Catholic Values and Australian Realities James Franklin BACK OF THE COVER Catholic Values and Australian Realities James Franklin BALLAN, VI CTORI A First Published 2006 Connor Court Publishing Pt y Lt d Copyright ( c) 2006 Jam es Franklin All right s reserved Connor Court Publishing Pt y Lt d PO Box 967 Bacchus Marsh VI C 3340 Phone/ Fax ( 03) 5368 2570 ant hony@connorcourt .com .au www.connorcourt .com .au I SBN 0- 9758015- 4- 6 Cover by Connor Court Publishing Cov er phot o: St . John's College fet e 1960, Cam pbellt own, Aust ralian Phot ographic Agency ( APA) Collect ion: Sydney people, places and event s, 1953- 1987, St at e Library of New Sout h Wales, used wit h perm ission. This book does not hav e any official endorsem ent by t he Cat holic Church Print ed in Aust ralia by Openbook Print , Sout h Aust ralia CON TEN TS 1 I nt roduct ion . PART 1 : A D I STI N CTI VE AUSTRALI AN N ESS 3 1 Cat holics Versus Masons 2 Cat holic Thought and Cat holic Act ion: Dr Paddy Ryan MSC 23 3 I m m igrat ion Versus Dem ocracy 47 4 Cat holic Schooldays w it h Philosophy 51 5 Cam pion’s Aust ralian Cat holics 57 6 Sant am aria’s European Sensibilit y 63 PART 2 : CATH OLI C VALUES N OW 7 Tradit ional Cat holic Philosophy: Baby and Bat hwat er 65 8 Secular Versus Cat holic Concept ions of Values in Aust ralian Educat ion 83 9 Account ancy as Com put at ional Casuist ics 97 10 The Mabo High Court and Nat ural Law Values 115 11 I s Jensenism Com pat ible w it h Christ ianit y? 129 12 St ove, Hum e, and Enlight enm ent 135 I ndex 139 I nt roduct ion A USTRALIAN CATHOLICS have had a distinct “image”: Irish tribal loyalties, Labor but anti-communist politics, childhoods full of guilt and incense. There is more to their distinctiveness than that. Their central contribution to Australian thinking is an objective view of ethics. Ethics, Catholics believe, is not a matter of the tribal mores a society happens to have developed, nor is it an arbitrary command of God (or of our genes). Instead, what is right and just is inherent in the way things are. Because human beings are human beings, serious injustice to them is an outrage, a violation of the order of the universe (ch. 7 below). That perspective, explicitly or implicitly, has been behind the unique Catholic contributions to Australian life described in this book. A commitment to the inherent equality in the worth of persons was behind the Mabo decision of the Catholic-dominated High Court, which declared that aborigines had rights in land that could not be ignored by the white colonisers (ch. 10). Similar views were behind the Catholic view of the 1940s on immigration, which held that refugees in war-torn Europe had some right to Australia’s unused spaces (as well as being good for Australia) (ch. 3). On more detailed matters too, such as compensation for loss, objective values based on the worth of persons are not vague motherhood statements but provide a recipe for calculating rights and exactly determining what ought to be done (ch. 9). The untiring anti-communist organising of Dr Ryan (ch. 2) and B.A. Santamaria (ch. 6) reflected not only knowledge of Stalinist atrocities, but a presumption that a materialist philosophy like Leninism could only result in a view of humans as expendable, fit only to be shovelled into mass graves if they were not on the side of “history”. To a lesser degree, Catholics were suspicious of the 1 Cat holic Values and Aust ralian Realit ies ruling secular ideology of Australia and so maintained at great expense their own school system with its distinctive values founded ultimately on its objective ethical philosophy (chs. 4, 8). If Freemasonry was a godless ideology, as Catholics believed, not entirely correctly (ch. 1), then it was certainly unsatisfactory if society in general and the school system in particular were dominated by Freemasons. Catholics were equally suspicious of evangelical Christianity which, they believed, replaced “in accordance with the nature of things” in ethics with an ungrounded and simplistic “the Bible says” (ch. 11). This book is partisan. Though it contains history done fairly as history ought to be, and arguments with a fair view of both sides, the overall pattern points to a conclusion. If Australian Catholics are to make the contribution they should to the Australia of the new century, they need to understand the theory and practice of what was done before. The Catholics of Australia had energy because they knew where they were going. Let us understand what they did and do likewise. There are some important issues hardly treated in the book. One is Catholic religious life – prayer, the Bible, liturgy, theology, charity work and the other activities of the institutional Church. Those are crucial, obviously, in understanding Catholics and their values. But this book concentrates on a single basic issue, an ethical one that can be understood by Australians who do not share Catholic beliefs. It is natural for an outsider to respond to rosaries and novenas with “just not my tradition”. It is not so easy to avoid serious thinking about whether persons have intrinsic moral worth. A second topic not dealt with here is the sexual abuse scandals that have disfigured the reputation of the institutional Church. It used to be thought that Catholics had somewhat exaggerated the seriousness and objective wrongness of sexual sins and that less guilt all round would be liberating. The scandals confirmed – not in the way Catholics would have wished, but confirmed nonetheless – that, for some of those sins at least, they were absolutely right. 2 CH APTER ON E Ca t holics Versus M a sons A S IS WELL KNOWN, one of the most significant events in Australian Catholic history was the withdrawal of state aid to Church schools late last century. In 1880 in New South Wales, and at similar times in other parts of Australia, the State Governments set up systems of ‘free, secular and compulsory’ schools, and at the same time withdrew aid they had paid to the Schools of the various churches. The Catholic Church maintained its system at great expense, at the same time as Catholics paid taxes for state schools. That situation lasted for ninety years, and defined the shape of Australian education thereafter, dividing Australian youth into three categories: those in private schools, usually run by a Protestant Church, those in Catholic schools, and the majority in the secular State school system. It was one of the main reasons for the distinctiveness of Australian Catholic culture. The high point of the Catholics’ struggle against the withdrawal of State aid came with Archbishop Vaughan’s First Pastoral on education, attacking Henry Parkes’ plan for a free and secular school system. Education without religion, Vaughan maintained, Original source: Journal of the Australian Catholic Historical Society 20 (1999), pp. 1-15. 3 Cat holic Values and Aust ralian Realit ies was impossible in principle. It was, he said, ‘a system of practical paganism, which leads to corruption of morals and loss of faith, to national effeminacy and to national dishonour’ and – in a phrase that caused particular offence – the existing state schools were ‘seedplots of future immorality, infidelity and lawlessness, being calculated to debase the standard of human excellence, and to 1 corrupt the political, social and individual life of future citizens.’ His extreme remarks caused a great deal of indignation in Protestant circles. So much is well-known. What is not so familiar is what Vaughan thought about the enemy he was facing. Va u gh a n a n d t h e M a son ic con spir a cy t he or y On 9 October 1876, he gave a speech on what he believed was really behind the campaign for secular education, later printed as a pamphlet called ‘Hidden Springs’. It is one of the great conspiracy theories, combined with a vision of grand conflict of philosophical systems. The three main currents of thought, he says, are Paganism, Supernaturalism and Materialism. Paganism, whose ‘hidden spring’ is man’s animal passion, as shown by the gross immoralities of the gods of Olympus, belongs to the past. The future, unfortunately, may belong to Materialism; the threat is so great that the Catholic and Protestant churches need to co-operate against it. But Vaughan does not see Materialism as just a way of thinking into which it is natural to fall when religion begins to seem less plausible. It would soon disappear, he says, if it were not being ceaselessly revivified by its own hidden spring. ‘The Hidden Spring of Materialism is centred in, and derives its main energy from the Sect, the Church of the Revolution, the International Secret Society, which is weaving its network around the world’, that is, Freemasonry. Promoting a Voltairean gospel of ‘absolute toleration’, its real programme is deicide, and the deification of humanity. ‘The Sect fixes savagely on one dogma of its own, whilst gnashing its teeth at all dogmas, it is this, viz., that absolute liberty and unlimited 4 Cat holics Versus Masons freedom to do, say, or think anything he likes, is the natural and inalienable right of every man.’ It is true that ordinary Masons do not know of the plots of the inner circle, and are often men of character, even dukes, but such men are ‘paraded before the world, that the world may be reassured, that, a blind oath of secrecy notwithstanding, little harm could attach to a Craft, however secret, so long as Dukes and Lords, and men of large estate, and of high character were members of it. How could that Society be subversive of the throne, which is patronised by Royalty itself?’ But the truth is otherwise. ‘The Altar, the Throne, Civil Society as at present constituted, are, under the action of its breath, to melt down into an International Communism, when the impossible equality of all men shall be achieved, when the Almighty God, and, consequently, dogma and Christian morality shall be expunged.’ Earlier, the Masons sneaked out of their lodges to foment the Revolutions of 1789, 1830 and 1848. But now they have a new plan. Spreading from Belgium is an ‘Education League’, and Masons around the world are now to rally behind their campaign. ‘Its watchword or war-cry is “Universal Secular, Free and Compulsory 2 Education”.’ This outburst raises a number of questions. The first one is, is it true? Was Freemasonry an international communist conspiracy, plotting revolutions and the downfall of the Church, and secular education in New South Wales? If not, who were the Masons, why did the Catholic Church find itself in conflict with them, and what is the relation of that conflict to job discrimination against Catholics in the 1930s? No, it is not true. Not of Australia, at least. Freemasonry was not an atheist communist plot. An answer on behalf of the Masons was written by Wazir Beg, earlier a Muslim of Poona but at this period a Presbyterian minister in Redfern and editor of both the 3 Freemason and the Orangeman. His reply to Vaughan denies the charges of atheism, immorality and disloyalty. Masonry inculcates a ‘rigorous morality’ – without dispensations or indulgences – and it is hardly likely that Masonry intends to subvert the State when the last King and the present heir to the throne are not merely 5 Cat holic Values and Aust ralian Realit ies 4 members, but Grand Masters. Beg is right: the idea of an international communist conspiracy led by royalty is ridiculous. All the same, Vaughan is not exactly making his theory up out of thin air. Nor is he alone. To understand what was happening we need to look at the situation in Europe on a long time scale. The Masonic conspiracy theory is part of a plot theory that had wide appeal for the European political right from the time of the French Revolution to the Second World War. The principals in the supposed world conspiracy varied: Masons, Jews, Liberals, 5 Socialists, but the linking idea was that a world conspiracy of some or all these was behind all revolutions real and potential, and all anticlericalism. The Masonic plot theory came first. It appeared in the Abbé Barruel’s Memoirs Illustrating the History of Jacobinism of 1797, which claimed to expose the French Revolution as a Masonic conspiracy. After a long run in the nineteenth century, where it 6 was promoted by Pius IX as an explanation for his troubles (and of course that was where Vaughan got it from), it acquired an 7 antisemitic tinge in the last two decades of the century. The most famous expression of it, the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, written in France probably in the 1890s, was Barruel’s theory over again, with the addition that the Masonic plot was actually controlled 8 from the inside by Jews. Descendants of the Protocols theory include the Nazis’ Jewish conspiracy theory, the Jewish-Bolshevik plot theory that was an issue in Helen Demidenko’s The Hand That Signed the Paper, and the Jewish-Masonic-Communist plot believed 9 in by such people as Franco. Those full-blown conspiracy theories are all false. The Protocols were a forgery, there was no world Jewish plot, and there was no secret international organisation behind all revolutions. It might seem, then, that although Vaughan was not alone, his plot theory was a pure fantasy. That is not quite true. It does not follow that there was no basis at all for the fears of the right. To understand what was really happening, it is necessary to look at what Freemasonry was, and why the Catholic Church was in conflict with it. If it was not a communist plot, what was it? 6 Cat holics Versus Masons Fr e e m a son r y in Eu r ope It was an institutional embodiment of the Enlightenment, or at least of one version of it. The difficulty with the common view of the Enlightenment is that it portrays it as existing purely in the realm of ideas. The philosophies are supposed to have written learned books full of dangerous theories and radical ideas, which somehow filtered down to the bloodthirsty souls who cut off the aristocrats’ heads. Apart from making the mistake of conceiving the Enlightenment as primarily atheist and an enemy of the state, when in general it was neither, this is to take far too intellectual a view of it. A church is not simply a creed and catechism, but also an institution that supplies tradition, ritual, mutual comfort and community support for right conduct and sanction for wrong, and, at least in earlier times, a social security agency. The organ through which the Enlightenment competed in these respects was Freemasonry. After developing in a still obscure fashion out of Scottish and English guilds of stonemasons around 1700, it spread quickly to the Continent and the American colonies during the eighteenth century, and included among its members such notables as Walpole, Pope, Hogarth, Franklin, Washington, Voltaire, Haydn, 10 Mozart and Goethe. It was not the intention of Freemasons to undermine the existing political or religious order. There was nevertheless an inevitable tension between Freemasonry’s ideals of internal constitutional self-government and the absolutist regimes on the Continent. There was also a philosophical conflict between Freemasonry’s ideals of religious toleration and the Catholic view of dogma. As a result, there was a certain amount of police action against the lodges in countries like France, and 11 the Catholic Church condemned Freemasonry. Up to the time of the French Revolution, however, the conflict was not a matter of great importance to either side. Indeed, the Church’s condemnations of Freemasonry were not promulgated beyond the English Channel, and around 1800 Irish Freemasonry was full of Catholics. 7 Cat holic Values and Aust ralian Realit ies The French Revolution was not a Masonic plot in any simple sense, but it is true that Masonic ideals, symbols and organisation 12 had something to do with the origins of the Revolution. Liberty, equality and fraternity were originally Masonic ideals, which one needs to read free of associations with the Terror – in the spirit of 13 the American Revolution, not the French. In the years of the Napoleonic Wars and the Restoration, the lodges did act as covers for the spread of revolutionary brotherhoods, even if Freemasonry 14 as a whole was not revolutionary. It must be emphasised that Freemasonry does not have any international central controlling body – something, of course, which the Catholic Church found hard to understand. That means, on the one hand, that an actual international Masonic plot is unlikely; on the other hand, it means that individual lodges or groups of lodges and shadowy quasiMasonic organisations can be captured by strange ideas, and develop in their own, sometimes revolutionary, directions. For example, around 1820, there were genuine Masonic connections to the Decembrist revolutionaries in Russia, the Carbonari in Italy, and 15 Spanish liberals resisting the Restoration. Even in early New South Wales, there were fears of Masonic revolutionary activity. Governor King feared the French might sail up the Hawkesbury, unite with the Irish at Castle Hill, and leave him defended only by the mutinous rabble of the New South Wales corps. Since all three of these threats were riddled with Masons, he took seriously the possibility of their cooperation on the basis of brotherhood, 16 and suppressed attempts to form a lodge. For the rest of the nineteenth century, Freemasonry was associated with the anticlerical ‘liberal’ political faction in Catholic 17 countries. Latin America was a scene of perennial conflict. An article in the Australasian Catholic Record of 1899 on ‘The just man of the nineteenth century’ tells the story of the Catholic President of Ecuador, Gabriel Garcia Moreno, who dedicated Ecuador to the Sacred Heart, gave the state education system to the Catholic 18 Church, and then was assassinated by, it was thought, Masons. It 19 was the same in Spain. The unification of Italy, with the 8 Cat holics Versus Masons confiscation of the Papal States, was a success for Freemasonry, 20 among other forces. By and large, the Catholic right fought a losing battle. As we saw, they did not attribute that to their being out of touch with the spirit of the age, or to a lack of concern for social problems, but to a literal plot. The control of primary education was one of the main issues in the conflict. Vaughan’s story that the Education League in Belgium was a Masonic front promoting free, compulsory and 21 secular education is entirely true. In France, laws instituted by a heavily Masonic government in 1879-82 took public money from Church schools, and instituted general moral education in public 22 schools. When the Catholics added a Jewish conspiracy theory to the Masonic one, they were discredited over the Dreyfus affair, and in the early years of the twentieth century, a vigorously anticlerical and largely Masonic government took advantage of having the upper hand to expel the religious teaching orders from 23 France and seize their property without compensation. There 24 was a lot of interest in these events among Australian Catholics, and Australia benefited by the immigration of the De La Salle Brothers, whose first Australian school, in Armidale, was founded 25 in 1906 by brothers just expelled from France. At the same time, it came to light in the ‘Affaire des fiches’ that there really was a Masonic conspiracy: the French Masons were keeping a huge card index on public officials who went to Mass, with a view to preventing their 26 promotions. The animosity between French Freemasonry and the Catholic Church waned somewhat in the next decades, but revived when the Vichy regime published long lists of Masons, 27 and sacked them from state schools and other employment. Naturally, not much has been heard of these things since 1945. There was, however, a problem with Vaughan’s theory that what was happening in Australia was the same as what was happening in France and Belgium. It is significant that all the Masonic documents Vaughan quotes as evidence are Continental, and all Beg’s British. British (and hence Australian) Freemasonry is not the same as the Continental variety. It was not in conflict 9 Cat holic Values and Aust ralian Realit ies with the Established Church or the state – on the contrary, kings, prime ministers and Archbishops of Canterbury have been Freemasons. There is no need to plot revolution against a state one controls already or if not ‘controls’, at least has an easy relationship with. Catholic propagandists knew their theory had a problem here, and made the most of the occasional meeting 28 between the Prince of Wales and an Italian Mason. Fr e e m a son r y I n Au st r a lia The story of the influence of the Masons is one of the great untold narratives of Australian history. Manning Clark, for example, though seeing Australian history as an epic struggle between Christian and Enlightenment principles, hardly mentions the main Enlightenment institution, and even full-length biographies of famous Australians often fail to mention they were Masons. They were involved in most of the significant developments in Australia. Joseph Banks was a Mason, and in the early colony, so were Governor Macquarie, Francis Greenway, and 29 the explorers Oxley, Hume and Leichhardt. More than thirty of the hundred and eleven members of the first Commonwealth Parliament were Masons, either at the time or later, ‘some indication’, according to Masons, ‘that our Commonwealth was in its beginning also based on righteousness and virtuous 30 character.’ Almost all of the conservative Prime Ministers up to 1972 – Barton, Reid, Cook, Bruce, Page, Menzies, Fadden, 31 McEwen, Gorton and McMahon – were Masons. Many governors 32 were Masons, often the Grand Masters of their states. Masons prominent in other fields include Edward Hargraves, the discoverer of gold, Lawrence Hargrave, the pioneer of flight, and such quintessentially Australian heroes as Sir Charles Kingsford Smith, Sir Don Bradman and Sir Edward ‘Weary’ Dunlop. The Masonic 33 Historical Society’s web site is informative. The first recognised Lodge, the Lodge of Social and Military 34 Virtues, arrived with the regiment it was attached to in 1814, and Freemasonry was associated with wealth and the party of 10 Cat holics Versus Masons 35 political reform by the 1830s, in both Sydney and Hobart. The lodges spread widely, especially in the 1890s and again between 36 the Wars. Specialised lodges included Lodge Cricket, of which 37 Bradman was a member, Lodge Literature, for newspapermen, and lodges for the old boys of particular schools, such as Sydney 38 Grammar, Fort Street, Sydney High and Shore. Melbourne University, Sydney University and later the University of New 39 South Wales had lodges for academics and graduates. Freemasonry was particularly strong in the Armed Forces, the police, banks, AMP, the state and commonwealth public services, and the councils 40 of country towns. Freemasonry in the army was an issue in the conscription campaigns of 1916 and 1917, since Catholics were not enthusiastic about being drafted as fodder for an officer corps dominated by Freemasonry, ‘the most insidious enemy of God and country … a huge tumour growing upon the life and blood of 41 the whole of the country’ (Mannix). Membership increased again after the Second War, as returned servicemen used the lodges to continue the mateship of the armed forces, and a high point of membership was reached in the mid-1950s, with some 330,000 42 members in about 2,000 lodges, or one Australian man in sixteen. Since there were no Catholic members, and very few blue-collar workers, this represents an extraordinary penetration of the target group, the ‘managerial classes’. This leaves the question, what did Masonic membership mean? It could, of course, mean nothing: like religious membership, it could simply be a way of getting out of the house, meeting people who might help one get a better job, or providing security for one’s widow. Masonic membership seems to have meant nothing to Menzies, for example. He was a club man rather than a lodge man. But for those who took membership more seriously, and many did, more was on offer. Freemasonry is a philosophy. It is not easy to say precisely what that philosophy is, not only because part of it is kept secret, but also because putting ‘doctrines’ into propositional form is not the preferred method of exposition of the Masonic point of view, even to initiates. Freemasonry is 11 Cat holic Values and Aust ralian Realit ies 43 officially ‘a system of morality veiled in allegory’. The allegory and symbolism, intended to assist the imagination and memory 44 of the initiate, is the main method of instruction, and the interpretation of the symbols is to some extent left to the individual. But the general outline of the system is not secret. The only Masonic ‘dogma’, strictly speaking, is the existence of God, belief in which is a condition of entry. Belief in immortality is, however, 45 strongly suggested. Beyond that, religious matters are left to the individual’s own sect; a Mason is expected to pursue his own faith, which may be of any Christian or other theistic persuasion. The centre of Freemasonry is not doctrinal but moral. ‘The whole purpose of Freemasonry is to teach the Moral Law and show that man should live rightly with his fellow man under the 46 all-seeing eye of God.’ The normal meanings of the symbols mostly concern morality. The well-known symbols of square and compasses, for example, symbolise respectively rectitude in general and the circle separating right behaviour from wrong. Truth and 47 honesty in dealings are crucial. Harmony has not characterised the relations of Freemasonry with the more dogmatic religions, and the reasons for conflict concern basic matters of the relation between philosophy and religion. Freemasonry insists that it is not a religion, but admits to being ‘religious’, or having something to say in areas already 48 occupied by religion. Its tolerance of all religions can easily give rise to the impression that dogmatic differences do not matter, even though that is never asserted explicitly. Suspicion in this regard is encouraged by the phrase ‘the Religion in which all men agree’, 49 in the original 1723 Constitutions of Freemasonry. It is clear why Masons should have generally felt happy with a system of secular education. Vaughan’s suspicion that a large-scale movement inimical to his position was under way, and that the Masons had something to do with it, was not altogether without foundation, even if there was no plot. W.C. Wentworth and John Woolley, the earlier leaders of the campaign for secular education, were Masons, while William Wilkins, the effective decision-maker 12 Cat holics Versus Masons on the syllabus, was a prominent Mason, who wrote in favour of 50 the possibility of moral education free of dogma. Parkes was not a Mason, but that was not much consolation for the Catholics, since his views were actually closer to those of the anticlerical 51 European Masons. The conflict between Catholics and Masons did not rest so clearly on any matters of principle. There is nothing explicitly anti-Catholic in Freemasonry (unlike the Orange lodges), and Catholic objections, other than on the secular education question, rested mostly on supposed Masonic plots in Europe and job discrimination in Australia. The main objection of principle was to Masonic oaths, committing Masons not to reveal secrets before 52 they knew the nature of the secrets. Since the 1960s, better 53 relations have prevailed, mainly because Catholic theology has itself adopted a more tolerant view of other religions. The reasons for this are probably not, as some think, that the last four popes have been secret Masons. D iscr im in a t ion in Em ploym e n t in Au st r a lia This brings us to the vexed question of job discrimination. Catholics believed that up to about 1960, at least, most positions of power in organisations like the armed services, many public service departments, the private banks, and so on, were virtually barred to them by a conspiracy of Masons looking after one 54 another. It is very hard to discover any undeniable facts about it. It has not even proved possible to establish whether the best-known story about the whole matter is literally true: that NSW Police Commissioners were by arrangement alternately Masons and Catholics. For one thing, it is difficult to prove that any given failure to get a job is due to underhand motives. And even if there were hard statistical evidence that there were almost no Catholics in, say, the management of the Bank of New South Wales – which there is 55 not – it is hard to demonstrate anything about the reasons for it. And even if there was discrimination against Catholics, it may 13 Cat holic Values and Aust ralian Realit ies have been due to Protestant sectarian feeling, or anti-Irish racism, rather than to the Masons. I know of no admissions by anyone that they ever discriminated against a Catholic in favour of a less qualified applicant for a job, though the Masons have informally agreed that they did provide a certain amount of help to one another 56 with jobs. As one senior Mason explained it to me, Freemasonry is intended to make good men better – unlike religions that hope also to make bad men good. So being a Mason is, other things being equal, a sign of being a good man, and hence a recommendation for a job. Applicants for membership who appeared to be interested simply in improving their employment prospects were supposed to be denied membership. There are hardly even any complaints by Catholics that they were passed over for any definite job. There is one case, though, recently described in some detail. It is in a life of Frank Letters, recently written by his widow. Letters was a classical scholar who applied for and failed to get positions in the late 1930s. When Frank was a young graduate hoping for an academic post, there was not one practising Catholic senior staff member at Sydney University. In 1938, of the forty professors at Sydney University there was no Catholic. It was little different in the higher echelons of education departments, the police force, the public service, banking, and in many businesses. Equally obvious, when you looked closely, was the absence of Catholics from the top legal appointments and among hospital specialists. For a start, Catholics could not be Freemasons, and were therefore automatically excluded from the mutual help towards promotion that Freemasons gave one another. There were of course men with high ideals – and good friends of ours – who enjoyed the convivial nights out at the local Masonic lodge with men friends, helping one another, perhaps even relishing a night out away from the wife. The rank-and-file Mason probably didn’t realize that helping his buddy get ahead in business or career could and often did mean that a better-qualified applicant didn’t stand a chance. That is not justice.57 14 Cat holics Versus Masons It is not entirely obvious, nevertheless, that Masonic influence was responsible in this case. The Professor of Latin, Todd, was a peculiar person, who disliked Letters on personal as much as sectarian grounds. Letters eventually obtained one of the foundation lectureships at the New England University College. When the College became an autonomous University in 1954, all 58 the pioneers were given chairs, except Letters. He never did become a professor, despite his international reputation based on respectable books on Sophocles, Virgil, Thomas Mann and Huysmans, and successful essays and poetry. Academic excellence is more open for inspection than talent in, say, the public service, and it is fair to say that for Letters to fail to get a chair at a provincial university was an obvious scandal. The book has some actual evidence about the role of Masonic influence. All Armidale could see the university men’s cars on Thursday nights near the Masonic Lodge on the corner of Faulkner and Barney Streets. Frank could not fail to deduce that he, a Catholic and the only one not a Lodge member, ‘would never get anywhere’. The dice were loaded against his professional advancement … Frank also recalled the invitation to a welcome for a Supreme Court judge and two barrister friends of Frank’s at Tatt’s Hotel. One had just won a spectacularly interesting case and offered to send some details to Frank, asking for his address. ‘Send it to The Lodge’ was the answer. [The Letters family lived in a former gatekeeper’s lodge at the University.] One of a nearby group, half-hearing the answer but not the question, complained, ‘You university men have taken us over’, assuming that Frank had meant the Masonic Lodge. This was news to Frank who had not up to that point seen the close link between Freemasonry and his colleagues. Once, when delivering a packet of Leaving Certificate English papers to Sid Musgrove [the only other member of his department], Frank looked over the bookshelves where to his surprise he saw books to do with Freemasonry. 