Daniel Mannix

Roman Catholic clergyman, born at Ráth Luirc, Co Cork, S Ireland. Ordained at Maynooth in 1890, he became president of the college in 1903. He went to Australia in 1913 as coadjutor in Melbourne, succeeding as archbishop in 1917. He opposed conscription, and attacked the government for lack of aid to Church schools. Despite the controversy this caused, he was responsible for establishing nearly 200 schools and more than 100 parishes.

For other people called Daniel Mannix, see Daniel Mannix (disambiguation)

Daniel Patrick Mannix (4 March 1864 - 2 November 1963), Irish-born Australian Catholic clergyman, Archbishop of Melbourne for 46 years, was one of the most influential public figures in 20th century Australia, and certainly the most powerful cleric in Australian history.

Mannix was the son of a tenant farmer near Charleville, in County Cork, and was educated at Irish Christian Brothers schools and at the prestigious St Patrick's College, Maynooth seminary, where he was ordained as a priest in 1890.

In 1895 he was appointed to the chair of moral theology, and in 1903, not yet 40, he was appointed president -in effect the intellectual head of Irish Catholicism.

Mannix was consecrated as a bishop in Melbourne in 1912. But in 1913 he accepted an appointment as coadjutor (assistant) to the elderly Archbishop Thomas Carr of Melbourne, one of the great centres of Irish emigration, where the Roman Catholic Church was almost entirely Irish. Mannix was thus regarded with suspicion from the start, and his militant advocacy on behalf of a separate Roman Catholic school system, in defiance of the general acceptance of a secular school system, made him immediately a figure of controversy.

In 1914 Australia entered World War I on the side of Britain, and when Mannix denounced the war as "just a sordid trade war", he was widely denounced as a traitor. When the Australian Labor Party government of Billy Hughes tried to introduce conscription for the war, Mannix campaigned against it and it was defeated.

When the Labor Party split over conscription, Mannix supported the Catholic-dominated anti-conscription faction, led by Frank Tudor. In 1917, when Carr died, Mannix became Archbishop of Melbourne.

Mannix opposed the Easter Rising in 1916 and always condemned the use of force by Irish nationalists, and he counselled Australians of Irish Catholic extraction to stay out of Irish politics. However he became increasingly radicalized, and in 1919 he led an Irish republican funeral cortége through the streets of London following the death of hunger striker Terence MacSwiney, a Lord Mayor of Cork (Mannix's native county).

By the end of the war Mannix was the recognised leader of the Irish community in Australia, idolised by Catholics but detested by many Anglo-Australian Protestants, including those in power federally and in Victoria - for many years he was ostracised and not invited to the official functions his position would have entitled him to attend.

Mannix formed the Irish Relief Fund, which provided financial support for the families of those shot or imprisoned by the British.

Mannix supported trade unionism but opposed militancy and strikes.

In Melbourne, Mannix was the leader of the city's largest ethnic minority as well as a religious leader, and felt he had to maintain the prestige and solidarity of the Irish community.

After the Irish Free State was created in 1922, Mannix became less politically controversial and animosity to him gradually faded.

Mannix's best-known protege in his later years was B.A. Santamaria, a young Italian-Australian lawyer, whom Mannix appointed head of the National Secretariat of Catholic Action in 1937. After 1941, when the power of the Communist Party in the trade unions was at its height, Mannix authorised Santamaria to form the Catholic Social Studies Movement, known simply as The Movement, to organise in the unions and defeat the Communists.

In 1951 the Liberal Party of Australia government of Robert Menzies held a referendum to give the government the constitutional power to ban the Communist Party. Mannix surprised many of his supporters by opposing this, on the grounds that it would give the Communists a propaganda victory and drive them underground: his may have been a decisive influence in the referendum's narrow defeat. Mannix covertly supported the DLP and allowed many priests and religious to work openly for it. This is believed to be the main reason why Mannix never became a Cardinal. As a mark of displeasure, Rome appointed Archbishop Justin Simonds as coadjutor to Mannix - Simonds was widely seen as Rome's man in Melbourne.

In 1960 Calwell became Labor leader and sought Mannix's support to bring about a reconciliation between Labor and the DLP, essential if the Menzies government was to be defeated. Some figures in the DLP supported this idea, but Mannix supported Santamaria in his resistance to such suggestions. The negotiations fell through, Menzies was re-elected in 1961, and Mannix and Calwell were permanently estranged.

By the 1960s the distinct identity of the Irish community in Melbourne was fading, and Irish Catholics were increasingly outnumbered by Italians, Maltese and other postwar immigrant Catholic communities. Mannix, who turned 90 in 1954, remained active and in full authority, but he was no longer a central figure in the city's politics. Archbishop Mannix: Champion of Australian Democracy. Doctor Mannix, Archbishop of Melbourne. Daniel Mannix – Archbishop of Melbourne. Archbishop Mannix. Daniel Mannix, Priest & Daniel Mannix – The Quality of Leadership. Daniel Mannix and Ireland.