In Race Mathews’s Of Labour and Liberty, the Split is a disaster for Catholic intellectuals, its significance needing to be understood in the context of the Church’s historic attempt to come to terms with what in the nineteenth century had been identified as ‘the social problem’. The story begins in 1891 with Pope Leo XIII’s encyclical Rerum Novarum, which called for social justice in overcoming mass poverty and social conflict, affirming that it was within the power of the state to improve the economic condition of the working class. Cardinal Manning, a convert from Anglicanism who was largely responsible for the English translation of Rerum Novarum, was active in support of trade unions, notably playing a pivotal role in settling the 1889 London dock strike, on terms advantageous to the dockers. Sydney’s Cardinal Moran was much influenced by Manning and saw the Labor Party as the best option for Australian Catholics, the great majority of whom were working-class.

In the wake of Rerum Novarum, some Catholic intellectuals, looking for an ideology that would provide a clear alternative to the extremes of capitalism and socialism, developed the theory of distributism. The starting point was ‘the restoration of property to the average citizen’. The Flemish priest Joseph Cardijn, who became a leading advocate of distributism, argued that the working class had to accept responsibility, ‘sharing in the running of industry and industrial concerns’. There was an emphasis on local production and commerce, with a hint of nostalgia for the pre-industrial Catholic guilds. Indeed in England, Hilaire Belloc and G.K. Chesterton (another convert), in advocating distributism, stressed the importance of tradition which meant, Chesterton said, ‘giving votes to the most obscure of all classes, our ancestors’.

Two experiments in distributism have attracted attention. In the small town of Antigonish in Nova Scotia priests at the University of St Francis Xavier launched a movement which in the depressed 1930s sought to assert the autonomy of the local community by developing cooperatives and credit unionism. Even more important has been the example of Mondragón in the Basque region of Spain. Here, in the 1950s, Fr José María Arizmendiarrieta brought to fruition a ‘great complex of manufacturing, financial, retail, civil engineering and agricultural co-operatives’ that Mathews researched for an earlier book, Jobs of Our Own: Building a stakeholder society (1999).

In Melbourne, Archbishop Mannix was receptive to distributist ideas, but the formation of the Campion Society in 1931 was the lay initiative of a group of Catholic graduates and students. The society aimed ‘to promote Catholic Lay Action in its intellectual life’ while encouraging its members ‘to attain a fuller understanding of Catholic culture’. Frank Maher and Kevin Kelly were particularly important in its formation and development. Catholic Action began to take formal shape in 1937 with lay-inspired moves to set up, with Mannix’s support, a national secretariat, but differences soon emerged concerning the precise scope of Catholic Action. The official, papal line was that it was ‘primarily a formative, educative action’ and not political, and this was the view of the Campion Society’s leaders. But some, like the young, precocious Bob Santamaria, sought to blur the boundary between the educative and political. He had been taught history by Maher at St Kevin’s College and had been encouraged by his teacher to attend Campion Society meetings; although he had been a brilliant student Santamaria later confessed that ‘the higher flights of philosophy and history’ were quite beyond him, and that he had slept through the first two meetings he attended. But he was an ardent activist and had soon established a close, advantageous relationship with Mannix. During World War II, Santamaria was instrumental in forming a Catholic movement to fight communism in the trade unions. By the end of the war he was secretary of the theoretically non-political Catholic Action National Secretariat while also pursuing the anti-communist crusade in what had officially become the Catholic Social Studies Movement. Not much in the way of ‘social studies’ was involved in the infiltration of the unions, which was soon marked by an authoritarian secrecy that Santamaria seemed to relish.

Pope Leo XIII (seated), 1898
(US State Library of Congress, via Wikimedia Commons)

Distributism was not helped by the sympathy some of its enthusiasts had for fascism. Belloc applauded Franco in the Spanish Civil War, as indeed did Santamaria. Parliamentary democracy as a form of government was under attack between the wars, and even the liberal-minded Maher expressed a preference for ‘organic democracy’. Since World War II, distributism has had a chequered career. The Antagonish Movement seems to have withered away, and in Victoria the cooperatives and credit unions which were enthusiastically set up have tended to atrophy or lose their original purpose. Mondragón survives intact but is not without its critics.

Mathews does stress the importance of distributists seeking progressive allies outside the Church, and criticises Mannix for sometimes unnecessarily alienating Protestants. He notices that in his celebrated Harvester Judgment, which established the basic wage, the Irish-born but Protestant H.B. Higgins seemed to echo the language of Rerum Novarum. Indeed, he knew the encyclical well, having favourably reviewed it in an 1896 lecture published as Another Isthmus in History.

Mathews is concerned, as per the subtitle, with Victoria and gives us only occasional glimpses of what was happening in other states, but it does seem that Melbourne took Catholic Action more seriously than other archdioceses. Essentially, this book is addressed to Catholics. The author laments today’s upwardly mobile, conservative Catholics who disdain the social justice policies of their Church. Mathews is in effect urging Catholics to reclaim their heritage and recognise that distributism might help deal with increasing inequality. Can political democracy survive, he asks, in the absence of economic democracy? Whether or not distributism is the answer, it is a question worth asking.