pringle wrote:

Slowly, slowly, the tide turned. Taking advantage of legislation providing for a secret ballot in union elections if a sufficient minority demanded one, well advised by industrial lawyers, mobilizing the Catholic vote, the Industrial Groups expelled the Communists from one union after another... By 1950, the Communists were in full retreat, and the Industrial Groupers were everywhere advancing to the relief of the nation.

Even as the Communist challenge in the unions was being defeated, Bob Santamaria saw that Australia’s future would be determined not within this country, but by the growing international struggle between the Communist superpowers--the Soviet Union and China--and the West, led by the United States. He understood that Australia was acutely vulnerable, with its tiny population (then about 8 million) spread over nearly 3 million square miles. He advocated a close political and military alliance with the United States, the encouragement of mass migration from Europe, closer settlement of the land, and development of infrastructure on a large scale. Many of these ideas were adopted by the Labor Party, although they aroused the fierce hostility and resentment of the Labor Party’s left wing. However, at the time, Bob Santamaria confided in his wife that he would shortly be able to resume a "normal" life, away from the constant battles which had torn through the labor movement.

However, in 1954, events intervened decisively against his plans. The brilliant, ambitious, and erratic Labor leader, H.V. Evatt, narrowly lost the 1954 election, shortly after the defection of a spy from the Soviet embassy, Vladimir Petrov, with documents supplied to the embassy by Australian informants. Two members of Evatt’s staff were among those implicated. Some of Evatt’s colleagues tried to get him to resign; but in his fury, Evatt formed an alliance with the left wing of his party and power brokers jealous of the increasing influence of the Industrial Groups, and he launched a bitter campaign, adopting the sectarian tactics used a generation earlier by Hughes, to drive the anti-Communists out of the Labor Party.

A bitter split ensued: Industrial Group leaders throughout Australia were expelled from the Labor Party, some 50 Labor Members of Parliament lost their seats, and a bitter outburst of anti-Catholic sentiment erupted in the Australian community. In the unions and the Labor Party, the pro-Communist left--previously marginalized--regained influence with startling rapidity, and anti-Communists were defeated in many union elections.

Meanwhile the Catholic bishops of Australia, fearful of the consequences of the sectarian campaign that was being waged against Catholics in the Labor movement, decided to abandon Santamaria--although a minority, led by Archbishop Mannix, who was then 90 years old, stuck by him. For a time, it seemed that everything that Santamaria had worked for in Australia had been destroyed.

THE NATIONAL CIVIL COUNCIL

It was then that Santamaria’s courage and strength of character showed themselves. He reorganized those who had been forced out of the Labor Party as the Democratic Labor Party (DLP). This small force kept Labor out of power in Australia for almost 20 years, on the basis that until it reformed itself, it could not be trusted with the responsibility of government.

In response to the withdrawal of support by the hierarchy, Santamaria resigned from his position with the Catholic bishops, and established a new, entirely lay organization, the National Civic Council, to carry on the political and industrial work in which he had been engaged, including the continuing struggle to prevent the re-emergence of Communist power in the labor unions. His efforts contained Communist influence in the labor unions until the dissolution of the Communist Party in the late 1980s.

Even from his position as head of a minority party, Santamaria exercised a decisive influence over Australian politics. The preferences of the Democratic Labor Party kept the overwhelmingly Protestant Liberal Party in office throughout the 1950s and 1960s, and in exchange for this, Santamaria was able to extract key policy concessions from the Liberals on a variety of issues. One of these was State Aid for Church schools.

To understand this issue, one must recall that Australia was settled as a group of British colonies, and predominantly populated by Protestants from England, Scotland, and Wales. Catholics comprised a minority--around 20 per cent of the population, largely of Irish extraction--and were heavily concentrated in the poorer sections of the population.

In Australia, Government schools were established in the late 19th century, on three fundamental principles: that they be free, compulsory, and secular. The clearly stated intention of the founders of the state school system--influenced as they were by the Founding Fathers of the United States, Protestantism, and the French Enlightenment--was to destroy what they saw as the divisive influence of religion in society, and to replace it with a set of universal human values. They clearly understood that if they could remove the Church from the process of education, her influence in society would gradually wane.

State-run schools were set up throughout Australia, and absolutely no assistance was given to non-government schools, many of which closed Most churches went along with this; but the Catholic Church in Australia, influenced by what had happened in Ireland in the mid-19th century, responded decisively by establishing a massive network of schools which eventually extended into almost every parish across Australia. By the 1950s, the Catholic system educated around 20 per cent of all Australian school children. Catholics felt a deep sense of injustice that their taxes were being used to educate other children, but not their own, and from the early years of the 20th century, had campaigned for "State Aid" for Church schools, but without success.

In 1963, using the bargaining chip of DLP preferences, Santamaria was able to bring the federal Liberal government to make the first major concession: an offer of funds to build science laboratories in high schools; a short time later, he persuaded the Liberal government in the state of Victoria to make direct payments to non-government schools on the basis of student enrollments. The other states quickly followed suit. The battle for "State Aid"--the principle that all children should be given access to government support for education--was decisively won.

In the area of foreign policy, Bob Santamaria was acutely conscious of Australia’s vulnerability, as a European enclave on the southern rim of Asia. In the 1950s and 1960s, at a time when Australia still retained strong emotional ties to Britain, Santamaria strongly pressed for an independent but pro-Western foreign policy, aligned with the United States, which had saved Australia from invasion in World War II. (Australians had fought alongside Americans in both Korea and Vietnam, and had fought with Britain to defeat Communist insurgencies in Malaya and Burma.)