15 Cat holic Values and Aust ralian Realit ies ‘Oh no! not you, Sid’, he said, laughing heartily at the thought of Sid, the cynic, being caught up in a conservative secret society. ‘I wouldn’t get anywhere if I didn’t belong’, Musgrove said simply.59 Catholics didn’t take things lying down, of course. Their best chance for advancement came through the system of public service entry through competitive examination, and promotion by seniority. It is an expensive solution to job discrimination, but an effective one. The Knights of the Southern Cross, a kind of 60 Catholic Masons, acted frequently as an employment agency. In due course, there were networks of Catholics as well as networks of Masons in public service departments; if anyone had a just complaint, it was those in neither camp. The best opportunity for Catholics to use raw political power to recover territory from the Masons was in Queensland, where there were Catholic-dominated Labor governments for decades. Freemasons lost ground in the 61 Queensland public service after 1915, and in 1957 the Premier, Vince Gair, took on the University of Queensland for, among 62 other things, an alleged bias in favour of Masons. He failed. Nationalising the banks might have helped, but Chifley and Calwell did not succeed with that particular plan. They did achieve a major change in the ethnic composition of Australia, away from the Anglo-Saxon Protestant mould that prevailed up to then, by importing 180,000 displaced Eastern Europeans, mostly Catholics. It is the multiculturalism of Australia that has done as much as anything to make the old conflicts irrelevant. Finally, a moment of speculation. Possibly the most significant effect for the Church of its long conflict with Freemasonry has been that many of the men in the highest positions in the Church have not understood the English-speaking countries. With the English kings being Grand Masters, and many American presidents being Masons and operating under a Constitution embodying Masonic ideals, how could the mind of the Roman Curia be anything but gravely suspicious of anything coming out of England or America? In particular, ideals of ‘freedom’, toleration and 16 Cat holics Versus Masons constitutional government have not been well understood by the Roman mind. There has been a grave misunderstanding between the international Church and the international language, which has been a great misfortune for both. N OTES 1 Archbishop and Bishops of N.S.W. Pastoral, Catholic Education Sydney, 1879, repr. in P. O’Farrell (ed.), Documents in Australian Catholic History, vol. 1, London, 1969, pp. 386-99. 2 R.B. Vaughan, Hidden Springs, or the Perils of the Future and How to Meet Them, Sydney, 1876; brief summary in J.N. Molony, The Roman Mould of the Australian Catholic Church, Melbourne, 1969, p. 150; similar later in Anon, ‘Freemasonry versus Church and State’, Australasian Catholic Record 10, 1904, pp. 23-41; by Archbishop Kelly, in M. Clark, Sources of Australian History, London, 1957, p. 577, Sydney Morning Herald 15/7/1913, p. 8. 3 ‘Wazir Beg’, Australian Dictionary of Biography, vol. 3, p. 130. 4 W. Beg, Dr. Vaughan’s Ignorance of Freemasonry Exposed, Sydney, 1876, pp. 10, 1921, 34; other replies: D. Allen, Reply to Dr Vaughan Upon Hidden Springs (Sydney, 1877) (on Allen’s anti-Catholic struggles, see F. Beedel, Letters and Other Writings of the Late Pastor Daniel Allen (Sydney, 1901), ch. 13); J.A. Downie, Rome’s Polluted Springs (Sydney, 1877). 5 J.Rogalla von Bieberstein, Die These von der Vershwörung 1776-1945. Philosophen, Freimauer, Juden, Liberale und Sozialisten als Vershwörer gegen die Sozialordnung, Berne, 1976 (see reviews in Annales 33, 1978, pp. 754-6; History of European Ideas 4, 1983, pp. 109-11). 6 R.F. Esposito, Pio IX. La Chiesa in conflitto col mondo. La S. Sede, la massoneria e il radicalismo settario, Rome, 1979 (see review in Catholic Historical Review 68, 1982, pp. 667-8); L. Leoni, La massoneria e le annessioni degli Stati pontificii, Viterbo, 1892-3; summary in F.A. Ferrer Benimeli, Masoneria español contemporanea, Madrid, 1980, vol. 2 pp. 36-41; Australian comment in T.A. Fitzgerald, ‘The present condition of Italy’, Australasian Catholic Record 4, 1898, pp. 36179, 460-74, at p. 467. 7 R.F. Byrnes, Antisemitism in Modern France, vol. 1, New Brunswick, New Jersey, 1950; pp. 126-40, 187-92; R. Millman, ‘Jewish anticlericalism and the rise of modern French antisemitism’, History 77, 1992, pp. 220-36; J. Katz, Jews and Freemasons in Europe, trans. L. Oschry, Harvard, 1970, chs. 10-11. 8 N. Cohn, Warrant for Genocide, 2nd ed, London, 1996, ch. 3. 17 Cat holic Values and Aust ralian Realit ies 9 J.A. Ferrer Benimeli, El contubernio judeo-masonico-comunista: del satanismo al escandalo de la P-2, Madrid, 1982?; Ferrer Benimeli, Masoneria español contemporanea, vol. 2 ch. 5; M.R. Marrus & R.O. Paxton, Vichy France and the Jews, N.Y., 1981, pp. 76, 199. 10 European background in M.C. Jacob, Living the Enlightenment: Freemasonry and politics in eighteenth-century Europe, N.Y., 1991; W.R. Weisberger, Speculative Freemasonry and the Enlightenment, Boulder, 1993; R. van Dülmen, The Society of the Enlightenment, trans. A. Williams, N.Y., 1992, pp. 52-65, 151-65; S.C. Bullock, ‘Initiating the Enlightenment?: recent scholarship on European Freemasonry’, Eighteenth-Century Life 20, 1996, pp. 80-92; Australian knowledge of it in M. Conway, ‘Freemasonry and the Age of Enlightenment’, Masonic Research in South Australia (South Australian Lodge of Research), 1, 1990-4, pp. 19-21; K. Brindal, ‘Brother Mozart, Freemason’, Masonic Research in South Australia 2, 1995, pp. 27-9; N.J. McDonald, ‘Desaguliers’, New South Wales Freemason 29, 1934, pp. 81-2; American background in S.C. Bullock, Revolutionary Brotherhood: Freemasonry and the transformation of the American social order, 1730-1840, Chapel Hill, 1996. 11 J.A. Ferrer Benimeli, Los archivos secretos vaticanos y la masonería, Caracas, 1976; G. Adilardi, Un’antica condanna. le origini di un conflitto tra Chiesa Cattolica e massoneria, Foggia, 1989; R.E. Jenkins, ‘The evolution of the Church’s prohibition against Catholic membership in Freemasonry’, Jurist 56, 1997, pp. 735-55. 12 Annales historiques de la revolution française, special issue July-Sept 1969, especially D. Ligou, ‘Structures et symbolisme maçonniques sous la révolution’, pp. 511-23. 13 Jacob, Living the Enlightenment, p. 12; emphasised in J.E. Carnegie, Freemasonry: its origin, history, principles and doctrines, Melbourne, 1862, p. 7; also P. Carter, ‘Visions of God – a Masonic perspective’, Theosophy in Australia 58, 1, Mar 1994, pp. 16-19. 14 J.H. Billington, Fire in the Minds of Men: origins of the revolutionary faith, London, 1980, pp. 91-9. 15 L.G. Leighton, The Esoteric Tradition in Russian Romantic Literature: Decembrism and Freemasonry, University Park, PA, 1994; Billington, pp. 141-2, 330; R. Lansdown, ‘Byron and the Carbonari’, History Today 41, May, 1991, pp. 1825; B.R. Hamnett, ‘Liberal politics and Spanish Freemasonry, 1814-1820’, History 69, 1984, pp. 221-37. 16 A. Atkinson, The Europeans in Australia, Melbourne, 1997, ch. 12; King to Sullivan, 21/4/1804, Historical Records of Australia, series I vol v p. 142. 17 C. Gazmari, El ‘48’ chileno: igualiterios, reformistas, radicales, masones y bomberos, Santiago, 1992; J.A. Ferrer Benimeli, ‘Bolivar y la masoneria’, Revista de Indias 43, 1983, pp. 631-87; J.P. Bastian (ed.), Protestantes, liberales y francmasones: Sociedades de ideas y modernidad en América Latina, siglo xix, Mexico, 1990; P. 18 Cat holics Versus Masons Rich & G. de los Reyes, ‘Freemasonry’s educational role’, American Behavioral Scientist 40, 1997, pp. 957-67. 18 J. Brennan, ‘The just man of the nineteenth century’, ACR 5, 1899, pp. 16272. 19 M.A. Ortiz de Andres, Masoneria y democracia en el siglo xix: el Gran Oriente Español y su proyeccion politico-social, 1888-1896, Madrid, 1993. 20 R.F. Esposito, Le grande concordanze tra Chiesa et massoneria, Firenze, 1987; L. Braschi, La massoneria e la Chiesa cattolica: un terribile scontro, un possibile incontro, Firenze, 1984; A. Luzio, La massoneria e il Risorgimento italiano, Bologna, 1966; A. Lattanzi, Bibliografia della massoneria italiana e di Cagliostro, Firenze, 1974. 21 R. Desmed, ‘A propos du mémoire de la Loge des Amis Philanthropes sur l’enseignement primaire obligatoire et laïque’, Revue belge de philologie et d’histoire 53, 1975, pp. 357-401, especially pp. 385, 395-401. 22 J.S. Schapiro, Anticlericalism, Princeton, 1967, pp. 56, 60, 153-6; E. Acomb, The French Laic Laws, 1879-1889, N.Y., 1941; T.F. Power, Jules Ferry and the Renaissance of French Imperialism, N.Y., 1966, pp. 16-21; J. Fulton, ‘The revival of church/ state hostility in France: the affair of the religious decrees, 1879-80’, Journal of Religious History 20, 1996, pp. 20-31; P. Nord, ‘Republicanism and Utopian vision: French Freemasonry in the 1860s and 1870s’, Journal of Modern History 63, 1991, pp. 213-29. 23 M. Larkin, Church and State After the Dreyfus Affair, London, 1974, pp. 23-8, 91101, 138-41; C.S. Phillips, The Church in France, 1848-1907, 1936, repr. N.Y., 1967, ch. 9. 24 J.J. Norris, ‘The Catholic Church and liberty’, ACR 3, 1897, pp. 564-72; letter of Leo XIII, ACR 2, 1896, pp. 149-53; D. Lynch, ‘Freemasonry in France’, ACR 8, 1902, pp. 529-46; P.S. Cleary, ‘Freemasonry – the enemy of throne and altar’, ACR 17, 1911, pp. 467-510; M.Q., ‘A few notes on Freemasonry’, Austral Light 4, 1903, pp. 672-4; ‘Hiram’, ‘Sidelights on Freemasonry’, Austral Light 5, 1904, pp. 403-12, 467-73, 515-21, 609-14, 772-8. 25 Br Aloysius, The De La Salle Brothers in Australia, 1906-1956, Sydney, 1956, pp. 19-27; Fogarty, Catholic Education in Australia, vol 2, p. 274; P.V. Dwyer, ‘The Marist Brothers and their work in France’, ACR 12, 1906, pp. 461-9; Count de Mun, ‘The religious persecution in France’, ACR 13, 1907, pp. 398421, at pp. 414-16; R.S., ‘France and the Catholic schools’, Austral Light 3, 1902, pp. 726-9. 26 Larkin, Church and State after the Dreyfus Affair, pp. 138-41: ‘Freemasonry in France’, Austral Light 6, 1905, pp. 164-72, 241-50. 27 D. Rossignol, Vichy et les francs-maçons. La liquidation des sociétés secrétes, 1940-1944, Paris, 1981; R.O. Paxton, Vichy France, N.Y., 1972, pp. 4, 102, 156, 172-3, 255. 19 Cat holic Values and Aust ralian Realit ies 28 T.A. Fitzgerald, ‘The Jewish Masonic combination in France’, ACR 6, 1900, pp. 342-88; Molony, p. 150; A. McLay, James Quinn, 2nd ed, Toowoomba, 1989, pp. 135-9. 29 G.H. Cumming, The Foundations of Freemasonry in Australia, West Pennant Hills, NSW, 1992, pp. 1-10; ‘Was Sir Joseph Banks a Mason?’, NSW Freemason 47, 1952, pp. 185; ‘Francis Greenway’, NSW Freemason 46, 1951, pp. 133-6; P. Krüger, ‘Ludwig Leichhardt: a German geologist of the “Vormärz” period’, in H. Lamping & M. Linke (eds), Australia: studies on the history of discovery and exploration, Frankfurt, 1994, pp. 127-38. 30 K.R. Cramp, ‘Federation and Freemasonry’, NSW Freemason 46, 1951, pp. 441-6, 47, 1952, pp. 313, 48, 1953, p. 5. 31 Freemasonry: Australia’s Prime Ministers, Masonic Historical Society of N.S.W., booklet 2, Sydney, 1994. 32 K. Henderson, Masonic Grand Masters of Australia, Bayswater, 1988, passim. 33 http://www.uglnsw.freemasonry.org.au/historic/historical.html 34 Cumming, p. 6; K.R. Cramp & G. Mackaness, A History of the United Grand Lodge of New South Wales, Sydney, 1938, ch. 4. 35 A.Atkinson & M. Aveling, eds, Australians 1838, Sydney, 1987, pp. 330-1, 314; Clark, History of Australia, vol. 2 pp. 300-1; G.M. Dow, Samuel Terry: the Botany Bay Rothschild, Sydney, 1974, pp. 215, 225-6. 36 The Tongue of Good Report: Lodge Zion no. 218, Gunnedah 1894-1994, Gunnedah, 1994, and similar histories of individual lodges; A. Richards, The Centennial Story: the history of Freemasonry in Queensland, Brisbane, 1959; D. Lauder, ‘Freemasons and Freemasonry in Queensland’, J. of the Royal Historical Society of Queensland 14, 1990, pp. 33-40; R.W. Bell, ‘Freemasonry and early Ballarat’, Ballarat Historian 4, 2, Mar, 1989, pp. 17-21 & 4, 10, Mar, 1991, pp. 6-12; W.C. Vahland, History of Freemasonry in the Bendigo District, Bendigo, 1904; M. Chapman, ‘Jews and Freemasons in the Colony of Victoria 1840-1900’, Journal of the Australian Jewish Historical Society 11, 3, Nov, 1991, pp. 415-91; R.J. Linford, ‘Freemasonry in the Queanbeyan-Canberra area, 1877-1939’, Canberra Historical Journal 36, Sept 1995, pp. 18-27. 37 Lodge Literature no. 500, Sydney, 1938. 38 Cramp & Mackaness, pp. 475, 587-8. 39 Cramp & Mackaness, p. 475; K.R. Cramp, Lodge University of Sydney, 1945. 40 J. Maguire, Prologue, Toowoomba, 1990, p. 63; R. Haldane, The People’s Force, 2nd ed, Melbourne, 1995, pp. 56, 171; B. Winter, The Intrigue Master, Brisbane, 1995, p. 174; Lieut-Gen H.G. Bennett, ‘Anzac Day, 1953’, NSW Freemason 48, 1953, pp. 133-6; R.J.W. Selleck & M. Sullivan, Not So Eminent Victorians, Melbourne, 1984, p. 127; Henderson, Masonic Grand Masters, pp. 89, 91; M. Cannon, The Long Last Summer, Melbourne, 1985, p. 62; ‘Clarke, W.J.’, ADB vol. 3 pp. 422-4; G. Davison, J.W. McCarty & A. McLeary, eds, 20 Cat holics Versus Masons Australians 1888, Sydney, 1987, p. 196; Bill Gammage & N. Spearritt, eds, Australians 1938, Sydney, 1987, p. 237; D. Armstrong, ‘Freemasons on the march again’, Bulletin 3/10/78, pp. 44-6, 51-4; M. Hogan, ‘The Sydney style’, Labour History 36, 1979, pp. 39-46, at p. 42; P. O’Farrell, Catholic Church and Community, Sydney, 1985?, p. 380; D. Horne, The Education of Young Donald, rev. ed., Melbourne, 1988, p. 20. 41 Age 15/2/1916, p. 8 repr. in O’Farrell, Documents in Australian Catholic History, vol. 2 p. 265; cf. pp. 107-9; reply in Argus 17/2/16, p. 9; also 10/7/16, p. 9; ‘The coadjutor-archbishop and the freemasons’, Austral Light 17, 1916, pp. 185-6; some facts about Catholics in the officer corps in D.J. Blair, ‘An Australian ‘officer-type’? A demographic study of the composition of officers in the 1st Battalion, First AIF’, Sabretache 39, Mar, 1998, pp. 21-7. 42 NSW membership figures in M.H. Kellerman, From Diamond Jubilee to Centenary: history of forty years of the United Grand Lodge of Freemasonry in New South Wales, 1948-1988, Sydney, 1990, vol. IV, ch. 5. 43 M.H. Kellerman, ‘Freemasonry’, in Australian Encyclopaedia, 4th ed, Sydney, 1983, pp. 241-4; C.D. Morpeth, ‘A peculiar system of morality’, NSW Freemason 30, 2, Feb 1935, pp. 43-5. W.C. Bowler, ‘Immortality’, NSW Freemason 22, 1927, pp. 169-70. 44 E.A. Hough, ‘What is Freemasonry?’, NSW Freemason 33, 1938, pp. 561-2; F.A. Maguire (ed.), Masonic Foundations, Redfern, 1940. 45 W.C. Bowler, ‘Immortality’, NSW Freemason 22, 1927, pp. 169-70. 46 ‘Masonry and the moral law’, NSW Freemason 42, 1947, p. 185. 47 F.S. McDowell, ‘Masonic philosophy’, in K.R. Cramp, From Jubilee to Diamond Jubilee: history of ten years of the United Grand Lodge of Freemasonry in New South Wales, 1938-1948, pp. 262-4. 48 ‘Masonry not a religion’, NSW Freemason 28, 1933, pp. 208, 223. 49 ‘The charges of a Freemason’, Anderson’s Constitutions of 1723, repr. in M.C. Jacob, The Radical Enlightenment: pantheists, Freemasons and republicans, London, 1981, p. 280; see L. Vibert, ‘Anderson’s Constitutions of 1723’, NSW Freemason 47, 1952, pp. 397-404, 451-8, 467, especially p. 453. 50 ‘Woolley, John’, ADB vol. 6 pp. 435-7; ‘Wilkins, William’, ADB vol. 6 pp. 400-2; W. Wilkins, National Education: an exposition of the National System of New South Wales, Sydney, 1865, p. 12; elsewhere, L. Fletcher, (ed.), Pioneers of Education in Western Australia, Perth, 1982, pp. 72, 159; for Queensland, T.L. Suttor, Hierarchy and Democracy in Australia, 1788-1870, Melbourne, 1965, pp. 302-3. 51 H. Parkes, ‘Darkness or light – which is to conquer?’, Empire 13 Oct 1851, p. 250, partly quoted in Martin, Henry Parkes, pp. 105-6; discussion in A.W. Martin, ‘Henry Parkes and the political manipulation of sectarianism’, Journal of Religious History 9, 1976, pp. 85-92; NSW Parliamentary Debates 21 Cat holic Values and Aust ralian Realit ies 1879-80, vol. 2. p. 1284; discussed in P.F. Cardinal Moran, History of the Catholic Church in Australasia, Sydney, 1895, p. 875, cf p. 869. 52 P.J. Lynch, Freemasonry: Its Incompatibility with Practical Catholicism, Sydney, 1923, pp. 30-2; A.J. Dunn, ‘Christianity and Freemasonry’, Austral Light 8, 1907, pp. 179-90; E. Cahill, The Truth About Freemasonry, Australian Catholic Truth Society pamphlet, Melbourne, 1936; L. Rumble, Radio Replies in Defence of Religion, Sydney, 1936, pp. 292-9. 53 M. Baume, ‘Masons and Catholics: a new understanding’, Bulletin 13/1/68, pp. 20-2; Jenkins, ‘The evolution’. 54 M. Hogan, The Sectarian Strand, Ringwood, Victoria, 1987, pp. 197-202, 217. 55 A preliminary attempt in Anon, ‘Catholics in the Australian public service’, Australian Quarterly 32, 3, Sep, 1960, pp. 16-22. 56 ‘The practical side of Freemasonry’, NSW Freemason 31, 1935, pp. 19. 57 K. Letters, History Will Out: F.J.H. Letters at the New England University College, Armidale, 1997, pp. 37-8; see also E. Campion, Australian Catholics, Ringwood, Victoria, 1987, p. 152. 58 History Will Out, ch. 10. 59 Ibid., pp. 67-8. 60 C.Kierce, ‘The men in the know?’, Observer 12/12/59, pp. 7-9; ‘The silent knights’, Nation 13/1/60, pp. 8-10; ‘The meeting at Chapter Hall’, Nation 6/10/62, pp. 5-6. 61 R.Fitzgerald, From 1915 to the Early 1980s: a history of Queensland, Brisbane, 1984, p. 13. 62 B.Costar, ‘Vincent Clair Gair’, in The Premiers of Queensland, D. Murphy et al (eds)., 2nd ed, Brisbane, 1990, pp. 459-74, at p. 467; M.I. Thomis, A Place of Light and Learning: the University of Queensland’s first seventy-five years, Brisbane, 1985, p. 138; cf. P. O’Farrell, UNSW: a portrait, Sydney, 1999, p. 133. 22 CH APTER TW O Ca t holic Thought a nd Ca t holic Act ion: Dr Pa ddy Rya n M SC M ELBOURNE IN THE 1930S was the scene of the vigorous Catholic intellectual life of the Campion Society.1 Sydney was quite different, and for reasons much debated but still far from clear, its version of the Campion Society was much less impressive, and there was not much in the way of a public or lay Catholic intellectual life.2 In Sydney, Catholic philosophy, apologetics and controversy in the 1930s and early 1940s was almost a one-man show. The man was Father Paddy Ryan. If it was a question of attacking Communists, or replying to objections on radio, or debating philosophers, or setting up Catholic adult education, or writing a pamphlet to prove the existence of God, one contacted the Sacred Heart Fathers at Kensington and got Father Ryan on the job. Born near Wodonga in 1904, he had studied at the Gregorian University in Rome, earning in 1929 doctorates in theology and philosophy with the highest honours, with work on the ‘Question of God’ in modern European philosophy.3 He taught philosophy, of a strictly scholastic Original source: Journal of the Australian Catholic Historical Society 17 (1996), pp. 44-55 23 Cat holic Values and Aust ralian Realit ies orientation, at the Kensington seminary thereafter. A series of lectures for the Catholic Evidence Guild at Sydney University which summarise scholasticism were printed in full in the Catholic Press, at that time more hospitable than later to the discussion of intellectual topics.4 His ability as a controversialist was first widely recognised in a debate with the celebrated atheist Professor of Philosophy at Sydney University, John Anderson, in a symposium on ‘Science, philosophy and Christianity’, in 1936. Anderson argued that ‘in so far as religion sets up a doctrine of meaning or explanations above the facts (‘supernature’) it is unscientific’, and that Christian morality wrongly ‘takes the standpoint of the individual recipient of benefits’ instead of exalting cultural achievement. Ryan then summarised the scholastic position on the knowability of God by natural reason, the reasonableness of faith, and the evils of taking scientific theories beyond their limits. He argued that inconsistencies between the Catholic faith and modern philosophies, such as materialism, were due to the faults of the latter. 5 Anderson and Ryan met again in 1939, in a symposium with two biologists on ‘The origin of life’, the topic of which was really the theory of evolution. The largest hall in the University was packed with 500 people; others were turned away. Ryan here defended one of the most controversial assertions of mid-century scholasticism, one in which he took a special interest: it was that spontaneous generation of life from the non-living is impossible, whether now or in the distant past, for purely philosophical reasons. Ryan argued that the ‘immanent nature of activity in living things’ meant there was a difference in kind, not degree, between the living and the non-living, which could not be crossed without divine intervention.6 Though Catholic philosophy generally was giving up the fight against evolution by the 1940s,7 Ryan did not. In his later pamphlet on the existence of God, he does however argue that if the theory of evolution were true, God would be even more needed, since ‘the Author of world order would have 24 Cat holic Thought and Act ion: Dr Paddy Ryan MSC endowed the primitive organisms with the powers necessary to produce, by gradual development, the present order of the plant and animal kingdoms’.8 Donald Horne recalled attending the debate as a convinced Andersonian of long standing, and still being surprised at the position Anderson took: I had been a believer in Darwinism ever since I had read in Cassell’s Book of Knowledge that ‘The protoplasm was the beginning of the wonderful story of evolution’, and when Pritchett and I stayed back at the university one night to attend a symposium on evolution at which Anderson would be speaking I expected that, since a Catholic priest was to be one of the other speakers, Anderson would launch all his fury against the ignorance and superstition of this clerical bigot. The large lecture theatre was brimming with people, and Anderson sat intent, silent and sadeyed, while the priest jumped on the theory of evolution and a scientist picked it up. Anderson sprang into the ring and floored the priest with a couple of blows. I was astounded when, after an obeisance towards Darwin because, like Freud, he had rejected the dualism of man and nature, he then pummelled evolutionary ethical theory, on, blow after blow, because it was full of progressivist illusions. Things might not get better. They might get worse. With Anderson one did not know where one was.9 There is a much greater sense of the cut and thrust of live argument in the report of a debate Ryan held, also in 1939 and at Sydney University, on freewill. His opponent was A.G. Hammer, a lecturer in psychology at Sydney Teachers’ College, later Professor of Psychology at the University of New South Wales. An audience of 500 was again estimated. Hammer claimed that ‘all our decisions are as necessary as the explosion of a bomb’, and asserted that ‘we can predict all human acts with absolute certainty, granted a sufficient knowledge of a man’s heredity, environment, and other factors extrinsic to the will’. Ryan took his stand on the ‘clear and unmistakable testimony of consciousness that it is very often in his power to choose freely amongst various actions which he has motives to perform’. He is reported, in perhaps a moment of overkill, as having ‘proceeded to prove that the testimony of consciousness is absolutely reliable’. Some interesting exchanges during the discussion are reported, which give some sense of Ryan’s 25 Cat holic Values and Aust ralian Realit ies ability to argue on his feet – as well as the style of public trading of certainties that has come to play less part in the tradition of public debate: Mr O’Neill, an ardent determinist: Dr Ryan assumes the ‘self’ or ‘ego’ to be an abiding reality. But as a mere succession of states, the ‘ego’ could not be self-determining. Dr Ryan: My appeal is to facts of experience. We have the direct and immediate experience of the ‘self’ as an abiding reality and the subject of successive states quite distinct from it. The facts cannot be explained away by futile indulgence in metaphysical speculations concerning the nature of the ‘ego’. Mr O’Neill: Your proof from the validity of consciousness means that all illusions are impossible. Yet there are illusions. Dr Ryan: How do you know that there are any illusions except from your consciousness of them? But the objection is pointless because I appeal, not to the testimony of consciousness merely as testimony, but as presenting objective evidence which enables us to distinguish between illusion and reality, between deliberate and indeliberate acts. The chairman of the debate, John Passmore, perhaps less wellinformed about the history of philosophy than he was later to become, then intervened with a historical point. ‘Relinquishing his duties as chairman’, he accused Ryan of reviving Descartes’ philosophy, and ‘attacked the notion of a self-determining principle, declaring it to be absurd’. Ryan said that Descartes’ philosophy was not the same as Aristotelico-Thomistic philosophy. Mr Passmore: The only person other than Descartes who adopted Dr Ryan’s line of approach was St Augustine, a man not regarded as a philosopher by anyone outside a certain religious organisation. Dr Ryan: Not one word of that is correct.10 Ryan did not confine his campaign to open debate. After collecting statements from students at Sydney Teachers’ College, he had a letter written by his superior to the Director of Education demanding that something be done about the immoral teaching at the College. The determinism taught by the Andersonians at 26 Cat holic Thought and Act ion: Dr Paddy Ryan MSC the College was the focus of the complaints. Dr Rumble’s Radio Replies was used to publicise the campaign.11 Ryan’s interest in Sydney University continued. He claims: I personally have argued for hours with graduates of Sydney University in a futile endeavour to convince them of their own existence, – so deeply had their very reason been undermined by scepticism and sophistry. In condemning things of this sort, we are not condemning critical or progressive thought. We are condemning a perverse negation which spells the suicide of thought and makes all progress impossible. In defending self-evident truths like one’s own existence and personality, or easily demonstrable truths like the existence of God, we are merely defending the foundations without which all talk of justice and injustice is so much meaningless twaddle.12 Donald Horne had the opportunity to tangle personally with Ryan in 1941, when Horne, as editor of Honi Soit, was a representative at a ‘Youth Parliament’ which saw a clash between Stalinists and Catholics. Horne recalls, ‘In the evening I drank beer with some of the Stalinists, infuriated by the unscrupulous red-herring tactics of the clerical fascists, who were not concerned with the constructive work of the Youth Parliament but with disrupting it by obscurantist Gestapo methods . . . Whenever the name “Catholic Action” was mentioned I would fall quiet with hate. We didn’t know much about it, but there were rumours of hysterical meetings and secret plottings in some kind of conspiratorial Catholic anti-Communist campaign that was going on in Sydney. Any Catholic student who wore a Holy Name badge seemed a servant of a black and unscrupulous clerical reaction which, under the subterfuge of anti-communism, represented an ambition of Francoism in Australia.’13 The Catholic resolution which particularly disturbed the ‘Parliament’ was one affirming ‘its complete adherence to the principles of democracy; its repudiation of the Totalitarian 27 Cat holic Values and Aust ralian Realit ies ideologies whether Nazi, Fascist or Communist’. As Ryan said, Catholic Action, like any genuine democratic Australian, would be in favour, so it was fair to ask why the ‘Youth Parliament’ rejected it. ‘Characteristic in this respect’, Ryan adds, ‘is the letter by Mr D.R. Horne, published in ‘Honi Soit’ issue of June 27, 1941. Mr Horne writes with deep emotion – with more heat than light. I gather from the references to the “unbalanced priest” who speaks over Radio 2SM, “the vaporisings of Dr Ryan”, the “Catholic papers” and sundry threats of Blitzkriegs to come, that he is making some sort of attack on me. But he does not face the real point at issue . . .A genuinely democratic Youth Parliament really representative of the Youth of Australia would deserve support. But the same cannot be said of a Youth Parliament which provides a convenient cloak for anti-democratic and anti-British propaganda.’14 Rumours of Catholic plots, Stalinists exposed . . . much more was to be heard of these themes in the coming years. Ryan gave a series of lectures on campus in 1943 which provoked the usual polarisation of opinion.15 There is a thoughtful reply to his arguments for the existence of God by medical student Doug Everingham, later Minister for Health in the Whitlam Government.16 Ryan was employed by the Church in a huge range of activities during the 1940s and 50s. In 1936, during one of the hierarchy’s periodic wringings of hands over the loss of young Catholics after they left school, lecture courses on apologetics and social theory were instituted, with Ryan as director.17 He was again involved, providing much of the study material, when the movement was reformed, with great but temporary success, in 1938.18 After the War, he headed a ‘Workers’ School of Social Reconstruction’.19 In 1954, the problem was as unsolved as ever (‘There is practically no such thing in Australia as the Catholic mind’, according to Ryan20) and an Adult Education Institute (Director, Paddy Ryan) was set up in the city to offer courses in apologetics, theology and public speaking (but not philosophy, where it was presumably not thought worthwhile to compete with the Aquinas Academy). Enrolments, 28 Cat holic Thought and Act ion: Dr Paddy Ryan MSC however, were never more than a few score. He debated on the radio on more or less anything; in a single broadcast of 1941, he dealt with the permissibility of moderate consumption of alcohol, the idiocy of chain letters (‘shows the depth of absurdity to which people can fall when they lack genuine religion’) and the responsibility of H.G. Wells for the War (‘If people teach, as Mr Wells does teach, that the Ten Commandments are so much junk, they have no right to complain if Hitler presents them with a working model of their own philosophy’).21 Radio Replies were one area where Ryan did have a rival, however. His colleague at Kensington, Dr Rumble, specialised in the genre, and books of his replies sold millions in Australia and overseas.22 In 1943 Ryan shot dead a man in mistake for a rabbit.23 It was the Red Peril, however, that came to take up most of his energy. Catholic emotional involvement in the Spanish Civil War had resulted in Catholics being more concerned than most Australians about the perils of international Communism. While many Australians maintained a generally favourable view of the USSR at the time when Stalin was on the same side during the war against Hitler, and the membership of the Communist Party of Australia reached a peak in 1944, Catholic circles remained solidly hostile to Stalinism. In 1943, Ryan answered one of the most effective leftist pamphlets of the day, Dean Hewlett Johnson’s Socialist Sixth of the World. This was the pamphlet which had converted to Communism the young Frances Bernie, hitherto active in Catholic youth organisations, leading to her leaking papers from Dr Evatt’s office to the Communist Party and later to her appearance before the Petrov Royal Commission.24 Ryan’s answer, concentrating on the lack of freedom of religion in Russia,25 sold some 45,000 copies.26 There was a reply by the indefatigable Communist, Lance Sharkey, long-time General Secretary of the Communist Party of Australia. Sharkey says that Lenin is as much in favour of a moral way of life as Father Ryan. But the fact that employers and their press laud the strike-breaker as a hero, while the workers regard him as a 29 Cat holic Values and Aust ralian Realit ies scab (‘the most immoral creature on earth’), ‘refutes Father Ryan’s standpoint that there is a general, fixed system of morals that applies to all conceivable conditions’. Further, Sharkey says, it is not part of Communism to attempt to uproot religion. It must be allowed to wither away with the ‘improvement of the material conditions of the masses’ and ‘the development of knowledge of nature through scientific investigation’.27 Ryan replied in a series of articles, collected into a pamphlet with the title Said Comrade Sharkey. It is a superior piece of propaganda. The chapter on ‘Comrade Sharkey’s “Truth” about Spain’ is illustrated with pictures of murdered priests in Spain; that on ‘Religion in Soviet Russia’ has an enormous amount of evidence about the truth of Stalin’s persecutions. Ryan’s finest hour came with a public debate at the Rushcutters Bay Stadium on 23 September 1948, on the topic ‘That Communism is in the best interests of the Australian people’. His opponent was Edgar Ross, a member of the central committee of the Party. Despite rain, 30,000 turned up, clogging the trams. Half of the crowd had to hear the debate outside through loudspeakers. Ross opened with a quotation from Pope Leo XIII on the need to find a remedy for the misery and wretchedness of the working class. He went on to condemn monopoly capitalism, Imperialism, atomic bombs, American bases. ‘Against this, the Soviet Union stood strong, secure, stable and prosperous (applause and boos)’. ‘The family was the bulwark of Soviet society (Laughter). In no country of the world were human rights so explicitly acknowledged. The Catholic Church in Russia enjoyed complete freedom of activity. (Dr Ryan scribbles furiously and waves a gently protesting hand to shush the audience)’. Ryan then spoke. He alleged Communism was based on a degraded philosophy of life, that its programme necessarily involved ruthless and unlimited dictatorship, and that the Australian Party had no loyalty to God or country but only to Moscow. ‘The audience broke out into coughing as Dr Ryan went measuredly into the influence of the philosopher Hegel on the thought of Karl Marx’, but perked up when he waved the Communist Manifesto and discussed the 30 Cat holic Thought and Act ion: Dr Paddy Ryan MSC possibility of getting a divorce in Russia simply by sending a card through the post to the registrar. Even more shockingly, he alleged that workers in Russia were forbidden to strike. Ross, in reply, ‘claimed that Dr Ryan had given a lot of generalisations on philosophy, a few lies about the Soviet, but nothing about the practical tasks confronting the worker in the real situation today’. Catholic preaching about the evils of society was like trying to cure cancer with an aspro. To Ryan’s claim that all the Catholic bishops in Russia were dead, in exile or missing, Ross replied that the churches were open ‘in thousands’ in Russia. ‘To the laughter he shouted, “Do you think I would pull the wool over your eyes?” One solitary shrill feminine voice shouted: “Yes”.’ Ryan asked what reliance could be placed on Ross’s word, when ‘according to Lenin, Communist morality was wholly subordinated to the class struggle of the proletariat’. ‘In saying that the Catholic Church supported Fascism, Mr Ross was (again the quiet unimpassioned voice) a liar. The Catholic Church was the deadliest enemy of Fascism, and of Red Fascism, too (Wild applause)’.28 Ross writes briefly of the occasion in his memoirs. He complains that ‘both sides were supposed to have equal rights in admittance to the Stadium and ring-side seats. But when the doors were thrown open the ring-side and many rows back were already stacked with nuns, priests and students from catholic institutions, who led the cheering and booing.’ (According to others, the Communist Party Central Committee had done its best to round up all available members of the Eureka Youth League and the New Housewives Association.29) Of their action Ross writes, ‘A report of the event took up half the front page of the Sydney Morning Herald and had the positive effect of introducing communism to thousands of people.’30 He omits to mention that the other half of the page was taken up with the latest news on the Berlin blockade. An ability to put an upbeat construction on the facts was becoming increasingly necessary to Party members, and would become more so. Ross was one of the leaders of the Coal Strike the next year that did so much to assure Menzies’ election victory. 31 Cat holic Values and Aust ralian Realit ies Ryan’s wish to spend some of his time in such an abstruse matter as the influence of Hegel on Marx is a perfect example of what Frank Knopfelmacher was later to call the ‘seminarian-deductive’ attitude to political doctrines. It is characterised, according to Knopfelmacher, by a ‘naive’ kind of intellectualism, which is preFreudian and pre-Marxist in believing in the ‘authentic force and causal efficacy of intellectual convictions’.31 Ryan certainly did believe that, though whether it is naive is arguable. In any case, Australia has cause to be grateful for the ‘intellectualism’ that led to the Cold War being fought here, not with the secret killings of many other countries, but by nothing much worse than Dr Ryan lecturing the Communist housewives of New South Wales on Hegel. Ryan continued to speak against Communism to large audiences, notably at the time of the Coal Strike.32 During the campaign for Menzies’ anti-Communism referendum of 1951, he toured the country, earning headlines in local papers like ‘ ‘Peace’ movement part of Communist plot for war’ (Armidale Express), ‘Big audience hears Dr. P.J. Ryan talk on the Red menace’ (Goulburn Evening Post), ‘Anti-Communist authority in Walcha’ (Walcha News).33 These speeches, and Ryan’s study materials, are the prototypes of the thousands of Evils of Communism speeches in emotion-charged church halls that are such a central element in the Catholic Childhood of legend. An interesting feature of Ryan’s own treatment of the issue, not always imitated, was his insistence on the positive aspects of Catholic social philosophy, and its incompatibility with laissez-faire capitalism: What we need is not less capital, but more capitalists: not the abolition of property, but the wider distribution of it among private owners. We want this to enable the worker to become an owner so that he might achieve economic independence and political freedom. The industrial capitalist admitted in theory the right of personal property, but denied it in practice to the great majority of his fellow men.34 Ryan is of course not saying anything unusual here. His programme is in line with the ‘corporatist’ view of society, as a 32 Cat holic Thought and Act ion: Dr Paddy Ryan MSC potentially homogeneous whole of organizations representing various interests, which also found expression in the Catholic bishops’ social justice statements.35 The project aroused little enthusiasm outside the Catholic Church and was eventually allowed to lapse as the fight against Communism took centre stage; the Hawke government’s ‘politics of consensus’ has some resemblances to it. Ryan’s position was average, except possibly for his support for bank nationalisation, which did not find much support from other Catholic leaders.36 The public speeches were only the tip of the iceberg of Ryan’s anti-Communist crusade. Ryan had been during the 1930s a leading proponent of ‘Catholic Action’, a phrase with a range of meanings covering any lay action from prayer to politics.37 Party political action was excluded, but political action to combat Communism was not. As early as 1940, or possibly even in 1937, he had investigated the possibility of setting up Catholic cells in the unions,38 and around the end of the War he was effectively the founder of the Movement in Sydney.39 B.A. Santamaria credited Ryan with having achieved the difficult task of convincing Cardinal Gilroy that enthusiastic support for secret anti-Communist action was necessary.40 Gilroy appointed Ryan the Sydney director of the Movement about 1946, with the title ‘Director of the Catholic Social Science Bureau’ and an office in the city, though without much in the way of money to run it.41 The story of the success of the Movement and its allies in Sydney is still far from written. Suffice it to say that in 1949 there were many Communist-controlled unions and within a very few years there were almost none. Facts have come to light, however, about one comparatively small but interesting aspect of the Movement’s activities in Sydney, their collaboration with the security services. The matter casts some light on Ryan’s opinions on the morality of various actions. The records of an ASIO investigation of 1953 into leaks of information from the Commonwealth Investigation Service, the forerunner of ASIO, to Catholic Action in the late 1940s provides 33 Cat holic Values and Aust ralian Realit ies an insight into contacts between the security services and Ryan’s operation. A senior officer, in the course of denying that he had passed any information to Catholic Action, writes: 1. I was an officer of Commonwealth Investigation Service from March, 1933, to October, 1949, when I transferred to ASIO. I had official contact with Catholic Action over the greater part of this period and visited the office of that organisation regularly up to about 1946. My dealings were with Dr Ryan, [deleted] and two persons whose names I do not now recall who were employed by the organisation prior to [deleted]. I was aware that Brigadier Alleghany and Mr Barnwell, of Commonwealth Investigation Service, were in contact with Catholic Action in that period also. 2. From approximately 1946 my C.I.S. duties became supervisory and I ceased to visit Catholic Action office, although I was in telephone contact from time to time. Brigadier Galleghan was also in contact, I think mainly by telephone, but Dr Ryan visited Commonwealth Investigation Service’s office on at least one occasion to see him.42 (Brigadier ‘Black Jack’ Galleghan, earlier commander of the Australian troops in Changi, was at this time Deputy Director of the C.I.S. in Sydney, and was soon to go to Europe to select nearly 200,000 anti-Communists, mostly Catholics, for Calwell’s immigration program.43 Bill Barnwell was also an anti-Communist specialist and also went to Europe to select refugees.44) Further documents in the same ASIO file indicate that the C.I.S., and later ASIO, continued to employ an officer at Catholic Action headquarters, with Ryan’s approval, for the purpose of acquiring information about suspected Communists which came from Catholic Action members. (Payment, £2, subtracted by Catholic Action from the officer’s salary). Catholic Action felt the security forces were ill-informed about, especially, union matters, and were happy to fill the gap.45 The relationship between the two organisations was not close, and had its vicissitudes. From the point of view of ASIO, the aim was to get information without giving any in return, and Catholic Action sometimes resented 34 Cat holic Thought and Act ion: Dr Paddy Ryan MSC giving high-quality information, such as shorthand records of highlevel Party meetings, without sufficient reward in terms of information usable for propaganda purposes. On the other hand, C.I.S. and later ASIO suspected that information they gave sometimes returned to them from other sources. To check this, in 1948 an officer supplied some false information, which was received back via Naval Intelligence. More disturbing was a leak of security information in 1948, though its nature is not disclosed. The investigation of 1953 revealed that a Catholic Action officer had actually worked from ASIO’s office at Edgecliff. It will be appreciated that if [deleted] used the Edgecliffe (sic) ASIO office for the purpose of carrying out Catholic Action organisational work, it left ASIO open to grave repercussions, if this became known to persons unkindly disposed toward this organisation. Such persons could imply that ASIO and Catholic Action were ‘hand in glove’, and working in common to the point of sharing the same office.46 More alarmingly for all concerned, some information about the liaison was publicly exposed. On 6 Aug 1949, W.T. Dobson, secretary of the Industrial Group in the Federated Clerks Union, dragged himself from Sydney Harbour into Nielsen Park, rang the police, and claimed that Communists had thrown him from a Manly ferry and stolen a bag containing secret documents relating to Catholic Action. 47 Two days later, he changed his story, confessing that he was a fanatical anti-Communist and had made the story up to smear Communists.48 Dobson’s confession was a relief to both sides. The Communists enjoyed portraying ‘Diver’ Dobson as typical of anti-Communists, and escaped any suspicions that their political methods might include throwing their opponents off ferries. The Catholics and security gained a general scepticism about any documents that might be associated with Dobson. That was just as well, because the Party still had the documents (though no story as to how they came to have them), and proceeded to splash photostats of them in Tribune and Labour News. They led with a particularly choice item, an official letter to Calwell agreeing to his request that a phone line be urgently 35 Cat holic Values and Aust ralian Realit ies installed for Dobson in his hotel room.49 Calwell made no attempt to deny its authenticity and was compelled to explain in Parliament: Mr. CALWELL. – I did make representations to the PostmasterGeneral at the request of Mr. Dobson. He came to see me, and fooled me. He came to me as the assistant secretary of the industrial group of the Federated Clerks Union and said he had the blessing of the head-quarters of the Labour party in New South Wales. I plead those facts in extenuation of my lapse. He was accompanied by another prominent representative of the industrial group, and he told me that he was carrying on certain work which, I believed, was of national importance. I made representations to the Postmaster-General to the effect that Mr. Dobson might by given telephone facilities, if that were possible, and a silent number to enable him to carry on the work of the industrial groups inside the union. Mr. BEALE. – Was that work of national importance? Mr. CALWELL. – That, to me, seemed to be work of very great importance.50 Calwell went on to suggest Dobson was linked to the Communists and to the Liberal Party, presumably on the principle that the more theories about Dobson there were, the better. In view of later events, it is not to be expected that either Calwell or the Movement should be keen to mention their co-operation, but the Parliamentary record is there. Calwell, one of the founders of the Groups,51 had fallen out with them by 1948, but was still prepared to support their anti-Communist initiatives in 1949, the year in which the Groups caused his dumping from the Victorian state executive of the Labor Party.52 Further documents, said to be pages from Dobson’s private notebook, included such gems as ‘Ryan appears to get a lot of unofficial information from Security’.53 Since these facts are now confirmed by ASIO documents, there seems no reason to deny that the Dobson notebook was as genuine as the Calwell letter. Dobson had committed an extraordinary series of frauds. In 1946 he had got a trip to Europe on Royal Navy ships by posing as 36 Cat holic Thought and Act ion: Dr Paddy Ryan MSC a war correspondent for fictitious publications. He had been jailed for fraud in Hong Kong but escaped prosecution in Manila. In Shanghai in 1948, he created a great deal of trouble with allegations of corruption against an Australian member of Parliament and an immigration official in Shanghai, and by claiming that one of the ‘top ten’ Nazis had got into Australia as an immigrant after escaping in a U-boat to Japan. The allegations proved unfounded and Dobson eventually confessed to fabricating them in order to pressure the Australian consul to help him while he was imprisoned by the Chinese (awaiting trial for fraud, naturally). Unfortunately, one of the Dobson allegations had meanwhile turned out to be true, namely that Australia had admitted as an immigrant a Mrs Glatzel, alias ‘Diana Hamilton’, who had broadcast Nazi propaganda in Shanghai during the War. Since the revelation of this information would have created unfavourable publicity for the immigration program, the matter was suppressed and Dobson given a free trip home.54 The only good aspect from the antiCommunist point of view was that the combination of Dobson’s falling on his sword and the revelation’s appearing in Tribune, whose credit rating was poor, caused enough doubts about the whole matter to have it forgotten among larger matters like the Coal Strike and the coming election. In connection with the takeovers of political bodies, there arose a subtle question of moral philosophy, disagreements over which caused much anguish in Movement and anti-Movement circles. The question is, may one vote at meetings of organisations to which one pretends to belong, but does not? James McAuley, generally supportive of the Movement, had been most worried about the question, and was assured by Santamaria that stacking of meetings with people ineligible to vote had never been a Movement tactic – or if it had once or twice happened, in Sydney, it had been put a stop to.55 The NSW central office of the Movement did issue instructions against stacking union meetings in general; approval was occasionally given when there was considered to be a ‘moral certainty’ that Communists would stack the meeting. The belief that stacking was widespread is probably to be attributed to knee37 Cat holic Values and Aust ralian Realit ies jerk reactions of those defeated in union elections by Movement candidates.56 On the other hand, students at Sydney University, where the Movement had spectacular success in 1951 and controlled all major student organisations, reported that Ryan positively encouraged Arts and Engineering students to vote at Medical students’ meetings and vice versa. Father Pryke, then chaplain at Sydney University and later a critic of the Movement, recalled that ‘Dr Ryan had once come back from the Vatican and reported to him and some Movement people that he had consulted some top moral theologians at the Gregorian and Lateran Universities and they had advised that Catholics were morally justified in doing anything that Communists did’.57 Many Catholics were not prepared to lie on demand, and left the Movement over such tactics. Ryan’s point of view must be seen in an internationalist perspective. The ‘top moral theologians of the Gregorian’ were of course seeing the problem in terms of Hungary and Czechoslovakia (and Italy, the subject of some very pessimistic assessments in Church circles).58 There does seem something ridiculous in urging the future victims of Stalinism in, say, Czechoslovakia in 1948, to watch the people planning to hang them from lampposts vote illegally at meetings, but to scrupulously avoid doing the same themselves. Ryan and his supporters, like the Communists themselves, transferred their vision of an international struggle of immense forces of good and evil to the sleepy backwater of 1950s Australia. Those who had lived all their lives in Australia, especially, found it out of contact with local reality. The onus of justification for dubious tactics, then, probably shifts to the question of whether the Movement really believed a takeover of Australia by Communists from within was possible. It is the moral consequences of the question that account for its ability to generate so much heat even now.59 Another factor to take into account is that the inner Sydney branches of the ALP were not the scene of decent and civilised exchanges of views in the first place. Branch-stacking was a way of life in them long before the Communists, let alone the Movement,60 and there would not have been much point in getting involved at all in them without being prepared to match 38 Cat holic Thought and Act ion: Dr Paddy Ryan MSC ‘normal’ tactic for tactic. Still, it is a high-risk strategy, to say the least. What if (as Guy Fawkes no doubt wondered) one is found out? That can be a problem even for those who do not pretend any special ethical superiority, as Richo discovered. It is far more of a problem for churchmen, whose raison d’être involves a bid for occupation of the high moral ground. When it was discovered that Ryan was, so to speak, subordinating morality to the struggle against the proletariat, people came to suspect that ‘everyone, from the Cardinal down, is guilty of conniving at arrant dishonesty’.61 Nothing came out into the full glare of publicity, but it is not difficult to understand why the Sydney bishops and the Vatican became extremely anxious to pull the plug on the Movement. Computational casuistics is not easy. Gilroy appointed his auxiliary, Bishop Lyons, to oversee the Sydney Movement. Lyons did not get on with Ryan, nor, it appears, with many other members. In 1953 Lyons had Ryan replaced as director with a Jesuit seen to be a partisan of the Melbourne Groupers. Ryan was widely thought to have been unjustly treated and the resulting tension contributed to the parting of ways between the Sydney and Melbourne branches of the Movement that had such far-reaching consequences at the time of the Split.62 Ryan himself resented the Melbourne takeover.63 The tension is illustrated by an event at the 1954 conference of the Movement in Melbourne. Ryan moved that in future, not all the speeches be given by Santamaria, as happened that year, but his motion was soundly defeated.64 Ryan was a key speaker at the meetings in 1956 at which the vast majority of New South Wales Movement men decided to accept the Sydney bishops’ policy of staying with the Labor Party instead of joining their Victorian and Queensland colleagues in what later became the DLP.65 At the meeting of seven to eight hundred Movement leaders held at St Paul’s, Kensington, on 30 September 1956, which finally saw the decision to ‘stay in and fight’ agreed to by almost all, Ryan spoke after Bishop Carroll. A participant recalled: 39 Cat holic Values and Aust ralian Realit ies The substance of Dr Ryan’s address was that he would obey his Bishop even if he thought he was wrong, but on this matter he knew his Bishop was right – history proved that break-away parties never lasted – ‘they were not worth two bob’.66 It was this meeting, as it happened, that provided the occasion for the closest the bishops came to public exposure as liars. In 1959 the Catholic Weekly officially denied claims in the Sydney Morning Herald that Catholics had been adjured to stay in the ALP ‘as a matter of loyalty to the Cardinal’. One of the participants at the Kensington meeting offered to name the speakers and the most prominent of those present, if the claim were made again. Nothing more was heard of the matter.67 In a brief document of 1962, ‘Why the Movement failed’, Ryan argues that the original policy of purely fighting Communism was not kept to, and the Movement began to target nonCommunists and thus became rightly seen by many Labor leaders as a danger to themselves. Further, in some places – though not Sydney – there was infiltration by the enemy.68 It is not entirely clear what Ryan means by the ‘failure’ of the Movement. If it was not intended to take control of the ALP, but only break the Communist hold on unions, then it would appear to have succeeded. If, on the other hand, its aim was to effect a spiritual transformation of Australian workers and replace monopoly capitalism with a harmonious society of medieval guilds, providing contented artisans and farmhands with the leisure to master scholastic philosophy, then doubtless it failed to do so, but the prospects of success were surely so low as to make depression at the outcome inappropriate. Ryan was still on deck in 1968, complaining about the laxity of Church responses to Humanae Vitae; there is no possibility, he thinks, of a Catholic disagreeing in conscience with the Pope’s ruling.69 He died in 1969.70 Catholic intellectual life has become more diverse since Paddy’s day. Its leaders are, in their various ways, more professional, better able to stay abreast of overseas developments. But who could get thirty thousand on the trams out to Rushcutters Bay? 40 Cat holic Thought and Act ion: Dr Paddy Ryan MSC AFTERW ORD In a meticulously researched article, Phillip Deery was able to reveal how Dobson’s documents came to be in the possession of the Communists. Dobson had sold them the documents. (P. Deery, ‘Labor, Communism and the Cold War: the case of “Diver” Dobson’, Australian Historical Studies 28 (1997), 66-87) N OTES 1 C.H. Jory, The Campion Society and Catholic Social Militancy in Australia 1929-1939 (Sydney, 1986). 