Yet in foreign policy, Bob Santamaria always understood that Washington would advance American interests, which might not be those of Australia. Following the United States’ acquiescence in the Indonesian takeover of West Irian, he formulated the principle of "self-reliance in defense"--a policy which was initially regarded as unrealistic, but which gradually achieved wider currency, to the point where politicians in Canberra now pay lip-service to the principle (while doing almost nothing to achieve it).

In 1969, again using the bargaining chip of Democratic Labor Party preferences, Bob Santamaria secured a commitment from the federal Liberal government to construct the naval base at Cockburn Sound, near Perth, making it possible for the Australian Navy to operate effectively in the Indian Ocean, and offer home-port facilities to United States and other allied naval vessels. The importance of this facility was brought home during and after the Gulf War in 1991, when the base (now called HMAS Stirling), was a major Indian Ocean facility used by both the United States and Australia.

THE CULTURE WARS

In the late 1960s and 1970s, Santamaria saw that the ideological battleground was moving from the union movement to the schools, the universities, and the media. He was instrumental in assisting moderate students to fight Marxist and "New Left" extremists who tried to turn Australian universities into bastions for an assault on Australian democracy. Members of his organization, the National Civic Council, were a vital part of a coalition of moderate students which brought about the collapse of the Marxist-led Australian Union of Students in the early 1980s.

Recognizing the growing power of radical feminism, he encouraged women to defend the unique and distinctive role of women--particularly their roles as mothers and primary educators of their children. He saw that the corrosive effect of individualism was to break down the institution of marriage, while economic libertarianism treated women as merely a human resource to be recruited into the workforce. In conjunction with a number of other prominent Australians, he helped form the Australian Family Association (AFA) which, to the present day, plays a foremost part in the public battle to ensure that government policies support intact families, rather than facilitate their disintegration.

To address the political vacuum which emerged in the 1980s, with both the major political parties pursuing almost identical policies based on their narrow self-interest, he was instrumental in the formation of the Council for the National Interest (CNI), which acts as a forum for discussion and ideas on issues of foreign policy and defense.

B.A. Santamaria was the first prominent Australian to understand the importance of the ideology of "economic rationalism," or "globalization." Although he saw economic rationalism as a reaction to the excessive interference in the economy by the state; he recognized that its agenda for the abolition of all government supervision of the economy would lead to the exploitation of small business by big business, the ownership of large sections of Australian business by overseas interests, and the collapse of Australian manufacturing industry--predictions which have, to a large extent, already come true.

Ultimately, he saw that the ideology of "globalization" would threaten the integrity and sovereignty of Australia, just as it has undermined the stability of countries such as Indonesia, Thailand, and Malaysia, whose economies have been damaged by a combination of internal incompetence and foreign speculation by the "markets." He was forthright in calling for a new economic program to address the challenge to Australia’s economic sovereignty.

CONCERN FOR THE CHURCH

Since 1970, Bob Santamaria had become increasingly concerned by the erosion of belief and practice in the Catholic Church, caused partly by a misinterpretation of the Second Vatican Council’s decrees, but also by mistaken attempts to accommodate the Church’s teachings to social fashions. He was particularly critical of the watering-down of the Church’s teachings, in the effort to appear culturally and politically "relevant." He once made the scathing comment: "Trendiness is not a policy, it’s an epitaph."

In more recent years, he saw the emergence of two entirely contradictory sets of beliefs among people who still described themselves as Catholics. This was an issue to which Archbishop George Pell of Melbourne referred in his eulogy for Santamaria at St. Patrick’s Cathedral. [See sidebar.]

Bob Santamaria responded to this challenge by establishing a new religious magazine, AD2000. He also helped form the Thomas More Centre, which engaged in the formation of young Catholics in their faith, and in some of the bioethical challenges which have emerged since the 1980s, particularly genetic engineering, in vitro fertilization, euthanasia, and the promotion of utilitarianism as the guiding principle in medical ethics. Additionally, his organization, the National Civic Council, has provided moral and logistic support to Catholics--and indeed other Christians--involved in religious controversies at a parochial or diocesan level.

The death of Bob Santamaria led to an extraordinary--in fact, unprecedented--assessment of his role in public life. Australian Prime Minister John Howard, visited him on his deathbed, and shortly after it, offered a State Funeral to his family. His Requiem Mass was attended by over 3,000 people from all walks of life, and Masses for the repose of his soul were held in most cathedrals and many churches throughout Australia.

One of his strongest opponents from the political struggles of the 1950s, Clyde Cameron, who in recent years had corresponded with Santamaria on issues of common concern, described him as the greatest Australian of the post-war era, and a champion of the working class. He was described in similar terms by Prime Minister Howard and many others.

As President of the National Civic Council and Australia’s most prominent Catholic layman and intellectual, he was unique in public life in Australia--and extremely rare anywhere in the world--as an original thinker on religious, social, and political ideas, and as an organizer capable of inspiring and motivating ordinary men and women to do extraordinary things: in the unions, on university campuses, in political parties, in women’s organizations, and much more: to engage in the great struggle for the future of their country. His vision was to ensure the survival of Australia as a free and independent nation, culturally part of the Western world, with policies and laws informed broadly by Christian principles.

Above all, Bob Santamaria has always been a contemporary figure in Australian public life. He addressed issues from a perspective which was principled, but was also flexible in how particular ideas should be implemented. "New situations demand new policies," he once said. He inculcated that philosophy into those who worked alongside him. The challenge for the National Civic Council is to continue the works in which he was engaged. Those who worked alongside him are determined to carry on the works he so brilliantly led.

[AUTHOR ID] Peter Westmore, who worked alongside B.A. Santamaria for over 20 years, has been elected Santamaria’s successor as President of the National Civic Council.