2 Jory, ch. 11; N. McDonald, War Cameraman: The Story of Damien Parer (Port Melbourne, 1994), ch. 4; B.F. Duncan, From Ghetto to Crusade: A Study of the Social and Political Thought of Catholic Opinion-Makers in Sydney During the 1930s (PhD thesis, Dept of Government, Sydney University, 1987), pp. 221-4. 3 P. Ryan, De via morali quam ad Deum cognoscendum proposuit Eduardus le Roy, thesis, 1932. 4 P.J. Ryan, ‘The new scholasticism: its origin and history’, Catholic Press 26/4/ 1934, p.6, ‘The fundamental tenets of scholasticism’, 17/5/34, p. 12, ‘The fundamental tenets of scholasticism’, 7/6/34, p. 6, ‘Philosophy and theology: the attitude of the moderns’, 12/7/34, p. 10. 5 O.U. Vonwiller, J. Anderson & P.J. Ryan, ‘Symposium on science, philosophy and Christianity’, Science Journal (Sydney University), Michaelmas 1936: 24-36.1 6 ‘Symposium on ‘The Origin of Life’, Catholic Press 20/7/1939, p. 27; ‘Symposium on the ‘origin of life’, Catholic Freeman’s Journal 20/7/39, p. 30; cf. ‘Evolution’, in Question Box, Catholic Freeman’s Journal 18/4/40, pp. 6-7; similar from the Anglican camp in T.C. Hammond, Fading Light (London), ch. 6. 7 F.A. Mecham, ‘Evolution and man’, Australasian Catholic Record 26 (1949): 19-28, 262-8; J. Burnheim, ‘Biology versus Catholic philosophy: a new approach’, Australasian Catholic Record 27 (1950): 267-71. 8 P.J. Ryan, The Existence of God: The Argument from Design, Annals publication no. 49 (Kensington, 1950), p. 22. 9 D. Horne, The Education of Young Donald (2nd ed, Ringwood, Victoria, 1988) pp. 179-80. 10 ‘Have we freewill? Lively debate at Sydney University’, Catholic Freeman’s Journal, 27/5/1939, p. 20. 11 Reports on A.G. Hammer, W.H.C. Eddy and Dr Woodward, in Ryan archives, section Articles, folder Teachers’ College Reports, with letter of M.D. Forrest MSC to G.R. Thomas, NSW Director of Education, 14/12/39; Dr 41 Cat holic Values and Aust ralian Realit ies Rumble, Question Box, ‘Must teachers be agnostics’, Catholic Freeman’s Journal 19/10/39, p. 10; ‘Is censorship immoral’, 2/11/39, p. 6; ’Methods at Teachers’ College’, 16/11/39, p. 6; ‘Man not rational!’, 23/11/39, p. 6; ‘Teachers’ College dogmas’, 30/11/39, p. 6; ‘Teachers’ College defended’, 7/12/39, p. 6; ‘Animals at Teachers’ College’, 14/12/39, p. 12; ‘Action at the Teachers’ College’, 21/12/39, p. 6. 12 P. Ryan, Question Box: ‘We stand for order and sanity’, Catholic Freeman’s Journal, 3/7/41, p. 8.4I 13 Horne, pp. 262-4. 14 ‘The cat got out’, in Dr Ryan’s Question Box, Catholic Freeman’s Journal 10/7/ 41, p. 8; Horne letter in Honi Soit 18 (14) (27/6/41), p. 2. 15 ‘Enquiry not hindered: Ryan on religion and science’, Honi Soit 15 (12) (22/ 4/43), p. 1; ’2 aspects of Ryan’s 1 truth’, Honi Soit 15 (24) (26/8/43), p. 1. 16 D. Everingham, letter, ‘Dr. Ryan refuted’, Honi Soit 15 (26) (30/9/43), p. 3. 17 ‘Catholic Action: Educational lectures inaugurated’, Catholic Press 19/3/1936, p. 10; ’Catholic Action Association’, 3/12/36. 18 Jory, p. 105; Duncan, ch. 10; ‘Rev Dr Ryan’s course of public lectures’, Catholic Freeman’s Journal 13/7/39, p. 21; see the regular ‘Secretariat of Catholic Action’ page in the weekly Catholic Freeman’s Journal during 1939 to mid1941. 19 P. Macphail, ‘What’s being done about adult education’, Catholic Weekly 5/9/ 1946, p.3; lecture notes of the School are in the Ryan archives. 20 Quoted in N. Turner, Catholics in Australia: A Social History, (Melbourne, 1992), vol. II, p.111. 21 P. Ryan, ‘Radio replies and comments’, The Southern Cross 2/5/1941, p. 5; ‘Rev Dr Ryan’s Question Box’ appeared weekly in the Catholic Freeman’s Journal from 7/3/40 to18/12/41; Protestant objections in ‘Dr. Ryan and intolerance’, The Watchman 2 (1) (February 1942), 8, 9, 13; ‘The Loyal Orange Institution of N.S.W. replies to Dr. Ryan (R.C.)’, The Watchman 2 (3) (Apr 1942): 10-11. 22 E. Campion, Australian Catholics (Ringwood, Victoria, 1987), pp. 134-6; biography in Who is Father Rumble?, pamphlet (St Paul, Minnesota, n.d.). 23 Sydney Morning Herald, 22/5/43, p. 12. 24 Royal Commission on Espionage: Transcript of Proceedings, vol. 3 p. 1329. 25 P.J. Ryan, Dean Hewlett Johnson’s Socialist Sixth: A Commentary, (Sydney, 1943). 26 Campion, Australian Catholics, p. 133. 27 L.L. Sharkey, Reply to Father Ryan (1943), summarised in The Sharkey Writings, ed. L.H. Gould (Sydney, 1974?), pp. 159-62; also L.L. Sharkey, ‘Marxism and morals: Dr. Ryan answered’, Tribune 2/10/48, p. 7. 28 ‘Stadium’s record crowd hears political debate, with big anti-Communist majority’, Sydney Morning Herald 24/9/1948, pp. 1, 3; ‘Huge stadium crowd shows wide interest in Communism’, Tribune 29/9/48, p. 8; ‘Ryan versus Ross’, The Watchman 8 (10) (November 1948): 219; full text of the speeches in ‘Full report: Dr. Ryan in debate with Communist’, Catholic Weekly 30/ 42 Cat holic Thought and Act ion: Dr Paddy Ryan MSC 9/48, pp. 1-4, 19-20; the Russian ‘postcard divorces’ were an out-of-date allegation, as other Catholic experts were well aware: F. Sheen, Communism and the Conscience of the West (Garden City, N.Y., 1948), ch. 7; Ryan earlier on this in ‘Divorce by postcard’, Catholic Freeman’s Journal 18/12/41, p. 8. 29 News Weekly 15/9/1948, reported in ASIO file on Catholic Action, Australian Archives series A6122/30 item 1222 30 E. Ross, Of Storm and Struggle (Sydney, 1982), p. 113. 31 F. Knopfelmacher, Intellectuals and Politics (Melbourne, 1968), pp. 76-7. 32 ‘Dr Ryan to lecture’, Catholic Weekly 13/3/47, p. 5; ‘Priest’s bitter attack on communism’, Sydney Morning Herald 9/10/1947, p. 4; ‘Dr Ryan’s attack on Communism at Religion and Life Conference’, Catholic Weekly 16/10/47, pp. 7, 21 (full text in Ryan archives, section Articles, folder Communism); ‘Priest attacks Reds at Paddington’, Catholic Weekly 6/11/47, p. 7; ‘Public meeting’, Canberra Times 18/2/1948; ‘Civil war only aim of communists’, Argus 2/3/1948; ‘Challenge forced Ryan to retract’, Tribune 23/6/48, p. 7; ‘Communist debater answers “loaded” question by priest’, Tribune 11/12/ 48, p. 8; ‘The red menace in Australia’, pamphlet printed by Record Printing Company, Rockhampton, 1949, with text of Ryan’s address at Rockhampton of 3/5/49; ‘Socialists’ cure is worse than disease, says priest’, Sydney Morning Herald 29/9/1949, p. 4; ‘Military conquest of Australia planned by Reds’, Sydney Morning Herald 21/4/1950, p. 3 (also Sun of same date); ‘Communist aim – world conquest’, Honi Soit 22 (21) (14/9/50), p. 2; T.P. Boland, James Duhig (St Lucia, 1986) p. 328; J.P. Maguire, Prologue: A History of the Catholic Church as Seen From Townsville (Toowoomba, 1990), p.155. 33 Dates respectively 26/5/1951; 20/8/51; 31/8/51. 34 ‘Socialists’ cure worse than disease, says priest’, Sydney Morning Herald, 29/9/ 1949, p. 4; more fully in ‘Social justice for all: Dr Ryan, MSC, expounds Christian programme’, Catholic Press, May 1941; and P.J. Ryan, World Problems, Annals publication no. 14 (Kensington, 1938); C. Lewis, People Before Profit: The Credit Union Movement in Australia (Kent Town, S.A., 1996), p. 15. 35 M. Hogan, ed, Justice Now! Social Justice Statements of the Australian Bishops, First Series, 1940-1966 (Sydney, 1990); M. Hogan, ‘Australian Catholic corporatism: proposals for industrial councils in the 1940s’, Labour History no. 62 (May, 1992): 91-105; for a very recent iteration of traditional Catholic opposition to laissez-faire capitalism, see A. K. Dunstan, ‘Guilds and other matters’, Annals Australasia 117 (1), January-February 2006, pp. 24-26. 36 G. Henderson, Mr Santamaria and the Bishops (Sydney, 1982), p. 71. 37 P.J. Ryan, An Outline of Catholic Action, Annals publication no. 5 (Kensington, 1935); summary in Duncan, pp. 158-60; other Ryan pamphlets in the Annals series are On creed and dogmas and all that (no. 6, 1936); The restoration of all things in Christ (no. 9, 1936); The Church and marriage (no. 10, n.d.). 38 Jory, pp. 119, 144 n. 6; Duncan, p. 232; see Ryan’s Question Box, Catholic Freeman’s Journal: ‘Red attack on Catholic Action’, 14/3/40, p. 7; ‘Catholic 43 Cat holic Values and Aust ralian Realit ies Action versus Communism’, 28/3/40, pp. 6-7; ‘Join your union’, 22/5/ 41, p. 8 and ‘What is Catholic Action?’, 13/11/41, pp. 9, 24. 39 P. Ormonde, The Movement (Melbourne, 1972), p. 3; G. Williams, Cardinal Sir Norman Gilroy (Sydney, 1971), p. 51; Henderson, p. 26; J. T. Kane, Exploding the Myths (North Ryde, NSW, 1989), p. 23; R. Murray, The Split (2nd ed, 1972), p. 46. 40 B.A. Santamaria, Against the Tide (Melbourne, 1981), p. 85. 41 Williams, pp. 52-3. 42 ‘Liaison with Catholic Action’, (27/10/53), in ASIO file on Catholic Action, Australian Archives series A6122/30 item 1222. 43 S. Arneil, Black Jack: The Life and Times of Brigadier Sir Frederick Galleghan (Melbourne, 1983), pp. 131-45; A. Davies, ‘“Black Jack” Galleghan and the ‘D.P.s’: Australian immigration and a modern Major-General’, Australian War Memorial History Conference, February 1983, pp. 1-16. 44 M. Bialoguski, The Petrov Story (1955, repr. Melbourne, 1989), p. 36. 45 K.C. Davis (NSW State Secretary of the Movement) to author, 15/7/95. 46 ‘Irregularities and improper control of sources – leakage of security information’, in ASIO file on Catholic Action, as above; summary in D. McKnight, Australia’s Spies and Their Secrets (Sydney, 1994), pp. 202-3. 47 ‘Anti-Communist union official says he was thrown off ferry’, Sydney Morning Herald 7/8/49, p. 1. 48 ‘Police reject story of murder attempt on ferry’, Sydney Morning Herald 8/8/49, p. 1; ‘Industrial group plot exposed: Australia saved from tragedy’, The Rock 5 (33) (18/8/49): 1,8; ‘“Stupid, crude”: Dobson case’, Sydney Morning Herald, 26/10/49. 49 ‘Calwell linked with Dobson’, Tribune 13/8/49, p. 1. 50 Commonwealth of Australia, Parliamentary Debates, House of Representatives 21 September 1949 (vol. 204 p. 395; further pp. 463-6); see also ‘Calwell’s bid to slide out of scandal won’t fool workers’, Tribune 24/9/49: 3. 51 Calwell, Be Just and Fear Not, p. 218. 52 Calwell, p. 172. 53 Tribune 27/8/49: 3; also 7/9/49: 6; copy of latter, with denials by CIS officer, in CIS File on Dobson, Australian Archives series A432/82 item 1949/ 851. 54 Australian Archives series A1838/1 item 1542/36 (Dept of External Affairs, Security File on Dobson). 55 Santamaria, pp. 276-7; cf. Ormonde, pp. 36-8; S. Short, Laurie Short (Sydney, 1992), p.187. 56 K.C. Davis to author, 9/5/95 and 17/5/95. 57 Ormonde, p. 43. 58 See, e.g., R. Hall, ‘Should you ever go across the sea from Ireland . . .’, Eureka Street 5 (2) (March 1995): 24-9, at p. 29. 44 Cat holic Thought and Act ion: Dr Paddy Ryan MSC 59 P. Ormonde, ‘A sort of healing’, Eureka Street 4(9) (November 1994): 16, and letters of K. Davis and P. Ormonde, 5(1) (January/February 1995): 7 and 5(2) (March 1995): 8. 60 G. Richardson, Whatever It Takes (Sydney, 1994), pp. 57-8; Kane, p. 41. 61 McAuley to Santamaria, 30/8/1955, quoted in Santamaria, p. 276. 62 Henderson, pp. 103-5; Williams, pp. 54-5; Santamaria, p. 167; Murray, pp. 128-9; Ryan’s complaints about Lyons in ‘Memorandum to His Eminence, Norman Cardinal Gilroy, Archbishop of Sydney, October 1952, Subject: The present state of the organisation in the Archdiocese’, in Ryan archives, section Articles, folder Communism. 63 K.C. Davis to author, 9/5/95. 64 G. Henderson, ‘B.A. Santamaria and the cult of personality’, in 50 Years of the Santamaria Movement, ed. P. Ormonde (Sydney, 1992), pp. 43-58, at p. 44. 65 Santamaria, pp. 204-6; Kane, p. 127. 66 M. Carroll to Santamaria, quoted in Kane, p. 144. 67 Kane, p. 142; Santamaria, pp. 206-7; cf. Kane to Gilroy, 21/12/1956: ‘We are unable to reconcile your Eminence’s reported intervention with the statement of your Secretary that you take no part in the affairs of political parties’. 68 P. Ryan, ‘Postscript 1962: Why the Movement failed’, typescript, Paddy Ryan archives, St Paul’s Seminary, Kensington. I am grateful to Mr Tony Caruana, archivist at St Paul’s, for help with these archives, which have provided much of the information on Dr Ryan. 69 P. Ryan, ‘Catholic conscience and “Humanae Vitae”,’ typescript, Ryan archives. 70 Obituary, ‘Crusader for truth’, Catholic Weekly 23/1/69, p. 3. 45 Cat holic Values and Aust ralian Realit ies Dr P.J. Ryan (centre), 1948 46 CH APTER TH REE I m m igra t ion Versus Dem ocracy O NE OF THE awkward features of democracy is that some of the stakeholders in a government’s decisions do not have votes. They include orphans in institutions, those suffering severe mental disability, foreign nationals and refugees seeking asylum, and it is no surprise to find them at various times the victims of governmental interventions ranging from bureaucratic hassles to indefinite confinement. Special difficulties arise if a government decides, for one reason or another, that it needs to act on behalf of one of these groups, but the voters are unlikely to be convinced. Should the government conspire against the electors, and pull the wool over their eyes? A case in point is the Australian immigration program since World War II. The transformation of Australia into a multicultural nation since 1947 is not something that the Australian people were asked to approve. Nor were they told the reasons why their successive governments agreed to it. Original source: IPA Review (June 2002), p. 29. 47 Cat holic Values and Aust ralian Realit ies In 1946, Australians were almost entirely of British and Irish descent. There were no plans to change that. Meanwhile, there were a million anti-Communist Eastern Europeans – Baltic peoples, Poles, Ukrainians and various others – in camps in Germany and Austria, refusing to be shipped back East. They threatened to disturb the reconstruction of western Europe. In contrast to the ineffectual responses of the international community in almost every other refugee crisis, this one was solved firmly, efficiently and soon. In 1950, the camps were empty and were burned down. The million refugees had been parcelled out to countries with plenty of money and space. 180,000 of them – 2% of the Australian population – were New Australians, and Australia’s road to multiculturalism had begun. The Australian people were not told any of this – of the behind the scenes arm-twisting to round up reluctant host countries, of the cables from Whitehall instructing the Australians to get on with it, of the worldwide lobbying efforts by Catholic representatives (Immigration Minister Arthur Calwell, later a Papal knight, wrote in reply to his thank-you note from the Vatican, ‘no letter which I have written in the six years in which I have been privileged to hold Ministerial office in this country has given me greater pleasure than this acknowledgement of the Holy Father’s appreciation of my humble efforts in the cause of distressed humanity.’) For local consumption, the story was cast in terms of ‘populate or perish’ considerations and arguments about labour for national development. Those reasons were genuine enough as far as they went, but they were far from the full story. The Australian people were told only what they were likely to want to hear. When overpopulation threatened the political stability of Italy and Greece in the early 1950s, the same co-ordinated action was undertaken and Australia was again among the largest recipients. Australia helped again with the smaller Hungarian refugee crisis of 1956. It was not so keen to help after the fall of Saigon in 1975; according to Employment Minister Clyde Cameron, Whitlam 48 I m m igrat ion Versus Dem ocracy angrily refused to have any ‘f***ing Vietnamese Balts’ coming here. But when South-east Asian nations began towing boat people back to sea in 1979, the U.S. State Department organised international pressure, and Australia, by then under the Fraser government, was yet again among the largest contributors to the resettlement of all the Vietnamese in the camps. Contrasting those events with recent ones, Malcolm Fraser noted that Calwell knew unionists in his time would not have agreed to large-scale immigration, so he avoided asking them. Similarly, Fraser said, ‘If I had asked Australians, do you want me to embrace policies which will lead to about 200,000 Vietnamese … coming to Australia; … if I’d taken that vote people would have said ‘no’. But we believed that it was necessary in Australia’s interest …’ As a reason for policy change, ‘we were pressured by great and powerful overseas friends’ is not something a democratic government can sell to its constituents. It may be a sound and honourable reason for action nevertheless. N OTE James Franklin is, with R.J. Stove, writing a book on the international dimensions of Australian immigration, especially of Calwell’s Displaced Persons program of the late 1940s. 49 Cat holic Values and Aust ralian Realit ies 50 CH APTER FOUR Ca t holic Schoolda ys w it h Philosophy I N HIS autobiography, B.A. Santamaria recalled his schooldays at Melbourne’s St Kevin’s College: The type of Catholic ‘apologetics’ which was the strength of religious teaching at St Kevin’s prepared my mind for John Henry Newman and later C.S. Lewis, who both provided confirmation of my religious beliefs. To the professional philosopher, Newman and C.S. Lewis might appear to be no more than popularizers of other men’s ideas. Yet I do not despise the popularizer, since it seems that there are few new objections to religious belief. What one normally encounters are new formulations of the old objections – except, of course, for those contemporary philosophic systems which, in complete selfcontradiction, pretend to prove the uselessness of reason as a mechanism in the search for truth … In the last analysis, the ‘apologetics’ we absorbed could not lift religion above dependence on an act of faith, but an act of faith sustained by, and consonant with, reason. It was not an act of faith standing, as it were, unsupported or contrary to reason ... Sheehan’s Apologetics and Christian Doctrine provided me, as a schoolboy at matriculation standard, with the rational justification for my act of faith in Catholic Christianity. When I examine what so many Catholic students at the same level are offered today, I stand appalled not merely at the intellectual poverty of the offering but at the ease with which so many so-called teachers of religion dismiss the intellect as a convincing support for religious belief in favour of highly subjective ‘religious experience’. I can understand why so few students believe anything at all: for that which reason does not sustain rests on most unsubstantial foundations when confronted with the challenges of the ‘new morality’ (which, as someone remarked, is only the old immorality writ large).1 51 Cat holic Values and Aust ralian Realit ies Santamaria here recalls a time when Catholic intellectual life, from primary school up, was informed by a complete official philosophy, the scholasticism of St Thomas Aquinas. Thomas Keneally’s memoirs at the corresponding point also describe the impact of the ‘nifty’ arguments for the existence of God in Sheehan’s Apologetics, and represent the author as briefly inspired to combat the evil forces of atheistic Sydney University philosophy.2 The Catholic childhood of legend was more than guilt and incense, and one of the essential extra ingredients was philosophy. The Catholic Church has always been more hospitable to philosophy than other religious bodies. It has taken the view that if ‘reason’ is a danger to faith, as it obviously is, then the solution is not less reason but more. It is true that the Australian Church has always had at least its fair share of anti-intellectuals, and some leaders of the local church have regarded the pursuits of the mind as an irrelevance and a nuisance, but others argued the opposite, as a response to the pluralism of a colonial society. According to a writer of 1896: The simple rudimentary Christian knowledge which was sufficient for the poor exile of Erin while yet in his own saintly island village, where his humble home was perhaps sheltered by the ivy-clad ruins of some ancient church or monastery, where he saw ‘books in the running brooks, sermons in stones, and good in everything,’ did not suffice when he found himself in a land where both press and pulpit teemed with calumny against his Holy Faith, and where there were then few shepherds to ward off the wolf from the fold.3 In any case, decisions on such matters were made in Rome. Official policy was to ensure that even primary school children understood their faith as clearly as possible, through instruction in the Catechism. At a time when tertiary and even upper secondary education was a rarity, the Catechism was the text that did most to create a difference between a Catholic and a secular education. It began on an abstract note: Q. Who made the world? A. God made the world. Q. Who is God? 52 Cat holic Schooldays wit h Philosophy A. God is the Creator of heaven and earth and of all things and the Supreme Lord of all. Q. How do we know that there is a God? A. We know that there is a God by the things that He made ... Q. If God be everywhere, why do we not see Him? A. We do not see God, because He is a pure Spirit, and therefore cannot be seen by us in this life … Q. Had God a beginning?4 And that is just part of the first page. The later parts of course do not deal in such abstract and philosophical issues, but the precision of the definitions is notable throughout. They are a philosophical education for those with an ear for such things: Q. What is man? A. Man is one of God’s creatures, composed of a body and soul, and made to God’s likeness. Q. How do you know that you have a soul? A. I know that I have a soul because I am alive, and because I can think, reason and choose freely.5 Q. What is sin? A. Sin is any wilful thought, word, deed or omission contrary to the law of God.6 Q. What is presumption? A. Presumption is the expectation of salvation without making proper use of the means necessary to obtain it.7 Q. What is a lie? A. A lie is the saying of anything that we believe to be false.8 As an intellectual training, it was not without effect either. Little girls came up with curly questions like ‘How could Our Lady have free will if she couldn’t sin?’9 and ‘How could a God of intrinsic goodness create evil?’10 The risk in relying on argument, of course, is that the audience may not be convinced. ‘I remember Sister Amard who tried to teach me the philosophical proofs of the existence of God, and thereby destroyed my faith completely because she didn’t know them; rather, she did know them but they weren’t valid’, says Germaine Greer. She adds: ‘the nuns were 53 Cat holic Values and Aust ralian Realit ies dreadfully incompetent at teaching Catholic philosophy. The Jesuits on the other hand were very good at it, and if I’d been taught by Jesuits I’d probably still be a Catholic.’11 The reputation of the Jesuits for increasing the validity of arguments is no doubt exaggerated. The passage from Santamaria refers to the two central themes of Catholic philosophy, the consonance of faith and reason, and the objectivity of ethics. The Church has welcomed the search for arguments for the existence of God,12 and has tried to resolve the apparent incompatibilities of faith and reason, such as conflicts between science and religion, and the problem of evil. It has also been committed to natural law ethics. The reason murder is wrong, on this view, is neither an arbitrary command of God (or of society, or of our genes), nor a free-floating rule, nor some fact about the greatest happiness of the greatest number, nor its failure to be ‘free and enterprising’ in John Anderson’s sense, but the intrinsic worth of persons, which makes their destruction wrong. As Paddy Ryan explained it: Ultimately, then, the morality of human acts is not to be explained by the civil legislation, public opinion and tradition, nor the authority of great men, nor mere utility, nor by gradual evolution from brute beginnings, nor their relation to the production of the super-man, but by their conformity to the law of God, founded in the nature and essential relationships of things, and known by reason. On the other hand, the morality or immorality of our acts does not depend wholly on God’s will. In other words, a thing is not always bad because God forbids it; God forbids it because it is bad.13 The two themes themselves stem from a more basic doctrine, also mentioned by Santamaria. Thomas Aquinas inherited from Aristotle an unusually optimistic view of reason’s ability to know important truths. While sense knowledge may be subject to manifold errors, the human mind, it was believed, has an ability to understand with certainty important matters of principle, like mathematics, philosophy and ethics. It is this capacity to understand objective general facts about the world that grounds both our reasoning about God and our ethical conscience. 54 Cat holic Schooldays wit h Philosophy N OTES 1 B.A. Santamaria, Santamaria: A Memoir (Melbourne, 1997), p. 8. 2 T. Keneally, Homebush Boy (Melbourne, 1995), pp. 37, 43, 45; similar in Sweet Mothers, Sweet Maids, ed. K. & D. Nelson (Ringwood, 1986), pp. 168-9. 3 M.J. Treacy, ‘The necessity of being able to give a reason for the faith that is in us’, Australasian Catholic Record 2 (1896), pp. 412-24, at pp. 415-6. 4 Catechism of Christian Doctrine: Adapted for Australia by 2nd and 3rd Plenary Councils (4th ed, Sydney, 1944), p. 11; almost identical, but lacking the third question, in Catechism: Approved for General Use by the Cardinal Delegate, Archbishops and Bishops (Sydney, 1905), p. 9; see M. Sheehan, ‘Some remarks on the catechism problem’, ACR 14 (1937), pp. 182-9; recollections in J. Redrup, Banished Camelots: Recollections of a Catholic Childhood (Sydney, 1997), pp. 127-8. 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 Catechism, 1944, p. 12. Catechism, 1905, p. 25, ‘actual sin’ in 1944, p. 29. Catechism, 1944, p. 34. Catechism, 1944, p. 38; cf. A. Coady, ‘The morality of lying’, Res Publica 1 (2) (Winter, 1992), pp. 6-9. Nelson, Sweet Mothers, Sweet Maids, p. 130. J. Arnold, Mother Superior Woman Inferior (Melbourne, 1985), p. 101, cf. pp. 143-4. G. Greer in There’s Something About a Convent Girl, ed. J. Bennett & R. Forgan (London, 1991), pp. 88, 92; also in C. Packer, No Return Ticket (Sydney, 1984), p. 88. 12 Arguments for the existence of God in the apologetic style in L. Rumble, Radio Replies in Defence of Religion (Sydney, 1936), ch. 1; L. Rumble, Questions People Ask About the Catholic Church (Kensington, 1972), ch. 1; L. Dalton, Can We Prove There Is A God? (Kensington, 1939); P.J. Ryan, The Existence of God: 13 The Argument from Design (Kensington, 1950). P.J. Ryan, ‘The fundamental tenets of scholasticism’, Catholic Press 17/5/1934, p. 12 & 7/6/1934, p. 6. 55 Cat holic Values and Aust ralian Realit ies 56 CH APTER FI VE Ca m pion’s Aust ra lia n Cat holics E DMUND CAMPION’s book, Rockchoppers, published in 1982, was a major publishing success, for a book about religion. There was more to this than the novelty of a priest writing something that people wanted to read. It was a very personal, readable and direct account of the author’s reaction to the changes in the Church in his lifetime. Since his reaction was that virtually all the changes were good, Campion came in for a good deal of fire from conservatives; a particularly severe review in Quadrant (November 1982) was entitled, ‘The disintegration of intellectual Catholicism.’ But the critics found little of what the Catholic Weekly film reviews used to call ‘objectionable scenes and other reservations’ – no heresies, no really nasty political commitments, no scurrilous attacks on saintly elders. Many readers, both members and non-members of the Church, found the book a valuable account of one man’s faith. The natural question about any author’s second book is, is it as good as his first? Or even, is it different from his first? Australian Catholics is a much less personal book than Rockchoppers, much more an objective social history. Campion has certainly taken to heart the criticism that Rockchoppers was too much about the author and Review of Australian Catholics, by Edmund Campion (Viking). Original source: Quadrant 32 (1/2) (January-February 1988), pp. 114-6 57 Cat holic Values and Aust ralian Realit ies his coterie. There is even an element of overkill in his determination to include every Catholic group, of every persuasion. Everything is in it – frontier nuns, the Holy Name Society, Catholic homosexuals, seminaries, relief agencies, the Assumption Society for Invalids. That account is throughout clear, well-written and fast-moving. The impression left is of an Australian Catholic culture of immense size. ‘The apron bar had sold 250 aprons by early afternoon’, said the report of the 1967 Moonee Ponds parish fête; how many times does that item have to be multiplied to give an idea of the size of the Catholic enterprise? The impression is often of huge energy, too, especially in the early years. Like the universe, Australian Church history seems to have been a slow working out of massive clashes of elemental forces in its early minutes. The famous conflict between Mary McKillop and the Bishop of Adelaide, which resulted in her (temporary) excommunication, was apparently only one of such clashes of titans. Vows of poverty and celibacy left these people with a large surplus of energy to expend. Joined to a vow of obedience, and confined, such energy could produce a St Thérèse of Lisieux; the Australian Church represents the opposite extreme, where there was a continent to expand in. In fact, Australia did not even get a random sample of those who took vows as priests and nuns. Our presbyteries and convents were largely built by Irish who had not only taken vows, but also volunteered to go to the other end of the world for life. Such a sample has an over-representation of the power-mad, naturally, leading to the spectacular struggles between bishops and mothers superior at one level, and at another the impact on young minds that has produced the ‘Catholic childhood’ of literature. Generations of seven-year-olds believing they will be eternally burnt if they miss Mass on Sunday is a part of Australian Catholic history that celebratory volumes like Campion’s omit, but that has to be included in a fair evaluation. Balancing that is an opinion of a pupil of the nuns, quoted by Campion: Convent girls are inducted into life by a rare and eccentric breed of women who reject the servility of marriage with all the paraphernalia of middle-class acquisitiveness. If it hadn’t been for 58 Cam pion’s Aust ralian Cat holics the nuns, I might well have gone to a secretarial college, had streaks put in my hair and married a stockbroker. This is from an Australian Women’s Weekly article by Germaine Greer. As Campion’s story approaches the present, more of it is taken up with Left-Right battles. Of course, this in-fighting is only pursued by a minority, and the majority reasonably enough takes no notice and continues with the serious work of the Church, like its spiritual life and the St Vincent de Paul Society. On the other hand, the matter looms large in public perceptions – during the papal visit of 1986, the newspapers wrote about little else. The outcome of these struggles also affects the future, by influencing what is taught in the schools. The ‘Left’ and ‘Right’ in the Church are not to be simply identified with the Left and Right generally; to begin with, both sides regard politics as of secondary importance. This complicates the picture, so here is a very quick guide to the two camps. The Left can generally be recognised by the use of the Greek words like ‘charism’ and ‘kerygma’. They are in favour of contraception (but not usually abortion), home Masses, and married and women priests, and find the terms ‘dialogue’ and ‘social justice’ inspiring. Their vocabulary is further explained by their belief that the language of serious theology is German. They see the Right as a clique of grim-faced clerics and poorly-educated fathers of ten, unable to open their minds to the modern world. They believe that the Right will die off in due course, but in the meantime has too much influence with the bishops. The Right may be recognised by saying, ‘Vatican II was only a pastoral Council.’ They are in favour of the Pope and St Thomas Aquinas, and find the terms ‘magisterium’ and ‘the family’ inspiring. They see the Left as a small band of café intellectuals and pregnant social workers, who adhere to various heresies already condemned by many Councils. They believe the Left will gradually disappear, as trendy priests marry and leave the Church, but that in the meantime the Left has too much influence with the bishops. 59 Cat holic Values and Aust ralian Realit ies Though Campion is by now the chief spokesman of the Catholic Left in Australia, Australian Catholics represents a certain attempt to be even-handed. Give or take a few patronising remarks, he succeeds, up to about 1960. Unfortunately the account of the last thirty years is both perfunctory and one-sided. There is even a slight suggestion that he tried to be fair earlier in order to be partisan later. Campion thinks that the loss of numbers and confidence in the 1960s and 1970s is giving way to a revival, led by dynamic people on the Left like himself. Certainly there is a revival. Catholics are now the largest religious denomination in Australia; their numbers showed an increase in the last census, and in the one before, while all other major denominations declined. Catholics schools are bulging, and the vigour of groups at the parish level is obvious. But there is nothing especially Left-leaning about any of this. Opus Dei is as vigorous as any other Catholic organisation. There is another gap in Campion’s story. Australian Catholics are numerous, and a picturesque lot, but what are they for? Perhaps it is too much to ask a historian to answer that question, but since the only readable books about Australian Catholicism are by historians – notably Campion, Patrick O’Farrell and Tim Suttor – it is not too much to expect them to give some idea of what Catholics have to offer. Australians’ problems are not primarily about wealth. The concern for most is not how to acquire material things, but what to do with them, and themselves. Australia is much afflicted by materialism, in both the philosophical and the jacuzzi-owning senses. Neither kind has anything to say about what is worth doing; everyone knows this. But some things are worth doing, others are not, others are wrong; everybody knows this too. So the supply of moral indignation is siphoned off by the political Left, or by the political Right’s reaction to the idiocies of the Left. Surely this is getting us nowhere. In Rockchoppers, Campion tells of going to one of James McAuley’s last major speeches, and being shocked that the main subject matter was the importance of parliamentary democracy. This is not very fair to McAuley, but the instinct is 60 Cam pion’s Aust ralian Cat holics sound. Defending liberalism and the literary classics does not constitute much of an aim in life. Catholics have something different to say: the moral and spiritual parts of a person can go together with thinking of the highest standard, resulting in the best possible understanding of the world and the clearest view of what should be done. Thinking, regrettably, has not been one of the strong points of the Australian Church. Campion treats well one of the bestknown facts about Australian Catholic history; so much effort was put into building a complete education system that there wasn’t much left over for other things. Thought, for example. Individuals have emerged who could think constructively: B. A. Santamaria and Ronald Conway have produced intelligent comment over many years, and Francis Xavier Costigan and Tony Fitzgerald have given us intelligence-led action. But in encouraging Santamaria and his colleagues in the 1930s, Mannix was as out of step with other Church leaders as he was in other ways. The organised Church had done little to encourage a serious Catholic intellectual life, and one has not emerged. This is especially true in Sydney, where St John’s College of Sydney University stands as a symbol. The uneducated Catholics of Sydney gave generously to build it, and got a nice building full of beer and football. Poor performance on the intellectual front must be the fundamental cause of the recent shambles over the Catholic Commission for Justice and Peace. Of course the bishops had to support justice, and that meant being associated with efforts to keep the problem of Third World poverty on the national agenda. But there was just no-one intelligent to do the work. Consequently, the level of argument in the CCJP’s statements and its associated journal, National Outlook, was so low that it had to be put a stop to. If Australian Catholics are going to make the impact they should, something must be done. Campion and others have done well with Catholic history. Now the Church has to find, encourage and pay for Catholic philosophers, novelists, psychiatrists and theologians who can tell Australians what they need to hear. 61 Cat holic Values and Aust ralian Realit ies 62 CH APTER SI X Sa nt a m a ria ’s Europea n Sensibilit y N O OTHER COUNTRY’s Catholicism produced a figure like B.A. Santamaria. And if he had been destined to exist somewhere, Australia should have been the least likely place for him to fall to earth. The sceptical, secular, isolated Anglophone society of mid-twentieth-century Australia was stony ground for an ideologue with a European sensibility and a vast plan to reorder society according to a rational and divine order. Any new book on the sources and meaning of the Santamaria phenomenon is welcome. Santamaria: The Politics of Fear is not however exactly new. It is largely a rerun of Paul Ormonde’s 1972 book, The Movement. Santamaria’s opponents from the leftist Catholic Worker group of the early 1960s, Max Charlesworth, Xavier Connor, James Griffin, Val Noone and Ormonde, regroup to have the last word on why they were right all along. They take no notice of anything that has come to light since 1972, such as boat people or Soviet archives, that might suggest there was anything whatever in Santamaria’s claims about the reality of Communist threats. It is a book that would look naive if it had appeared in, say, Czechoslovakia. Review of Paul Ormonde (ed.), Santamaria: The Politics of Fear (Spectrum Publications, Melbourne). Original source: Journal of the Australian Catholic Historical Society 22 (2001), pp. 82-3 63 Cat holic Values and Aust ralian Realit ies From the point of view of Catholic history, the most interesting chapter is Colin Thornton-Smith’s trawl through all the surviving evidence of Santamaria’s early speeches and writings. Some lurid quotes are turned up, such as his 1936 defence of the Italian invasion of Abyssinia: ‘Italy had only two alternatives, Haile Selassie or Marie Stopes, war or race suicide!’ An attempt to pin antisemitism on Santamaria is not entirely successful. There are no actual anti-Semitic statements in his name, although a filler in one issue of the Catholic Worker under his editorship is an item downloaded from Action Française propaganda that arguably has an antisemitic tinge, while Santamaria’s mentor Denys Jackson took European Catholic theories about a world Jewish-Masoniccapitalist-pinko plot more seriously than they deserved. ThorntonSmith touches more on the true origins of the Santamaria thoughtworld in his remark that ‘Any twinges of theological doubt he may have had were dispelled by the triumphalist certitudes of Archbishop Sheehan’s Apologetics and Christian Doctrine.’ ‘Triumphalist’ Sheehan may have been, but he knew a valid argument from a piece of cheap rhetoric. The reason Sheehan worked so hard with argument was that he knew outsiders were not convinced by the alleged certainties of Christianity, and that convincing argument was the only way to challenge them. The message of Sheehan’s Apologetics was that anyone could promote an ideology as far out of step with the historically limited platitudes of the day as he liked, provided he had a chain of rigid deductions from first principles to rely on. By the late 1960s, when the leftward tide of opinion was running at its strongest, there was only one accessible media outlet where a coherently argued response could be found. It was Santamaria’s weekly TV slot, Point of View. Many a student radical surreptitiously tuned in to it, and more than a few came to wonder if all the good arguments were on one side. 64 CH APTER SEVEN Tra dit iona l Ca t holic Philosophy: Ba by a nd Ba t hw a t er I FIRST ATTENDED the Aquinas Academy in 1973. That was the last full year its founder, Dr Austin Woodbury, taught, and the operation had seen better days by then – ‘the Doc’ was inclined to repeat his anecdotes, the examples of racehorses in the notes dated from the 1940s, attendance was down. That was hardly a surprise since it was getting on for thirty years since he founded the Aquinas Academy and about fifty years since his own intensive study of scholastic philosophy in Rome. (I use ‘scholastic’ as a shorthand for the philosophy he taught; the word refers to the ‘schools’ of philosophy of the middle ages, especially that of St Thomas Aquinas.) It was primarily an evening school, aimed principally at the laity, and was for many years a remarkably successful operation. In 1961, for example, it was running nineteen classes a week, with a total enrolment of some 500 – and that in a city much smaller than today.1 Woodbury was a charismatic classroom teacher. The artist John Ogburn recalled: Frequently Woodbury would send me to the canvas with his answer and I responded to this as a miner greets the fresh air after working a double shift underground. Through the teaching 65 Cat holic Values and Aust ralian Realit ies of these two men [Woodbury and the artist Orban] I had at last found the source of that clear stream of loveliness and beauty, the Being from which or in which all other beings are. I could now start to paint seriously.2 That was not quite my experience. I found the lectures full of unintelligible formulas. So I went back to Thomas Aquinas to find what was behind it. I was still not much the wiser, so I went back a step further to Aristotle, the philosopher from whom Aquinas took his main ideas. I finally made some progress. Woodbury was well known for his aggressive views on other philosophers, notably the atheist Professor John Anderson at Sydney University. In 1952 Woodbury claimed publicly, ‘The department of philosophy in the University of Sydney is a cancer at what ought to be the heart of the scholastic life of this city. It is a disgrace to the University of Sydney, and would be a disgrace to any university anywhere. I would warn students, and the parents of students, that a grave risk to their future intellectual and moral life is incurred by students who follow the course of philosophy at the University of Sydney without at the same time taking courses at this academy.’ Anderson deigned to reply, at least briefly, describing Woodbury’s attack as ‘sheer rubbish and propaganda’. ‘Dr Woodbury not only knows nothing about philosophy, but he knows nothing about the department of philosophy at the University.’ Intellectual polemic in Sydney is not what it used to be … As the Melbourne philosopher Rai Gaita says, in Sydney we not only put the boot in, we make sure it is steel-tipped to begin with. Like many forms of thought and organisations still found in odd corners at the end of the Sixties (the DLP, for example), the scholastic philosophy that Woodbury taught came to be regarded in many circles as hopelessly outmoded. The Aquinas Academy itself fell to a kind of coup by people of a Jungian orientation, more interested in modern psychology than in mediaeval philosophy. The present Aquinas Academy descends from them. The spirit of the Second Vatican Council was hostile to the old 66 Tradit ional Cat holic Philosophy: Baby and Bat hwat er style of philosophy that had dominated seminary training – or at least, many people thought it was, though of course the ‘spirit of Vatican II’ is a hotly contested article, and there is nothing in the letter of the Council’s documents that denies scholastic philosophy. *** My purpose is to put forward three views: · · · Scholastic philosophy is still very much with us, in the teaching of the present and previous Pope and those who agree with them. The basics of scholastic philosophy, especially its views on the natural law foundation of ethics, are right and we cannot do without them. Some of its more esoteric deductions on ethics from the principles are not adequately justified. Vatican pronouncements on contraception, euthanasia, glutenfree hosts3 and so on are still driven by deductions from the scholastic philosophy of Thomas Aquinas and his followers. That is why they are at odds with the consensus of early thirdmillennium Western intellectuals. Pope John Paul II had the same thesis supervisor as Dr Woodbury and has never given any indication of doubting any of Aquinas’s doctrines (though unlike Woodbury he did add to his scholastic formation a serious study of certain twentieth-century philosophers). He makes clear his commitment to the thought of Aquinas many times. For example near the beginning of his 1993 encyclical on the foundations of morality, The Splendour of Truth, he complains that ‘the traditional doctrine regarding the natural law, and the universality and the permanent validity of its precepts, is rejected [by many]; certain of the Church’s moral teachings are found simply unacceptable; and the Magisterium itself is considered capable of intervening in matters of morality only in order to “exhort consciences” and to “propose values”.’4 There are many other pro-scholastic statements of the same kind. 67 Cat holic Values and Aust ralian Realit ies Not everyone approves of the conclusions the Pope drew from his philosophy. But the attempted answers to him have mostly been disappointing. If one does not like some of the deliverances of his philosophical thought – for example, its policy on condoms and AIDS – then it is not satisfactory to condemn it as outmoded, or patriarchal, or out of touch with reality, or reactionary, or pigheaded, or clerical, or Polish. It or some of those promoting it may or may not suffer from those defects, but that does not bear on whether the philosophy itself or the conclusions from it are true. The proponents of those ideas are rightly unimpressed by those accusations. They put forward a philosophy and arguments for it, and answers to them must be in the same terms – either an explanation of why the principles of that philosophy are wrong, or argument that the conclusions deduced about particular cases from those principles do not follow. A dryer task that expressing indignation, perhaps, but the only relevant way to proceed. *** Natural law ethics is based on a simple idea. A caricature of it has it saying ‘If God had meant us to fly, he would have given us wings.’ That is not what it is about. It would be better to start with the Nuremberg trials. The judges at Nuremberg said that it was not up to the Nazis to develop historical understandings of morality as they saw fit, understandings, for instance, that Jews were vermin who deserved to be exterminated. What prevents the Nazis doing that is the fact that Jews, like other humans, have an intrinsic worth that makes killing them wrong. That is an objective fact – not a scientific fact, but a moral one. The central idea in scholastic or ‘natural law’ ethics is that the objectivity of ethics is founded on the nature of humans. The reason murder is wrong, on this view, is neither an arbitrary command of God (or of society, or of our genes), nor a free-floating rule, nor some fact about the greatest happiness of the greatest number, but the intrinsic worth of persons, which makes their 68 Tradit ional Cat holic Philosophy: Baby and Bat hwat er destruction wrong. Dr ‘Paddy’ Ryan, the celebrated Sydney scholastic philosopher and anti-Communist crusader of the 1940s, explained: Ultimately, then, the morality of human acts is not to be explained by the civil legislation, public opinion and tradition, nor the authority of great men, nor mere utility, nor by gradual evolution from brute beginnings, nor their relation to the production of the super-man, but by their conformity to the law of God, founded in the nature and essential relationships of things, and known by reason. On the other hand, the morality or immorality of our acts does not depend wholly on God’s will. In other words, a thing is not always bad because God forbids it; God forbids it because it is bad.5 Surely there is something fundamentally right about that. If we were to deny that there is some sort of intrinsic worth of persons, we would be agreeing with the view of atheist materialism that humans are fundamentally the same kinds of things as galaxies – just heaps of atoms. In that case, there is no distinction between an exploding galaxy and the death of a human. But we all really know that the explosion of a lifeless galaxy is just a firework but the death of a human is a tragedy. The concept of tragedy, and a serious reading of all our other moral vocabulary, does not make sense in the absence of a concept of the objective worth of persons. What makes us Catholics philosophically as opposed to both atheists and religious fundamentalists is a strong sense of the inherent value of people, prior to any wishes of people or commands of God. Although the worth of persons is a high-level principle, it makes a difference at a very detailed level. The most dramatic outcome of Catholic philosophy in Australia in recent times has been the High Court’s Mabo judgement on Aboriginal land rights. The fundamental issue in the case was the conflict between the existing law based on the principle of terra nullius and what the judges took to be objective principles of justice. The existing law held that the white settlers of Australia had found the land unoccupied, as if the aboriginal inhabitants were just tourists who walked over the land without in any sense possessing it; therefore 69 Cat holic Values and Aust ralian Realit ies the land belonged to no-one and the whites could occupy it. The judges in the Mabo case agreed that it is a very serious matter to overturn existing law, and that it could only be done if the doctrine of terra nullius could be found inconsistent with one of the basic underlying principles of the law. That principle, they said, is a simple one: equality before the law. ‘No case can command unquestioning adherence if the rule it expresses seriously offends the values of justice and human rights (especially equality before the law).’6 Sir William Deane, one of the judges in the case, was happy to mention (later) his commitment to natural law principles. ‘The basis of natural law’, he says, ‘is the belief that some things are innately right and some innately wrong, flowing from the nature of things, including our nature as human beings. That approach provides a philosophical basis for seeing such things as human rights as going deeper than any particular act of Parliament or what have you. That is not exclusively Catholic. It runs through Christian belief.’7 Deane also emphasised how much detail it is possible to derive from the principles. In a remarkable passage on the natural law basis of international law, as founded by Aquinas and his Spanish followers, he had earlier said ‘This basis gave international law a rich philosophical foundation which was a source of unlimited development. In it there is a reservoir of rules for all situations and cases. A law based on natural law can never grow out of touch with the current needs of nations.’8 Sir Gerard Brennan, one of the other Mabo judges, has an equally remarkable passage where he advises that the point of the endless complications of commercial law is not to provide many opportunities for legal loopholes, but so that the lawyer can advise his client’s conscience with due complexity. Those beliefs about natural law are not agreed to by the kind of judges appointed to the High Court by the Howard Government. They regard the attempt to make law conform to principles of justice as an unwarranted ‘judicial activism’, and 70 Tradit ional Cat holic Philosophy: Baby and Bat hwat er complain that the ‘activists’ replace ‘strict rules with flexible standards based on their own notions of reasonableness, fairness and efficiency.’9 Without their explicitly saying so, it is clear that these lawyers do not believe in the existence of any objective standard of justice to which law ought to conform. The conflict about these very basic matters of the philosophy of ethics makes a difference. *** To clarify our ideas on natural law ethics, let us run briefly through some objections to it. In the light of our strong grasp of human worth, should we be impressed by arguments that ethics cannot be objective because different tribes have different moral views, or we understand how ethical views have developed historically, or we know from psychology what makes us believe our ethical opinions? As the Pope put the problem, ‘The great concern of our contemporaries for historicity and for culture has led some to call into question the “immutability of the natural law” itself, and thus the existence of “objective norms of morality” valid for all people of the present and the future, as for those of the past. Is it ever possible, they ask, to consider as universally valid and always binding certain rational determinations established in the past ... ?’10 (Now, it is true that on the natural law view, our ethics could change to some degree if we came to know human nature better. In fact that has happened, as when a better grasp of human equality made it clearer that slavery was wrong. Perhaps the last century’s advances in psychological understanding made some difference too, but the best of psychological research has been continuous with what we knew already. For example, the discovery that abuse of children caused long-term trauma means we understand that child abuse is worse than we thought; but still, we always knew it was serious. And psychology has given us a better idea of when blame is appropriate and when treatment is needed instead of moral 71 Cat holic Values and Aust ralian Realit ies advice, but those things are only marginal to the questions about right and wrong that natural law is concerned with. By and large, ethics should not change with time, on the natural law view, except, like mathematics, by being better understood.) The objections from historicity, psychology and so on all claim to undermine the objectivity of ethics by finding causes for our ethical views. But the argument that the objectivity of a belief is undermined by knowing what caused it is a bad argument. It is an instance of what my philosophy teacher David Stove named as the winner in his ‘competition to find the worst argument in the world’ – the argument that we can only know things through our perceptual organs, or through or cultural understanding or whatever, therefore we cannot know things as they are in themselves. It is like saying that the display on a calculator is just caused by its wiring, so there is no reason to believe it is right. Or even more bluntly, it is like saying ‘we have eyes, therefore we can’t see.’11 The objection that morals are diverse among different tribes is not convincing either. It needs longer discussion than I can give it here, but I would argue that it is taken care of by a combination of the replies that at the more fundamental levels, there is not a great deal of diversity in morals (John Paul II mentions respect for parents as they deserve as almost universal)12 and that we can dismiss some ethical conclusions of some tribes as simply mistaken, the way we would dismiss the views of tribes who thought there were no numbers bigger than four.13 For example, we dismiss the Nazi tribe’s view that Jews are vermin because we understand that the reasons they gave for those views were rubbish. Skull measurements cannot possibly be relevant to the ethical worth of any persons. So to the question ‘Who are we to say (that other cultures have made mistakes in ethics)?’, natural law thinking would answer ‘It is everybody’s job to say (that blowing up infidels is wrong)’. The same reasoning applies to the idea that we must ‘make our own values’ (as in, ‘I’m not going to take orders from any Church, I need to do my own thinking and determine my own values.’) That has a Nazi tinge about it too – it is no accident that 72 Tradit ional Cat holic Philosophy: Baby and Bat hwat er the most famous Nazi film was called Triumph of the Will. On a natural law view, making your own values is as misconceived as making your own additions. Sure, you can add up a column of figures and write down any answer you like at the bottom. A number of prominent Sydney businessmen availed themselves of that freedom, and several of them are before the courts at the moment. Any sum is possible, but only one sum is right. Any estimation of the ethical worth of other people is possible, but one that estimates others as worth less than yourself is wrong. *** It is by now clear that it is very hard to do the things one normally does in ethics, such as defend human rights, condemn injustice and so on, without committing oneself to the basics of natural law ethics. If humans do not have an objective worth, why are we bothering with the injustices done to them? One last reason for believing in the objective worth of persons comes from the problem of evil. As is well-known, it is very difficult for religion to deal with the question, How could God allow so much evil to happen? That is a very fair question, but it only makes sense if the evil happens to beings for whom evil really matters, that is, ones of objective worth. There is no problem for evil for cockroaches, because it does not matter what happens to cockroaches. There is only a problem of evil for humans because humans have great worth, so that it matters a great deal if they suffer. Any conclusions drawn from the problem of evil need to take account of that. Which is not so easy.14 *** Now we come to some more detailed ethical matters. The principle that all humans have worth, indeed an equal worth, is very general, whereas moral questions are very particular. Plainly there is work needed to fill in the gap between the ethical principle 73 Cat holic Values and Aust ralian Realit ies and the particular cases. Concerning euthanasia, for example, does a respect for the worth of persons imply keeping them alive at all costs, or assisting them in a decision to end life?15 Here, Catholic thinking has again turned to the concept of the ‘nature’ of humans, but in a way that appeals to more detailed facts about humanity than merely their equal worth. *** There is an interesting diagnosis of Catholic ethics by Alan Donagan, originally from Melbourne but for many years Professor of Philosophy at the University of Chicago. He was broadly sympathetic to Catholic ethics but believed it had made a fundamental mistake at this point, where Catholic thought attempted to ‘read off’ morality from the purposes of various organs. He considers Aquinas’s analysis of what is wrong with lying. Aquinas says ‘since words are naturally signs of thoughts, it is unnatural and wrong for anyone by speech to signify something he does not have in his mind.’16 So Aquinas is not appealing directly to anything about the worth of persons, but just to what is natural for the part of the person that deals with language production. Donagan argues that Aquinas has gone wrong on two points. First, he says, Aquinas has not established that it is the natural purpose of speech to express what is in the speaker’s mind: speech is to communicate, but an act of misinformation, for which there could be a good reason, is not unnatural. Secondly, Donagan says, Aquinas has not explained why it is wrong to prevent natural activities reaching their natural end; for example, we prevent animals performing naturally if we eat them, but there is nothing wrong with that. To explain why lying is wrong, Donagan says, one must recall that in the normal case with communication, one lies for the purpose of harming someone, and the harm explains why it is wrong; if, however, telling the truth is what would harm someone, it is telling the truth that is wrong.17 His analysis thus appeals directly to the worth of persons. He went on to write a book, The 74 Tradit ional Cat holic Philosophy: Baby and Bat hwat er Theory of Morality, that shows how the morality we normally assume can be deduced from implicit principles of the worth of persons. Donagan is right to emphasise that appeals like Aquinas’s to what is natural are something added to the original idea of natural law based on the equal worth of persons. He comments ‘one reason why the scholastic theory has had less influence outside Catholic circles than it merits, is that it is assumed to be a seamless unity, and that little is known of it but arguments like St Thomas’ against lying. It is widely believed that if you reject such arguments (that against artificial contraception is, of course, the best known) then you must deny that there is a natural law: that is, you must abandon the conception of the moral law as a matter of human reason.’ (He could have mentioned also that the ‘seamless unity’ theory has the problem that the Church has admitted to mistakes a few times – on usury and on religious freedom and the Inquisition.) In summary, he suggests that natural law in the style of the Nuremberg trials is all right, but that Catholic morality has been misled by arguments that really do amount to saying ‘if God had meant us to fly, he would have given us wings.’ Is he right? I am sorry to complicate things further, but not so fast. We will find ourselves more in sympathy with Aquinas’ thought on lying if we recall that language production is done by the whole cognitive and speech system – the mind that knows the truth and decides to utter either the truth or its opposite. Surely there is something to be said for the idea that the point of the cognitive system is be aligned with the truth, as far as possible, and hence that forcing it to serve falsehood is a perversion that is unworthy of its dignity and its role in human life? Do we not think of people gaoled for fraud, ‘You’re only on the planet once, what are you doing wasting your life and your intelligence deceiving people?’ If we are forced to lie, as in the classic case of misleading a would-be murderer on the location of a knife, that is the right thing to do, but still does a kind of violence to the cognitive system – indeed, the point of the example is the need for a serious reason 75 Cat holic Values and Aust ralian Realit ies to overcome the natural orientation of the system to the truth. Cognition is integral to being human, not a tool, which is why the notions of perversion and violence apply. That is the kind of appeal to natural use of organs that has ethical credibility. However, in the case of misleading the would-be murderer with a lie, we should not think of ourselves as doing something ‘intrinsically evil’, lying, so that good may come of it. The case simply presents a conflict between the worth of the potential victim and the normal orientation to truth of our cognitive system. Obviously the rights of the potential victim prevail in this case. *** Let us take another example where reasoning from what is natural for humans is strong. Consider what advice you would give to a daughter of yours who told you she was considering starring in porn films as a career. (True, the scenario is not very realistic, since a daughter with an adequate parent is probably not thinking of that particular career.) She says she has found a recommended place of employment, the Occupational Health and Safety guidelines are in place, and she asks what is wrong with simulated sex for money. What would you say (after you’d recovered)? You might reply along these lines: ‘That is not looking after yourself. Sex is too close a part of the personality to be exposed for money. It is just the nature of sex that it is a way of giving yourself very one-to-one and privately. That’s why rape is worse than an assault of similar physical severity and why we’re especially concerned about sexual abuse of children: it is because the sexual part of the personality is close and private that a violation of it is serious. For the same reason, doing something else that doesn’t suit it, like trading it for money, is harming yourself even if you consent. It is like staying deliberately ignorant by refusing to learn anything at school – doing that harms the intellectual part of the personality, and it’s wrong whether you consent or not.’ 76 Tradit ional Cat holic Philosophy: Baby and Bat hwat er Those arguments, both as to sex and education, are appeals to details about what human nature is like: starring in porn films and deliberate ignorance are perversions of our nature, or failures to develop what is good about our nature. *** It is an argument of that sort that Paul VI gave against contraception in his 1968 encyclical Humanae Vitae. This is the full argument, which is intended to be free-standing and apply to all humans, irrespective of their religious beliefs. Each and every marital act must of necessity retain its intrinsic relationship to the procreation of human life. This particular doctrine … is based on the inseparable connection, established by God, which man on his own initiative may not break, between the unitive significance and the procreative significance which are both inherent to the marriage act. The reason is that the fundamental nature of the marriage act, while uniting husband and wife in the closest intimacy, also renders them capable of generating new life – and this as a result of laws written into the actual nature of man and of woman.18 That is the complete argument. It is hard to argue further either for or against it. It seems to me inadequate, but if someone does find it adequate, I would call that reasonable, as it is very close to the argument about why lying disturbs the natural relation between our cognitive faculties and the truth. If the argument is right, it still seems not to have established that the wrongness of contraception is serious. *** In cases like this, it would be simplistic to dismiss those who take a laxer view of morality than the traditional one as simply infected by modern ideas of freedom or autonomy. John Paul II had a certain view of his opponents. While recognising a certain variety among them, he came back repeatedly to the idea that the 77 Cat holic Values and Aust ralian Realit ies main trouble arises from Enlightenment ideas on absolute freedom. He had absorbed an idea once very colourfully expressed by Archbishop Vaughan, the leader of Sydney Catholics in their fight against the withdrawal of state aid to church schools in the 1870s. Vaughan gave an extraordinary talk with the title ‘Hidden Springs’ on the conspiracy that he thought lay behind plans for secular and compulsory education. It was a plot, he believed, by the sect of the revolution, international Freemasonry. ‘The Sect fixes savagely on one dogma of its own,’ he said, ‘whilst gnashing its teeth at all dogmas, it is this, viz., that absolute liberty and unlimited freedom to do, say, or think anything he likes, is the natural and inalienable right of every man.’19 That diagnosis of the opposition to natural law theory does fit a number of cases – not the Masonic plot theory, of course, but the Enlightenment freedom one. Peter Singer, Australia’s bestknown philosopher, has views on the permissibility of infanticide (of healthy but unwanted babies) that fit that scheme exactly. But seeing Catholic natural law theory as a seamless unity and all its opponents as infected to one degree or another by rabid ideas on freedom is simplistic. It fails to see and hence fails to answer those who take their stand on natural law but draw different conclusions in detail. (For one thing, the most famous Enlightenment document is the American Declaration of Independence, which says ‘We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life … etc.’ That is a natural law theory too – and one that joined well with Catholic theory in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in 1948, largely written by an American lawyer and a Catholic Lebanese follower of Aquinas.)20 *** We need to discuss condoms and AIDS. If the average Muslim is asked whether he is distressed by Islamic practices of terrorism 78 Tradit ional Cat holic Philosophy: Baby and Bat hwat er and female genital mutilation, the answer is often ‘Nothing to do with me’: those practices are said to be un-Islamic and only practised in primitive parts of the Islamic world or by strange subsects. That is a reasonable answer, but at the same time one might hope for something a little more forceful in condemning practices done in the name of Islam and perhaps some agitation to encourage the authorities to suppress the practices. In the view of many in our community, the Vatican’s opposition to condom campaigns against AIDS is as bad as Islamic terrorism and probably kills more people. There is a great deal of anger about it. Catholics should be thinking about what is being done in their name and asking themselves if they agree with it. We need to consider it in the present context because the Vatican’s position is a direct consequence of its arguments on natural law and contraception, described earlier. The main official Vatican document on the question is a long article, ‘Family values versus safe sex’ (2003), by Alfonso Cardinal López Trujillo, President of the Pontifical Council for the Family.21 It contains mostly argument about factual matters rather than philosophy. In brief summary, it claims: · There is no such thing as safe sex: although condoms reduce the risk of transmission of AIDS considerably, they have failure rates in both normal and perfect use that mean ‘safe sex’ is a false promise (he suggests that if American legal practice is followed, victims of so-called safe sex campaigns might like to sue). · Although condoms reduce AIDS infections, that has to be set against an increase in AIDS infections that a condom campaign brings about, by suggesting ‘everyone is doing it’ (and safely), which leads to promiscuous behaviour. The Cardinal points out that AIDS is rampant in Thailand, 79 Cat holic Values and Aust ralian Realit ies which has had a large condom campaign, but not in the Philippines, which hasn’t. It is not my business to evaluate complicated matters of health policy and the physics of latex and so on, but I would say the evidence the Cardinal provides for these assertions is substantial. Perhaps there are some facts he does not mention, such as the reasonable success of Australian policy against AIDS and the effectiveness of imperfect methods of protection in reducing epidemics. Still, it would not be good to maintain that it is obvious that Vatican policy is killing people without looking at the evidence very carefully. It would not be desirable to find oneself saying ‘Of course black people and gays can’t be expected to show restraint, but I certainly don’t want condom vending machines in the toilets at my daughter’s expensive private school – that would be sending the wrong message.’ And if it seems unlikely that there would be a world conspiracy to pretend condoms work better than they do, as the Cardinal in effect claims, one might compare with a point he makes in passing – that in Western countries, cervical cancer kills more people than AIDS, and it is almost always caused by sexually transmitted HPV virus, against which condoms have poor effectiveness. That is ‘well-known’, in principle (well-known to the health authorities to the extent that they are considering mass immunisation of twelve-year-old girls against HPV)22 but not much mentioned in the newspapers. It means that safe sex campaigns here are fraudulent. Having said that, there is still something disturbing about Cardinal López Trujillo’s position. It is that if the facts were different, he would still be saying the same thing. He maintains that the use of condoms is a natural evil and cannot be excused if it did turn out that they saved lives. That is like arguing that it would be wrong to lie to save someone’s life. It is not seeing correctly the need to balance the natural worth and rights of potential victims against the natural use of personal faculties. In conclusion – the essentials of the Catholic natural law view of ethics provide the only way to make sense of the foundations of 80 Tradit ional Cat holic Philosophy: Baby and Bat hwat er ethics: the only way to explain what rights are, what rules ought to be adopted, what ought to be considered in individual acts of decision. Some of the bathwater of detailed deductions needs to be thrown out, but the baby of basic principle needs to be kept. Then fed and displayed. N OTES 1 J. Franklin, Corrupting the Youth: a history of philosophy in Australia (Sydney, 2003), pp. 80-82. N. Turner, Catholics in Australia: A Social History (Melbourne, 1992), vol. II, pp. 286. 2 3 ‘Hosts that are completely gluten-free are invalid matter for the celebration of the Eucharist. Low-gluten hosts (partially gluten-free) are valid matter, provided they contain a sufficient amount of gluten to obtain the confection of bread without the addition of foreign materials and without the use of procedures that would alter the nature of bread.’ Letter of Cardinal Ratzinger, 24 July 2003, http://www.usccb.org/liturgy/innews/ 1103.shtml 4 John Paul II, Veritatis Splendor (1993), section 4; similar in Fides et Ratio (1998), sections 43, 61, 78. 5 P.J. Ryan, ‘The fundamental tenets of scholasticism’, Catholic Press 17/5/1934, p. 12 & 7/6/1934, p. 6; Franklin, Corrupting the Youth, p. 67; a more recent exposition in N. Brown, The Worth of Persons: A Study in Christian Ethics (Catholic Institute of Sydney, 1983). 6 G. Brennan, in The Mabo Decision with Commentary by Richard H. Bartlett (Sydney, 1993), p. 19. 7 T. Stephens, Sir William Deane: The Things That Matter (Sydney, 2002), p. 100; Franklin, Corrupting the Youth , pp. 388-98. 8 W.P. Deane, ‘Crisis in the law of nations’, Social Survey 6 (1957), 8-15, at p. 12. J. Gava, ‘The Rise of the Hero Judge’, UNSW Law Journal 24 (2001), pp. 747- 9 59; D. Heydon, ‘Judicial Activism and the Death of the Rule of Law, Quadrant 41 (1) (January-February 2003), pp. 9-22. 10 John Paul II, Veritatis Splendor, section 53. 81 Cat holic Values and Aust ralian Realit ies 11 J. Franklin, ‘Stove’s discovery of the worst a rgument in the world’, Philosophy 77 (2002), pp. 615-24. 12 Veritatis Splendor, section 52. J. Franklin, ‘On the parallel between mathematics and morals ’, Philosophy 13 14 15 16 17 79 (2004), pp. 97-119. J. Franklin, ‘Two caricatures, II: Leibniz ’s best world ’, International Journal for Philosophy of Religion 52 (2002), pp. 45-56. Survey in the Australian context in Franklin, Corrupting the Youth, pp. 425-30. Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae II-II q. 110 art. 3. A. Donagan, ‘The scholastic theory of moral law in the modern world’, in A. Kenny, ed, Aquinas: A Collection of Critical Essays (Garden City NY, 1969), pp. 325-339. 18 19 Paul VI, Humanae Vitae, sections 11-12. R.B. Vaughan, Hidden Springs, or the Perils of the Future and How to Meet Them, (Sydney, 1876), discussed in J. Franklin, ‘Catholics versus Masons’, Journal of the Australian Catholic Historical Society 20 (1999), pp. 1-15. 20 21 22 ‘A conversation with Habib Malik’, usinfo.state.gov/journals/itdhr/1098/ ijde/habib.htm; see C.H. Malik, ‘The search for absolute values’, in The Search for Absolute Values in a Changing World: Proceedings of the Sixth International Conference on the Unity of the Sciences (New York, 1978), pp. 1251-70. A. López Trujillo, ‘Family values versus safe sex’, http:// www.catholicculture.org/docs/doc_view.cfm?recnum=5836 Australian Medical Association press release, ‘Immunisation against cervical cancer?’, 15/6/2003, http://www.ama.com.au/web.nsf/doc/WEEN5NG4JQ 82 CH APTER EI GH T Secula r Versus Ca t holic Concept ions of Va lues in Aust ra lia n Educa t ion T HE DEBATE ON VALUES in schools, especially values in state schools, has proceeded with very little attention to philosophical discussion of ethics. Yet it is hardly possible to discuss values without some philosophical framework to organise the material. Whether implicitly or explicitly, one will have some idea on what ethics and values there are and which ones should be implemented in schools. Since it is better to be explicit than implicit, we begin with a very brief overview of the foundations of ethics and how the different views on that question will tend to work themselves out in education. We avoid traditional divisions of ethical theories into such categories as deontological and utilitarian, since these classify according to the rules of decisionmaking which the theories advocate, and here we prefer a more fundamental classification that accounts for the difference in perspectives on values in different educational traditions. The simplest position on ethics is: there is really no such thing as ethics. That was the view defended in John Mackie’s ‘error’ theory:1 there is just no place in the scientific world view for anything ethical. It does not follow from that position that values Original source: Catholic Institute Biennial Conference in Philosophy, Religion and Culture, 3 October 2004. 83 Cat holic Values and Aust ralian Realit ies should not be taught in schools – no-one wants to be murdered in their beds by the younger generation, so it might be prudent to teach them that values, like weapons of mass destruction, exist somewhere even if they do not show up in satellite images. The reasons for not accepting any such moral scepticism are well expressed by Rai Gaita, who asks us to imagine ‘a tutorial in which one of its members had been a victim of terrible evil of which all the other members were aware, and in which the tutor invited them to consider whether our sense of the terribleness of evil was not an illusion. Everyone would be outraged if the tutor were not serious and struck by unbelieving horror if he was.’ That kind of scepticism, Gaita says, is not merely an intellectual mistake but an evil act against the victims of evil.2 That sceptical position is not often seen in the debate on values in schools, for obvious reasons. What is more common, however, is the view that although there are values, it is not a good idea to delve too vigorously in their foundations, since we may find that they are not as secure as we imagined. In any case, it is thought, since the youth tend to be critical and sceptical at the best of times, it is better to protect them in particular from too much unsettling discussion of where values come from. That view too has not been found very explicitly in the values in schools debate, again for obvious reasons. It was found in the parallel debate on values in law, where Australia’s most distinguished Chief Justice of the High Court, Sir Owen Dixon, connected his view that values should not overturn ‘black letter’ precedent with his opinion that ‘An enquiry into the source whence the law derives its authority in a community, if prosecuted too far, becomes merely metaphysical.’3 As we will see later, it is a view implicit in a good deal of earlier Australian work on secular education. If one does think ethics has some foundations that ought to be made explicit, there are three basic choices one can make. They are set out with the most fundamental reasons for and against in the following page’s table. The last two of the table’s theories have been represented in Australian education respectively by the Catholic and the extreme evangelical Anglican positions. 84 Secular Versus Cat holic Th e Ca t h olic n a t u r a l la w t r a dit ion Catholic tradition has always been informed from the ground up by a commitment to natural law thinking. As we saw in Chapter 4, the essence of that view was explained by Dr ‘Paddy’ Ryan; the reason murder is wrong, he says, is neither an arbitrary command of God (or of society, or of our genes), nor a free-floating rule, nor some fact about the greatest happiness of the greatest number, but the intrinsic worth of persons, which makes their destruction wrong. What is right is “founded in the nature and essential relationships of things, and known by reason.” 4 We saw, too, that at least some students at Catholic schools, such as B.A. Santamaria, accepted as important the idea of rational justification of religious ideas. A colourful aspect of natural law theory in its Catholic version was its tendency to issue in detailed casuistics, with pronouncements on many particular cases of conscience said to be deduced from the principles – for example, the characteristically Catholic prohibition on contraception is justified in the Pope’s encyclical purely on natural law grounds. And discussion descended to much finer levels of detail than that: May one deliberately confess to a deaf priest? (Of course not, since that defeats the essential purpose of confession.)6 Is an excommunicate obliged to attend Mass? The answer is complicated.7 The unique feature of Catholic schools’ approach to values was the assumption that there is a correct answer to any ethical question, no matter how detailed, and that answer can be discovered by reasoning that attends to both general principles and the particular case. Sir William Deane, many years before his appointment to the High Court, wrote of the natural law basis of international law that ‘This basis gave international law a rich philosophical foundation which was a source of unlimited development. In it there is a reservoir of rules for all situations and cases. A law based on natural law can never grow out of touch with the current needs of nations.’8 Deane acknowledges the role of natural law philosophy in the Mabo 85 Cat holic Values and Aust ralian Realit ies judgment, which overturned precedent in the interest of the principle of human equality, a principle which the judges argued was a value inherent in the law.9 The same went for questions of conscience in ordinary life. Values should inform individual decisions in such a way as to give rise to detailed prescriptions. Since the Second Vatican Council in the 1960s, Catholic education has tended to lose contact with the natural law tradition, which was identified with the ‘old order’ in the Church. Though papal encyclicals continued to promote natural law theory, it was much less visible at the school level. As more ‘experiential’ styles of religious education became prominent, conservatives complained that children would inherit a ‘watered-down and wishy-washy Catholicism’.10 It was certainly true that the children who grew up in this regime, though they had fewer complaints than earlier generations, were unable to give a clear account of what was distinctive about Catholic values.11 In theory, Catholic education retained some commitment to objectivity in values,12 but in practice any distinctiveness was maintained more by the inertia of having teachers who had grown up in the old system than by any visible theory. That is all reasonably clear in principle. So is the commitment of Sydney-style evangelical Anglicanism to a divine command theory of ethics. Archbishop Peter Jensen believes, contrary to the natural impression one might receive from gospel stories like the Good Samaritan, that ethical behaviour is not pleasing to God unless badged with explicit Christian faith. That would be the error of ‘moralism’: ‘The final sin of religious people,’ he says, ‘is moralism, by which we trust that we can come to know the living God and to gain his approval by the quality of our lives.’ He is against any religious system that involves ‘even a modicum of human merit.’13 Taken literally, that would mean that God is not pleased with Mother Teresa. However, Anglican schools have by and large not taken that position, though they have often experienced stresses between evangelicals and other factions. The complex question of the range 86 Secular Versus Cat holic NATURALIST Customs tribes evolved x have NATURAL LAW: Based on ‘natural’ preciousness or worth of humans THEOLOGICAL: What God(s) command(s) x FOR Fits well with science Explains well both similarities and differences among tribes x Fits well with actual intuitions: We understand our own worth, and know others are the same x Scriptures give clear answers x Has stood the test of time 87 AGAINST Does not allow moral criticism of other tribes (e.g. Nazi tribes) x Does not give a reason to be moral; x Moral progress is meaningless x Is hard to fit with the scientific world picture? x x Existence of God is doubtful x Alleged revelations conflict x Socrates: ‘Is something good because the gods command it or do the gods command it because it is good?’ Cat holic Values and Aust ralian Realit ies of values in non-Catholic church schools deserves study, but is outside the scope of the present article, which concentrates on the contrast between the two largest systems, state and Catholic. Th e va lu e s of se cu la r e du ca t ion : h ist or ica l pe r spe ct ive It might be expected that if Australian secular education was committed neither to Catholic natural law theory nor to any version of divine command theory, it must have been committed to some kind of naturalism. That is not the case. Instead it avoided foundational questions but continued to teach actual morals. The consequences have been significant for the recent values debate, where secular schools have had to defend themselves but have had no theory to fall back on to do so. The original attack on the values of public schools, and a much more vigorous one than the recent mild questions by John Howard about values and political correctness, was in Sydney Catholic Archbishop Vaughan’s First Pastoral Letter of 1879, during the political conflict over the withdrawal of state aid to church schools. He attacked the secular schools then in existence as ‘a system of practical paganism, which leads to corruption of morals and loss of faith, to national effeminacy and to national dishonour’ and – in a phrase that caused particular offence – ‘seedplots of future immorality, infidelity and lawlessness, being calculated to debase the standard of human excellence, and to corrupt the political, social and individual life of future citizens.’14 (A Christian school that resurrected Vaughan’s remarks in 2004 found itself heavily criticised.)15 Secular schools then and since have not all been observed to produce students of the exceptional levels of depravity predicted by the Archbishop’s theory, but it was certainly a fair question as to where they were going to find their values if not from Christianity. Vaughan took the attempt to separate religion and morality as a Masonic plot, an accusation not wholly true but not wholly false either.16 88 Secular Versus Cat holic The secular schools had a plan. Many plans. The one thing they did not think of doing was abdicating responsibility by simply confining schooling to instruction in matters of fact. The New South Wales Act, following the Victorian, laid down ‘the words “secular instruction” shall be held to include general religious instruction as distinguished from dogmatical and polemical theology.’ 17 On the one hand, ‘No sectarian or denominational publications of any kind shall be used in school, nor shall any denominational or sectarian doctrines be inculcated.’ On the other, ‘It shall be the duty of all teachers to impress on the minds of their pupils the principles of morality, truth, justice and patriotism; to teach them to avoid idleness, profanity and falsehood; to instruct them in the principles of a free Government; and to train them up to a true comprehension of the rights, duties and dignity of citizenship.’18 That was not window-dressing. It was implemented by a subject called ‘Civics and morals’ in the higher primary school years, which incorporated Authorised Scripture lessons and dealt with such subjects as moral courage, pride in thorough work, temperance, the evils of gambling, patriotism, courtesy, kindness to animals and gratitude to parents and teachers. The teacher was advised to use moral examples rather than abstract ethical principles. ‘The moral influence of the teacher should be felt in a special manner in the freedom of the playground.’19 Training in values was not limited to the classroom. Into the great maw of the youth’s indifference to virtue was thrown a huge range of solutions besides the lessons in civics and morals. Team sports. The Boy Scouts. Cadets. Surf lifesaving. School mottoes. The Empire. The classical languages and the heroes of ancient Rome. The Anzac legend. Wordsworth. Improving literature and literary criticism. It is impossible do justice to all of these, but some short samples will illustrate how these were intended to work in the area of reinforcing values. 89 Cat holic Values and Aust ralian Realit ies Sport was not just to develop the body and give the less academic pupils something to do. The New South Wales Public Instruction Gazette of 1911 explains: The recreative effect of games is always of great importance, as through them so much can be done to make the lives of children brighter, more joyful and less monotonous. The educational effect on the mind and character is equally valuable. Children can learn more easily perhaps in this way than in any other the value of co-operation with others, and the need to sacrifice when necessary personal desires and wishes for the common good. The faculty of initiation is at the same time developed, and the habit of obedience is encouraged.20 The Empire, like the Environment in the present, was not just a heap of ground, but a moral entity that, on the one hand, was where you were, but on the other, had a mystical vastness about it yet needed your action to ensure its very survival. Its moral point is expressed in the 1919 history textbook A Story of the English People: Issued by the Department of Public Instruction for Use in Schools: For British rule, in spite of a mistake here and there, has brought peace, justice, liberty and prosperity in its train wherever it has been established. And the size, wealth and population of the Empire is a kind of guarantee that those ideals of Peace, Justice, Liberty and Prosperity must be respected. For they endear British rule to the native races.21 Empire Day was the culmination of the year’s reflection on the significance of Empire. The 1937 textbook New Syllabus English and Australian History for Fifth Classes, with Civics and Moral Stories says: On that day, in almost every school in the Empire, children are reminded, not so much of the greatness and wealth of the Empire, but of the need to keep it bound together by ties of good will and love. This can be done by helping one another, and being fair to one another ... In a small way, even a boy may become an Empire builder, for so long as he works honestly, strives for the right, and keeps his mind clean, he is adding something to the greatness and glory of our Empire.22 The Greek and Roman classics, including the grammar of their languages, provided training in a different but compatible style of 90 Secular Versus Cat holic virtue – exactitude of thought and a perception of nobility. Sir Charles Nicholson’s speech at the inauguration of Sydney University extolled the benefits of classical study: No better discipline for the intellect of the young can be found than that which is afforded by a careful and thorough initiation into the forms of the Greek and Latin languages. Such a process involves with the learner a practical acquaintance with those fundamental principles of logic of which the grammar of every language is more or less an exemplification. To regard a knowledge of the ancient languages as a mere futile exercise of memory is to betray an ignorance or a perverseness which it is scarcely necessary to attempt either to enlighten or combat … From whence can the poet, the orator, the statesman draw such pure draughts of inspiration as from the immortal literature of Greece and Rome? As the majesty, the unequalled grace, and unapproachable beauty of the Parthenon have been the envy and admiration of all ages, so will the works of Homer and Aeschylus, of Demosthenes and Plato, be regarded as the archetypes of all that is sublime in poetry, eloquent in oratory, and profound and original in philosophy.23 ‘Whatever else may be the result of a classical training,’ Sir Owen Dixon wrote, ‘it does implant what is a very useful thing in the law – a fear of error.’24 The role of the Anzacs, rural virtue, surf lifesaving, the Boy Scouts, improving literature and so on in training for virtue are described in Franklin.25 Those various efforts at training in virtue had success in their day. But their Achilles heel was revealed when they came under attack by the corrosive scepticism of the Sixties. Because there was no intellectual foundation or attempt at philosophical explanation of morality, when the old value system began to look dog-eared and antiquated, it had no way of defending itself other than through censorship. As Shirley Hazzard puts it ‘the battle against knowledge was fought from an emotional and incoherent concept of “morality”.’26 It was no match for the destructive and relentless criticism of such intellectuals as Sydney University’s atheist Professor of Philosophy, John Anderson. ‘Tradition itself 91 Cat holic Values and Aust ralian Realit ies invites criticism’, he said, ‘because it represents certain things as worthwhile but is unable to give any account of their value.’27 The problem is one that faces any attempt to implement values merely by listing them and urging they be taught. Cu r r e n t de ba t e s on va lu e s in e du ca t ion Some of those plans of fifty and a hundred years ago can appear quaint or naïve from a twenty-first-century perspective. A supercilious attitude would be better founded if the present day were doing any better. Secular education before the Second World War at least had a strategy. The Sixties and Seventies mostly dropped those plans without replacing them with any other.28 As with the Catholic system, explicit teaching of values in the secular system drifted for want of any accepted theory to base it on. In more recent times, there have been some serious attempts to revive at least a skeleton of basic moral education and to state the principles that are to be inculcated. The New South Wales Education Department’s instructions of the 1990s divide the values to be ‘fostered’ into three categories: those relating to education (curiosity, logical and critical thinking, among others), those relating to self and others (accepting one’s own worth, being honest, caring and punctual, and ‘accepting the importance of developing a positive personal belief and value system’), and those relating to citizenship (including being in favour of democracy, liberty, economic development and conservation, and conforming to the school rules). A primary school subject, ‘General Religious and Moral Education’, helps students to understand these matters through a ‘study that is objective and non-sectarian’,29 but it is much less clear what is to happen in high school. It is also unclear whether lessons or any other mere talk about values performs the function of developing character in the way that training in real action, such as sport, was intended to do.30 The latest attempts in the field, the 2003 Federal Government ‘Values education study’31 and the resulting ‘Draft National Framework for Values Education in Australian Schools’32 lack both a philosophical basis and a coherent plan. There are some positive features, certainly, that would not have been found in an older 92 Secular Versus Cat holic document, such as the reference to developing ‘resilience’ in students at risk of suicide and drugs. But in the Study, there are excessive efforts to make sure there is nothing offensive to any possible interests. The schools in the case studies were mostly unclear as to what values they were promoting and why, with the exception of Al Faisal College, whose program ‘incorporates a range of Islamic values (including honesty, respect, tolerance, modesty, courtesy, trust, politeness in manner and speech, cleanliness, industriousness and hospitality).’33 The Draft Framework’s list of values is reasonable enough: 1. Tolerance and Understanding (Accepting other people’s differences and being aware of others). 2. Respect (Treating others with consideration and regard). 3. Responsibility – personal, social, civic and environmental (Being accountable for and in charge of a course of action – responsibility for one’s own actions, including the exercise of self-discipline; responsibility for the way in which one interacts and cooperates with others especially for resolving differences in constructive, non-violent and peaceful ways; responsibility for one’s role in and contribution to society; and responsibility for one’s own role in the maintenance and preservation of the environment). 4. Social Justice (Being committed to the pursuit and protection of the common good where all persons are entitled to legal, social and economic fair treatment). 5. Excellence (Seeking to accomplish something noteworthy and admirable individually and collectively, and performing at one’s best). 6. Care (Caring for self and showing interest in, concern for and caring for others). 7. Inclusion and Trust (Being included and including others, listening to one another’s thoughts and feelings actively and creating a climate of mutual confidence). 8. Honesty (Being truthful and sincere, committed to finding and expressing the truth, requiring truth from others, and ensuring consistency between words and deeds). 9. Freedom (Enjoying all the rights and privileges of citizenship free from unnecessary interference or control, and standing up for the rights of others; ensuring a balance between rights and responsibilities). 10. Being ethical (Acting in accordance with generally agreed rules and/or standards for right [moral] conduct or practice). 93 Cat holic Values and Aust ralian Realit ies The values are satisfactory and form a coherent whole. There is a broad range of different and important values, and they are free of the ‘political correctness’ that John Howard fears has become endemic in state schools.34 But it is unfortunate that ‘tolerance’ appears first (though coupling it with ‘understanding’ does broaden its scope). Tolerance is a genuine virtue, and one easy to reach agreement on except perhaps among some fringe groups. But it is hardly central to right action. To put it bluntly, to be tolerant, all you really need to do is do nothing. And finishing with ‘being ethical’ is content-free, especially when it is explained as acting in accordance with ‘generally-agreed values’ – surely the difficult cases of moral action are those where one’s values conflict with what is generally agreed in one’s peer group and one must become a whistleblower or dissident. And is the total effect a touch chilly? There is little about positive warmth among families and friends. Is love to be valued in Australian schools? It seems not.35 Whether the list of values is adequate or not, it is hard to see them being realised in schools through the vapid managementspeak of the ‘Suggested approaches’ in the document, like ‘Schools discuss values to be fostered with the local community’, ‘negotiate and manage the process of clarifying school values’, ‘monitor their approach to values education on an ongoing basis’, and so on. That leaves it unclear what will be happening on the ground. The ‘values roadshow’ promised in the 2004 Federal Budget has yet to be filled out, and at $1,600 per school, is possibly not planned to make a big impact. Until something more definite is provided (a textbook, or plans for school talks by visiting community representatives such as small business employers and refugee advocates), it is hard to see the process as a serious operation. Meanwhile private schools will continue to make money from their marketing spiel claiming they are stronger on ‘values’.36 94 Secular Versus Cat holic N OTES 1 J.L. Mackie, Ethics: Inventing Right and Wrong (Harmondsworth, 1977). R. Gaita, Good and Evil: An Absolute Conception, 2nd ed. (Abingdon, 2004), pp. 314-5. 3 O. Dixon, ‘The Statute of Westminster 1931,’ Australian Law Journal, 10 (Supplement): pp. 96-112, p. 96. 4 P.J. Ryan, ‘The fundamental tenets of scholasticism’, Catholic Press, 17/5/1934, p. 12 and 7/6/1934, p. 6; a modern version in N. Brown, The Worth of Persons: A Study in Christian Ethics (Manly, 1983). 5 B.A. Santamaria, Santamaria: A Memoir (Melbourne, 1997), p. 8. 6 J.J. Nevin, ‘Purposely confessing to a deaf priest,’ Australasian Catholic Record 20 (1943), pp. 258–9. 7 J.J. Nevin, ‘Is an excommunicate bound to go to Mass on Sunday?’, Australasian Catholic Record, 22 (1945), pp. 232–5; further in P. Mullins, ‘Looking back on the way we were’, Australasian Catholic Record, 75 (1998), pp. 264–70. 8 W. Deane, ’Crisis in the law of nations’, Social Survey 6 (1957), pp. 8–15, at p. 12. 9 T. Stephens, Sir William Deane: The Things That Matter (Sydney, 2002), p. 100. 10 Hamilton, W., What’s Been Happening in RE in Australia? (Blackburn, Victoria, 1981), p. 41; K. Lawlor, ‘Religious education in Victorian Catholic schools – the 1960s and 1970s’, Journal of Religious Education, 48 (2000), pp. 8–15. 11 R. Rymarz, ‘Postconciliar Catholics: Generation X and religious education’, Journal of Religious Education, 50 (2002), 4, pp. 52–56. 12 R. Tarlinton and F. O’Shea, ‘Values education: a Catholic perspective’. In S. Pascoe (ed.), Values in Education: College Year Book 2002 (Deakin West, ACT, 2002), pp. 85–91. 13 P. Jensen, ‘The gospel and mission of Anglican evangelicals’ (2003), http:// www.anglicanmedia.com.au/index.php/ article/articleview/586/1/25/ 14 R. B. Vaughan, Archbishop and Bishops of NSW Pastoral, Catholic Education (1879), repr. in P. O’Farrell, Documents in Australian Catholic History, Vol. 1 (London, 1969), pp. 386-99; at pp. 388, 390, 393. 15 K. Burke, ‘Apologise, Christian school told’, Sydney Morning Herald, 21/8/04. 16 J. Franklin, ’Catholics Versus Masons’, Journal of the Australian Catholic Historical Society, 20 (1999), pp. 1-15. 17 NSW Dept of Public Instruction, Public Instruction Act of 1880, and Regulations Framed Thereunder (Sydney, 1886), p. 15. 18 Ibid., p. 40. 19 NSW Dept of Public Instruction, Course of Instruction for Primary Schools. (Sydney, 1905), pp. 9, 11, 40-1; further in C. E. Fletcher, ‘The teaching of civics in the primary schools’, Public Instruction Gazette (NSW), 6 (1913), pp. 57–66. 20 Anon., ‘Organised games for junior cadets (from notes supplied by the Department of Defence)’, Public Instruction Gazette, 5 (1911), pp. 334–6. 2 95 Cat holic Values and Aust ralian Realit ies 21 K. R. Cramp, W. Lennard, and J. H. Smairl, A Story of the English People: Issued by the Department of Public Instruction for Use in Schools (Sydney, 1919), p. 408. 22 G. T. Spaull, New Syllabus English and Australian History for Fifth Classes, with Civics and Moral Stories (Sydney, 1937), pp. 214-5. 23 H. E. Barff, A Short Historical Account of the University of Sydney (Sydney, 1902), p. 26. 24 O. Dixon, ‘The teaching of classics and the law’, repr. in O. Dixon, Jesting Pilate (Melbourne, 1965), pp. 276-8. 25 J. Franklin, Corrupting the Youth: A History of Philosophy in Australia (Sydney, 2003), ch. 10. 26 S. Hazzard, Coming of Age in Australia (Sydney, 1985), p. 16. 27 Anderson, J. ‘Socrates as an educator’, repr. in J. Anderson, Studies in Empirical Philosophy (Sydney, 1962), pp. 203–13, at p. 207. 28 A reminiscence in S.P. Kenaelly, ‘What happened to my school’, IPA Review, 42 (1988), 2, pp. 45–9. 29 NSW Dept of School Education, The Values We Teach. Revised (Sydney, 1991); for comparison, recent Catholic primary school values education in P. Reiher, ‘Values education and educating the virtues: definitions, documentation sources and issues for the values and attitudes domain of primary religious education in diocesan schools in NSW’, Journal of Religious Education, 47 (1999), 4, pp. 9–13. 30 M. Freakley, ’The values cop-out and the case for character development in moral education’, Educational Practice and Theory, 18 (1996), 2, pp. 29-37. 31 Curriculum Corporation, Department of Education, Science and Training, Values Education Study Final Report (2003), http:// www.curriculum.edu.au/values/pdfs/VES_Final_Report.pdf 32 Department of Education, Science and Training, A Draft Framework for Values Education in Australian Schools (2003), http:// www.curriculum.edu.au/values/pdfs/values_web.pdf 33 See further Salman, S. ‘Values in education: an Islamic perspective’, in S. Pascoe, op. cit., pp. 115-24). 34 Crabb A. and O. Guerrera, ‘PM queries values of state schools’, The Age, 20/ 1/04. 35 Some similar lists of values, to which the same comments apply, are in Aspin, D.N., ‘The nature of values and their place and promotion in schemes of values education’, Educational Philosophy and Theory, 31 (1999), 2, pp. 123-143, and Hill, B., ‘Bridging the divides: a Christian brief for values education in schools’, Journal of Religious Education, 51 (2003) 3, pp. 34-43; little beyond equality is named in Connors, L., ‘The values that characterise public schooling: A Thermopylae well worth defending’, in S. Pascoe, op. cit. (2002), pp. 59-70. 36 L. Doherty, ‘Push for values drives public school exodus’, Sydney Morning Herald, 8/8/04. 96 CH APTER N I N E Account a ncy a s Com put a t iona l Ca suist ics W HEN BHP MANAGED to close the Newcastle steelworks, its share price surged, to the benefit especially of the directors who made the decision.1 There has to be a suspicion that capitalism is pulling its usual trick of distributing the profits to itself and the costs to someone else. That means that the accountancy is being done wrongly. That in turn means that there is an obligation to discover how to do it right. There are plenty of other cases where costs are distributed to people against their will, and where they have no legal or other recourse, because of a combination of difficulty in measuring the loss, and the lack of a legal regime to sheet home losses to those causing them more or less indirectly. US buyers of oil do not pay the cost of sending the USS Enterprise to the Gulf to protect the source of the oil; that cost is not ‘internalised’, but paid by the State.2 Financiers insist on their rights to global mobility of capital and the freedom to invest where they like, but those in the third Original sources: Business and Professional Ethics Journal 17 (4) (1998), pp. 21-37; repr. Australian Accounting Review 9 (2) (1999), pp. 36-43; Eureka Street 9 (1) (January-February 1999), pp. 2, 43-6. Winner of Eureka Street Ethics Essay Prize for 1999, and contributor to ACU Eureka Prize for Research in Ethics, 2005. 97 Cat holic Values and Aust ralian Realit ies world who lose their livelihood as a result cannot insist on any right to global mobility of labour; nor are they compensated for their not having the right to camp on Rupert Murdoch’s lawn.3 Or – to take an example that may appeal to a different part of the political spectrum – the benefits accruing to small and isolated nations from the United States’ role as global policeman are largely unmeasured and unpaid for. Now, whose business is it to study such issues? Prima facie it is a problem for applied ethics, or some related discipline. But at present, issues of that kind fall down the cracks between disciplines. Law is not applicable, since there is no legal regime permitting those suffering disadvantage of this kind to sue. Applied ethics itself, which has developed from philosophy with some input from law, has inherited those disciplines’ phobia about quantification, and hence is in no position to handle the usually economic nature of the rights and losses involved. Economists study such matters, but typically in a ‘big picture’ way, and not from the point of view of inquiring how the individuals affected might be able to do something to recover their losses. Accountants have a good awareness of the nature of small-scale quantified gains and losses, but normally restrict themselves to costs that an entity will have to pay, not ones it merely ought to pay. The problems can only be attacked by a fusion of the relevant parts of all these disciplines. Applied ethicists must embrace quantification, and create a ‘computational casuistics’, while accountants must measure not only the obligations that the present legal situation places on entities, but those that morality requires. They must create a ‘moral accountancy’ – which will be the same thing as computational casuistics. (The name ‘casuistics’ is taken from the art of casuistry, the application of moral principles to particular cases, on which there were many books for confessors in the period 1350 to 1650.)4 This has been done before, and recalling a few historical points may help suggest how to restart progress. Aristotle’s discussion of money and prices occurs in the middle of his treatment of justice, 98 Account ancy as Com put at ional Casuist ics in which he goes into some mathematical detail on the different ways of calculating just outcomes in different cases. In the case of a partnership, for example, it is just to distribute the profits in proportion to the stakes invested, while when there is a matter of compensation for wrong, only the amount of the loss arising is to be calculated. He goes on to say that the advantage of money is that it allows all such things to be compared.5 In the Middle Ages, the scholastics developed Aristotle’s ideas, and caused them to have meaning in the courts. In those days, they thought that everything had a just price, normally the price determined by the market. Selling something to an unsuspecting buyer for substantially more than the just price was wrong, and that moral thought was backed up by legal sanction. In ancient and mediaeval Roman law, one could ask a court to nullify a contract of sale if the price had been in error ‘beyond half the just price’.6 Many subtle and powerful ideas were developed on how to find the just prices of futures contracts, annuities and insurances, leading eventually to the morallegal problem whose solution created the mathematical theory of probability: what is the just division of the stake in an interrupted game of chance?7 One of the solvers was Pascal, who in his other writings dealt casuistry, the application of morality to particular cases, a blow from which it has only recovered with the rise of applied ethics in the last thirty years. In the meantime, there have been successive waves of Calvinism, positivism, Marxism, utilitarianism, modernism, postmodernism and so on, all of which have tended to drive apart quantitative and ethical reasoning, and indeed, discouraged reasoning about detailed ethical cases at all. Of the major modern ethical traditions, only utilitarianism approved of calculation, and that was calculation of pleasures rather than of something specifically ethical, such as rights; in any case, the requirement to calculate was generally taken to be one of utilitarianism’s weak points. Modern applied ethics has revived casuistry, but not its willingness to get involved with numbers. There are two main issues, or difficulties, with implementing any project that involves quantifying rights and making the answer 99 Cat holic Values and Aust ralian Realit ies have effect. The first concerns the possibility of measuring rights. Does it make sense to quantify rights with sufficient accuracy to make intelligible the demand that they should be recognised by a legally-backed system of accounting? Secondly, is it at all practicable to create a legal regime that would enforce those rights? The natural scepticism one feels about both these matters is, it will be argued, unfounded. The technology to measure rights largely exists already in accountancy and environmental economics, while the international legal regime that is currently developing has the means to enforce any measurable right. It needs some more work, but only more of the same kind of thing that is happening already. Doubts about the possibility of measurement of certain kinds of rights are perhaps best assuaged by considering the one area where there has been a fairly determined effort to quantify moral rights for which there was at present no supporting legal regime. This is the field of ‘environmental accounting’, studied mostly by economists (as it has no legal significance, it has not been of interest to most accountants and lawyers). It began with the recognition that National Accounts, such as the Gross Domestic Product, were measures of economic activity that failed to take into account certain goods, and hence were mismeasures of progress. For example, depletion of a scarce natural resource counts as a positive item in the GDP. Thus the costs to future generations of unrestricted economic growth in the present were not measured. To use GDP as a measure of the Good is thus an instance of ‘Great Leap Forward’ pricing, the name taken from the response of the Chinese peasants to the Great Helmsman’s demand that they increase the production of iron (they melted down their tools). Economists attempted to devise a system of national accounts that would take into account environmental goods, as well as, for example, the health of populations, so that there would be a measure of whether economic ‘progress’ was actually improving the lot of humanity.8 Accountants have been rather behind in this field, but as legal requirements to disclose costs of cleanup have increased, there has been a certain amount of work.9 100 Account ancy as Com put at ional Casuist ics This is not to say that the economists have measured fairly. Environmentalists have not been keen to recognise all the benefits of normal economic activity. One needs also to measure the benefits to future generations of unrestricted economic growth in present, such as expensive taxpayer-funded medical research with cures for the future, and the discrediting of Stalinist regimes. A focus on just one kind of good, that of the environment, leads to distortions as bad as those that gave rise to the demand for environmental accounting in the first place. All relevant goods must be quantified, if there is to be any plausibly rational attempt to calculate and balance rights. Cost-benefit analysis has made a concerted effort at weighing all considerations relevant to such decisions as major infrastructure projects. There have been some reasonable ethical objections to some details of its methodology, which can weight the preferences of the poor less than those of the rich,10 but the vigorous attempts in the field to weigh all considerations are admirable. These intellectual ferments have largely passed accountancy by. While it may be admitted that the subject matter of accounting is ‘equities’, that is, rights or titles,11 the profession has traditionally adopted a conservative attitude to what may be quantified for display on a balance sheet. There has been a strong preference for recording tangible and saleable assets, for example, with a good deal of emphasis on what they cost and what they could now be sold for. But that attitude has tended to erode as modern business has created a demand for information on the true financial position of entities. There is regular criticism of accounting standards whenever a giant corporation goes under shortly after reporting a healthy profit, as happened regularly in the 1980s.12 While the principles of measurement in accountancy are controversial, the recent tendency has been to avoid artificial rules and to look for the expected future economic benefit arising from the assets an entity controls.13 ‘Expected’ has approximately the usual meaning it has in mathematical probability theory. Some of what is now becoming standard comes close to the quantification of a moral obligation. For example, if a company is 101 Cat holic Values and Aust ralian Realit ies engaged in open-cut mining, and has an established policy of site restoration to a higher standard than that required by law, it must make provision on its balance sheet for that ‘constructive obligation’ as soon as the mining is undertaken. Failure to restore the site to the higher standard ‘would cause unacceptable damage to the entity’s reputation and its relationship with the community in which it operates’; it is going to have to restore the site, so must disclose its present obligation to do so.14 Further clarifications may be made by replying to various obvious objections to the project. • Objection 1. Rights are not the kind of thing that admits of quantification. Surely a right to life, or a right of a people to land, are not capable of being weighed in a balance, or subject to more and less? Answer. It is not maintained that all kinds of rights admit of quantification. Some obviously do. One’s right to be compensated by someone who has stolen one’s goods, or to be paid for one’s work, is limited to a fixed amount, and that is unaffected by the cases considered in the objection. But it is also true that there is pressure to quantify somehow even rights to life, when they conflict. When scarce health care resources or investments in safety are to be allocated, someone will lose out, that is, have their rights recognised little or not at all. It is usual to quantify claims somehow, in order to balance them – for example, when there is a need to allocate scarce health care resources. It may be alarming to hear health economists talking about the dollars needed per ‘Quality Adjusted Life Year’,15 or experts on safety putting a money value on life,16 but deviations from the results of those methods are also alarming. It is hard to see any superior way of proceeding. What rights exactly can be quantified is a further question. Perhaps one cannot improve on Aristotle’s opinion that quantification is appropriate in two areas: distribution and 102 Account ancy as Com put at ional Casuist ics • • compensation. In that case, in a case like allocation of health care resources, it may be preferable not to speak of rights to life as themselves quantifiable, but rather to say that the quantification arises only at the stage when distribution of resources to support those rights is in question. Similarly, it may be that the intrinsic or aesthetic value of endangered species is not quantifiable, but quantification must enter when resources are to be diverted from other uses to save those species. Objection 2. The quantification of ‘rights’, if it is possible at all, arises from something non-ethical. For example, if I promise you $10, the quantification arises merely from what I said, while the ethics of the matter is founded on a general obligation to fulfil promises, which is not itself quantitative. So there is no need for any kind of ‘computational ethics’. Answer. That may be so, and in that case pure ethics need not consider quantification. But here we are considering applied ethics, in which we wish to look at the actual obligations that arise from ethical principles in particular cases (and compare those arising from different principles, if necessary). It is not true that because ethical principles are non-quantitative, the obligations arising from them also are. You might as well argue that because probabilities arise from symmetry, which is not quantifiable, probabilities also cannot be measured. Objection 3. It is quite unrealistic to expect precise measurements of anything so vaguely specified as one’s right to clean air, or one’s loss of self-respect through being unemployed. Answer. Precise measurement is rarely relevant to action. As is wellknown in probability theory, a very rough estimate is all that is needed in most cases. I don’t know the precise risk of a crash when I get on a plane: maybe it’s one in a million or one in ten million; but if I believe it has got to one in a few 103 Cat holic Values and Aust ralian Realit ies • thousand, I sweat on takeoff and wish I weren’t flying Aeroflot. As this example also illustrates, what is often needed is not so much a precise measurement, as a solid minimum. If I can show that an environmental good is worth at least a certain amount, that is enough to get its claims ‘on the table’, even if there is no hope of a precise measurement. And if precise calculations are needed to decide between two alternatives, it probably doesn’t matter much one way or the other. But again, more entities can be priced exactly than was once thought. Options (the right but not the obligation to buy something for a fixed price at a future date) were once thought too speculative to price, but their exact pricing now keeps many mathematicians in comfort. Reasonably exact measurement is also possible in the area where quantification is most familiar in law: compensation payments for loss of future earnings, as evaluated by actuaries.17 Objection 4. Some future outcomes are too speculative to measure even approximately, and if something cannot be measured with some reasonable accuracy, no-one is likely to take it into account when acting in the present. Answer. The defence budgets of countries, and the advertising budgets of companies, are not observed to be small. Yet the outcomes of that spending are wildly speculative. The same is true of research and development budgets, which are large in countries other than Australia. Decision makers in such cases are acting to insure against various small risks of large, perhaps catastrophic, loss. The risks and payoffs may be almost unmeasurable, but it is still necessary to distinguish between real or appreciable risks and completely fanciful ones. As examples of quantities that might seem initially to be too vague, but are in fact priced reasonably, consider the 104 Account ancy as Com put at ional Casuist ics • goodwill of a business, and the intellectual capital of a research and development company. The goodwill of a business has a substantial causal effect on its future profits, so it cannot be ignored when the expected future cash flows of the business are to be estimated. It can be measured approximately as the excess that a purchaser of the business is prepared to pay for it over and above the value of its tangible assets (including ‘visible intangibles’ like copyright).18 Microsoft has few tangible assets (and not a lot of goodwill, either), but it has ‘intellectual capital’ in the sense of a team of researchers with a track record of successful innovations, who can be expected to generate future profits. Microsoft’s share price can be taken as an estimate by the market of what that is worth (after tangible assets, licences, etc are subtracted). On one estimate, 94% of Microsoft’s worth is represented by such intangibles that do not rate a mention on its balance sheet.19 The size of this figure indicates, if nothing else, the need for accountancy to take some risks over what it regards as measurable. Otherwise, it will be sidelined as an irrelevance. That completes the consideration of objections based on difficulties over quantification. We now come to those concerning the feasibility of any plans for morally restraining large-scale enterprises. Objection 5. Capitalists are not nice people, and are not going to accept more moral rules. They are more than sufficiently challenged working around the few they already have. Answer. If capitalists really wanted a deregulated environment, they would migrate to Russia, and take advantage of the free market in judicial decisions, the liquidation of business rivals, and so on. They do not do so, as they prefer to operate in countries where exchange is protected by legally backed moral codes against theft and fraud. A norm of fairness underlies exchange: ‘to make exchange possible, we must 105 Cat holic Values and Aust ralian Realit ies • make theft unfeasible.’20 The same point arises from the extensive work on modelling trust in exchanges through iterated prisoners’ dilemma games, which shows the stability of tit-for-tat strategies in a wide range of circumstances.21 As one saying has it, ‘When trust is betrayed, stakeholders get even.’22 Corporations worry incessantly about their ‘image’ of probity, for the obvious reason that other capitalists don’t trust sleazebags. After the crash of the late 1980s, there were fears that Sydney’s place as the commercial centre of Australia was at risk through its reputation for corporate fraud.23 Legal pressure on insider trading and similar frauds seems to be increasing (though that is hard to evaluate until years later).24 To return to the Middle Ages for a moment: when national governments were weak and knew little about business, capitalists created their own international legal regime, the Law Merchant, based on commonly accepted basic moral principles and business practice.25 Objection 6. With all major political parties in the West captured by economic rationalism, there is little prospect for plans that involve an increase in legal control. In any case, the globalisation of business means it can escape the efforts of any nation state to regulate it. Answer. This is a problem for an approach like that of Mark Latham’s Civilising Global Capital which takes the ways of capitalism more or less for granted, and asks what ‘policy’ prescriptions can restrain it from running amok. It is also a problem for the idea that it is the ‘State’ whose business it is to coerce business enterprises into internalising external costs.26 The proposals here should act at an earlier stage, and should act through liability at common law, not through action by governments. How capitalism pursues profit depends on what the profits are. And what the profits are, if any, depends on the accounting. It is unclear, for example, if Bond Corp 106 Account ancy as Com put at ional Casuist ics etc ever made a real profit, yet it was able to ‘buy’ anything it liked – including its choice of auditor.27 If it could have afforded to buy only out of its real profits, it would not have been heard of. Legislative control of business may have been weakening, but it is not so clear that legal control has been. The increases in legal control represented by such decisions as Mabo in Australia and the class actions against tobacco companies in the US have nothing to do with legislation. They depend instead on the common law reaching into the moral underpinning or core of its tradition of decisions. Whatever fads the highest courts of Western countries may be subject to, free market theory is not among them. Robust ethical theories seem to be more popular. In a remarkable speech on ‘Commercial law and morality’, Sir Gerard Brennan, later chief justice of the High Court, said: Moral values can and manifestly do inform the law ... The stimulus which moral values provide in the development of legal principle is hard to overstate, though the importance of the moral matrix to the development of judge-made law is seldom acknowledged. Sometimes the impact of the moral matrix is obvious, as when notions of un-conscionability determine a case. More often the influence of common moral values goes unremarked. But whence does the law derive its concepts of reasonable care, of a duty to speak, of the scope of constructive trusts – to name but a few examples – save from moral values translated into legal precepts? 28 The complex maze of rules that make up commercial law may seem an inhospitable domain for moral imperatives, but the opposite is true, according to Brennan. It is for the commercial lawyer to discern the moral purpose behind each abstruse rule, and advise his client’s conscience of what is just in the circumstances, not merely what he can legally get away with. Of course, not all judges of the High Court agree with him. Ian Callinan perhaps does not – which is one reason why Callinan is in a certain amount of trouble. 107 Cat holic Values and Aust ralian Realit ies The accounting profession cannot set its own standards in splendid isolation from legal opinion, since it must operate in a legal environment not of its own choosing. This became most evident through the legal cases of the early 1990s, when victims of the large accounting firms’ view of standards sued for huge sums, sometimes successfully. In one of the largest cases, Deloitte’s faced damages of $340m for certifying Adsteam’s 1990 accounts, which disclosed a profit of $236m when the true figure was a $244m loss.29 In other cases, the State of Victoria sued KPMG for $1bn over its audit of Tricontinental, and KPMG settled for a reported $136m,30 while Andersens was lucky to avoid trouble over Bond.31 A table as at October 1996 lists twenty-one such cases.32 The ability of law to have an impact on complex financial matters is well illustrated by the move away from the legal support for artificial tax schemes that the Barwick High Court provided. ‘Literal’ interpretations of tax laws permitted endless schemes that subverted the intent of the law by appeal to its letter. Then the crucial section 15AA was added to the Acts Interpretation Act in 1981. It provided: In the interpretation of a provision of an Act, a construction that would promote the purpose or object underlying the Act (whether that purpose or object is expressly stated in the Act or not) shall be preferred to a construction that would not promote that purpose or object. In 1984, the revolutionary section 15AB was added, allowing recourse to external evidence such as Hansard as evidence of the legislators’ purposes.33 Australia’s tax avoidance industry, hitherto one of the most cunning in the world, never recovered from the blow.34 There are parallels in accountancy. The standards contain a ‘substance over form requirement’ (‘Transactions and events should be accounted for and presented in accordance with their financial reality and not merely their legal form’35 and there is a long-standing ‘true and fair’ requirement.36 These notions are sometimes thought of by accountants as 108 Account ancy as Com put at ional Casuist ics • decorations surviving from the age of the dinosaurs,37 but gross departures from them are subject to legal scrutiny. All these developments put paid to the notion that can sometimes be gained from both accountants and lawyers, that accountancy and law are very technical fields in which the common person’s crude notions of the right, the true and the fair count for little. When the crunch comes, the courts prove to be as scandalised by technical evasions of what is fair as outside observers. These considerations apply with minor changes in all major jurisdictions: commercial law is remarkably international. It is true that there are some countries where commercial law is a dead letter. But then, there is not much commerce to regulate in Somalia or Afghanistan, for reasons not unrelated to the breakdown of law in those areas. Objection 7. The law has a poor track record of actually doing anything to restrain capitalism, at least, restraining it from harming anyone but other capitalists. Answer. An interesting historical precedent that may encourage optimism is the gradual success of legal remedies in promoting industrial safety. Accidents and polluted work environments are one of the easiest means for a manufacturer to lessen costs, but the standard of workplace safety is high, and has been rising for at least a hundred and fifty years. Legislation has played a part, but the role of common law damages is far from negligible. Common law has been important both in setting pre-existing standards of liability by employers, and in providing the matrix of interpretation for subsequent legislation.38 More recently, and especially relevantly for a general project of internalising costs through legal means, has been the expansion of legal liability for economic loss. Until recently, the law was generally unwilling to recognise liability for purely economic loss, such as loss of income, suffered as a result of negligence (for example, in oil spills or incompetent 109 Cat holic Values and Aust ralian Realit ies • audits). There has been strong movement away from this position in the last twenty years, and damages are now often recoverable in such cases.39 The law does not yet recognise a general duty of care in all cases of foreseeable harm, but the tendency to approach that limit is strong.40 In the meantime, the aggressive law firms who specialise in class actions are continually forcing the pace. The firm of Slater and Gordon, for example, have been involved in the Sydney water crisis, pollution from Ok Tedi, asbestos, breast implants, tobacco, peanut butter and the Christian Brothers. One should not forget either the legal regime that is gradually arising internationally from treaties, which has had some success in areas like protecting Antarctica. The speed of development of international e-commerce and Internet gambling means that something dramatic will happen concerning international laws governing finance. It remains to be seen what it will be. Objection 8. Attempts to find complex surrogate measures of environmental goods, subtle methods of valuing contingencies and so on are undemocratic. Policy matters about the environment and any other important matters ought to be judged by the citizens in the light of argument, not by alleged experts through measurement. Having experts in back rooms deciding such matters would replace public deliberation about ideas with a scientistic paternalism.41 Answer. This style of argument will appeal to philosophers and Americans more than non-philosophers and non-Americans. Even American philosophers, though, are grateful to the Food and Drug Administration’s experts who test their food and medicines. If rights are quantifiable, no amount of talk about democracy will make them otherwise, and expert opinion as to the quantity of the rights will be part of the information that ought to inform the political (or legal) process. 110 Account ancy as Com put at ional Casuist ics • In any case, the question of what rights exist and can be measured is separate from public policy issues about how to cause them to make a difference. Objection 9. No-one is going to be found who is expert in these issues. Answer. Australia is crawling with accountants and lawyers: many with glowing testimonials from the best schools and universities in the country. Here is an opportunity for them to do something useful instead of wasting their lives devising tax minimisation schemes. N OTES 1 ‘BHP’s decision lifts markets’, Sydney Morning Herald 30/4/97, p. 32; ‘BHP unions set for fight ... while chiefs quit in style’, Sun-Herald 4/5/97, p. 29. 2 H.M. Hubbard, ‘The real cost of energy’, Scientific American 264 (4) (Apr, 1991): 18-23. 3 J. Seabrook, ‘A global market for all’, New Statesman 26/6/98, pp. 25-7. 4 A.R. Jonsen and S. Toulmin, The Abuse of Casuistry: A History of Moral Reasoning (Berkeley, 1988); E. Leites, ed, Conscience and Casuistry in Early Modern Europe (New York, 1988); J.F. Keenan and T.A. Shannon, eds, The Context of Casuistry (Washington, DC, 1993). 5 Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, Book 5, chs. 3-4. 6 Justinian’s Code 4.44.2; J.W. Baldwin, ‘The medieval theories of the just price’, Transactions of the American Philosophical Society 49 (1959), part 4, repr. in PreCapitalist Economic Thought (New York, 1972), at pp. 18, 23; J. Gordley, The Philosophical Origins of Modern Contract Doctrine (Oxford, 1991), pp. 65-7; a similar modern case in Taylor v. Johnson (1983) 151 CLR 422. 7 E. Coumet, ‘La théorie du hasard est-elle née par hasard?’, Annales 25 (1970), pp. 574-598. 8 UNSTAT, c 1993, Handbook for Integrated Environmental and Economic Accounting; M. Young, ‘Natural resource accounting: some Australian experiences and observations’, in E. Lutz, ed, Toward Improved Accounting for the Environment (Washington, DC, 1993), pp. 177-83; Australian Bureau of Statistics, ‘Natural resource and environmental accounting in the national accounts’, in Australian National Accounts: National Income and Expenditure OECD, Environment and Economics: A Survey of OECD Work (Paris, 1992); J.A. Dixon, L.F. Scura, R.A. Carpenter and P.B. Sherman, Economic Analysis of Environmental Impacts (London, 1986). 111 Cat holic Values and Aust ralian Realit ies 9 Journal of Accounting and Public Policy special issue 16 (2) (Summer 1997); R. Gray, J. Bebbington and D. Walters, Accounting and the Environment: Green Accounting (London, 1993). K.F. Herbohn, R. Peterson and J.L. Herbohn, ‘Accounting for forestry assets: current practice and future directions’, Australian Accounting Review 8 (1998), pp. 54-66; F. Micallef and G. Peirson, ‘Financial reporting of cultural, heritage, scientific and community collections’, Australian Accounting Review 7 (1) (May 1997), pp. 31-7. 10 D. Copp, ‘The justice and rationale of cost-benefit analysis’, Theory and Decision 23 (1987): 65-87; D.C. Hubin, ‘The moral justification of benefit/cost analysis’, Economics and Philosophy 10 (1994), pp. 169-93. 11 L. Goldberg, A Philosophy of Accounting (Melbourne, 1939), p. 41. 12 F.L. Clarke, G.W. Dean and K.G. Oliver, Corporate Collapse: Regulatory, Accounting and Ethical Failure (Cambridge, 1997). 13 G. Hampton and T. Bishop, ‘Measurement and the Australian conceptual framework’, Australian Accounting Review 8 (1998), pp. 42-53. 14 Australian Accounting Research Foundation, Exposure Draft 88: Provisions and Contingencies (December, 1997), p. 54. 15 A. Edgar et al. The Ethical QALY: Ethical Issues in Health Care Resource Allocation (Surrey, 1998); A.M.D. Porter, ‘Measurement: health economics’, in The Ethics of Resource Allocation in Health Care ed. K.M. Boyd (Edinburgh, 1979), pp. 101-29; cf. J. Richardson, ‘The accountant as triage master: an economist’s perspective on voluntary euthanasia and the value of life debate’, Bioethics 1 (1987), pp. 226-40; A. Bowling, Measuring Health: A Review of Quality of Life Measurement Scales (Milton Keynes, 1991). 16 J.W. Jones-Lee, The Value of Life: An Economic Analysis (London, 1976); criticism in P. Dorman, Markets and Mortality: Economics, Dangerous Work and the Value of Human Life (Cambridge, 1996). 17 D.A. McI. Kemp, The Quantum of Damages in Personal Injury and Fatal Accident Claims (4th ed, London, 1975); H. Luntz, Assessment of Damages for Personal Injury and Death (2nd ed, Sydney, 1983); on matters of principle, J.W. Chapman, ed, Compensatory Justice (New York, 1991). 18 K.W. Chauvin and M. Hirschey, ‘Goodwill, profitability and the market value of the firm’, Journal of Accounting and Public Policy 13 (1994), pp. 159-80; I. Morley, ‘Debating goodwill’, British Dental Journal 176 (11) (11/6/94), pp. 409-10. 19 C. Leadbeater, ‘Time to let the bean-counters go’, New Statesman 17/4/98, pp. 30-1; on valuing ‘brand strength’: G.V. Smith and R.L. Parr, Valuation of Intellectual Property and Intangible Assets (2nd ed, New York, 1994), pp. 289-96. 20 R.E. Goodin, Motivating Political Morality (Oxford, 1992), p. 24. 21 J.M. Guttman, ‘Rational actors, tit-for-tat types, and the evolution of cooperation’, Journal of Economic Behavior and Organization 29 (1996): 27-56, and many articles in Games and Economic Behavior. 22 L.L. Axline, ‘The bottom line on ethics’, Journal of Accountancy 170 (1990): 8791. 112 Account ancy as Com put at ional Casuist ics 23 P. Costello, ‘Restoring confidence in corporate morality’, Quadrant 34 (9) (September 1990): 20-22; J. Hyde, ‘Trust, politics and business’, Quadrant 37 (4) (April 1993): 43-50; ‘Big business elders crusade for higher ethics’, Sydney Morning Herald 26/5/90, p. 6. 24 S.S. Shapiro, Wayward Capitalists (New Haven, Connecticut, 1984). 25 L.E. Trakman, The Law Merchant: The Evolution of Commercial Law (Littleton, Colorado, 1983). 26 A.C. Pigou, The Economics of Welfare (4th ed, London, 1932), part 2, ch. 9; W.J. Baumol, Welfare Economics and the Theory of the State (London, 1965). 27 Clarke, Dean and Oliver, esp p. 179. 28 G. Brennan, ‘Commercial law and morality’, Melbourne University Law Review 17 (1989): 100-6, at p. 101; see also G. Brennan, ‘The purpose and scope of judicial review’, Australian Bar Review 2 (1986): 93-113, at pp. 104-5; P. Finn, ‘Commerce, the common law and morality’, Melbourne University Law Review 17 (1989): 87-99. 29 ‘ASC wins Adsteam appeal’, SMH 29/8/96, p. 25, also 9/4/97, p. 29; Clarke, Dean and Oliver, Corporate Collapse ch. 12. 30 ‘Victoria sues KPMG for $1bn over Tricon audit’, SMH 2/6/92, p. 31. 31 C. Ryan and K. McClymont, ‘Alan Bond: the untold story’, SMH 4/8/92, pp. 35, 38; comment in M. Walsh, ‘Morality wanes the more the law waxes’, SMH 4/8/92, p. 29; R.G. Walker, ‘Window-dressing at Bond Corp’, Australian Business 24/2/88, pp. 95-6; R. Gibson et al. ‘Bond: a commentary on accounting issues discussed’, Accounting History 2 (2) (1990): 135-42; R.G. Walker, ‘A feeling of déjà vu: controversies in accounting and auditing regulation in Australia’, Critical Perspectives on Accounting 4 (1993): 97-109; Clarke, Dean and Oliver, ch. 13. 32 Clarke, Dean and Oliver, pp. 234-5; further in ‘Southern Cross sues former auditor’, SMH 19/9/95, p. 29; ‘AWA auditor to pay $12.2m in damages’, SMH 8/4/93, pp. 29, 34; ‘Court orders Deloitte and Corrs to pay $1.8m’, SMH 21/7/97, p. 41; on Westpac’s 1991 accounts, E. Carew, Westpac: The Bank That Broke the Bank (Sydney, 1997), ch. 12; legal discussion in B. Feldthusen, Economic Negligence (3rd ed, Scarborough, Ontario, 1994), pp. 117-24; G.R. Masel, Professional Negligence of Lawyers, Accountants, Bankers and Brokers (2nd ed, North Ryde, NSW, 1989), ch. 4; B. Chapman, ‘Limited auditors’ liability: economic analysis and the theory of tort law’, Canadian Business Law Journal 20 (1992), pp. 180-214. 33 See Mr Justice Bryson, ‘Statutory interpretation: an Australian judicial perspective’, Statute Law Review 13 (1992): 187-208. 34 ‘Interpreting statutes – a new challenge to accountants and lawyers’, The Chartered Accountant in Australia 52 (2) (August 1981), pp. 42-3; M.L. Perez, ‘Wielding the axe on Australia’s tax laws’, Australian Business Law Review 20 (1992), pp. 362-71. 35 Australian Accounting Standard, AAS 6 (Australian Accounting Standards, Students Edition [1982], p. 1051). 113 Cat holic Values and Aust ralian Realit ies 36 R.H. Parker, P. Wolnizer and C. Nobes, Readings in True and Fair (New York, 1996). 37 W. McGregor, ‘True and fair view – an accounting anachronism’, Australian Accountant Feb, 1992, pp. 68-71. 38 H.H. Glass, M.H. McHugh and F.M. Douglas, The Liability of Employers in Damages for Personal Injury (2nd ed, Sydney, 1979); J. Munkman, Employer’s Liability at Common Law (11th ed, London, 1990); P.W.J. Bartrip and S.B. Burman, The Wounded Soldiers of Industry: Industrial Compensation Policy 18331897 (Oxford, 1987), chs 1, 4. 39 J.M. Feinman, Economic Negligence: Liability of Professionals and Businesses to Third Parties for Economic Loss (Boston, 1995); V.P. Goldberg, ‘Recovery for economic loss following the Exxon Valdez oil spill’, Journal of Legal Studies 23 (1994), pp. 1-39; K. Hogg, ‘Negligence and economic loss in England, Australia, Canada and New Zealand’, International and Comparative Law Quarterly 43 (1994), pp. 116-41. 40 See Anns v. Merton London Borough Council [1978] Appeal Cases 728 at 751-2, 7578. 41 M. Sagoff, The Economy of the Earth: Philosophy, Law and the Environment (Cambridge, 1990). 114 CH APTER TEN The M a bo H igh Court a nd N a t ura l La w Va lues B Y THE 1970S Catholic philosophy of the traditional sort was in an apparently decrepit state. The scholastic philosophy descended from the middle ages came to be thought a hopelessly antiquated embarrassment, both inside and outside Catholic circles. But in the legal world the middle ages are only yesterday. There, the scholastic method of arguing for and against propositions with the citation of learned authorities is fully preserved.1 So are practices like wearing robes and hiring champions to fight one’s case. The scholastic natural law philosophy of ethics, stressing objective principles of justice, has also survived and flourished in the nourishing habitat of the Australian courts. Consequently, the most dramatic outcome of Catholic philosophy in recent times has been the High Court’s Mabo judgement on Aboriginal land rights. The fundamental issue in the case was the conflict between the existing law based on the principle of terra nullius, and what the judges took to be objective principles of justice. Original source: James Franklin, Corrupting The Youth: A History of Philosophy in Australia (Macleay Press, Sydney, 2003), pp. 388-98. 115 Cat holic Values and Aust ralian Realit ies The relation between law and morality is a question on which Catholic philosophy is dramatically opposed to traditional legal theories. On one older view of the relation between the two, ‘the King can do no wrong’: the law simply is whatever is laid down by properly constituted authority. A less extreme position holds that there may be moral constraints on law, as on any other human activity, but that law is still not especially connected with morality. Instead it is a set of customs that have arisen to allow society to become organised. They could have been different, but once they arise they are fixed so that everyone can get on with life, knowing what is expected of themselves and others.2 It is hard to see what other view is possible for those who lack the scholastic view that morality is somehow founded on the objective facts of human nature. At the opposite extreme, the scholastics hold that law and morality are so closely related as to be almost the same thing. The whole point of law, they say, is to implement the demands of justice, whose standards are external and objective. Or rather, one should not think of the standards of justice as external to law, since the aim is that law should realise and internalise the principles of justice: ‘the precepts of law are designed to be the precepts of justice.’3 Father Farrell, the Dominican who denounced university philosophy in 1961, was one of the most active in promoting this view, and many other Australian Catholics have defended it.4 The two views come into conflict over the issue of whether a precedent should be followed, even when it is unjust. Generations of lawyers absorbed the fundamental doctrine of precedent: a precedent cannot be overthrown in favour of some abstract conception of ‘justice’; there is to be no private revelation of justice, since that would make the law unstable, as each new judge imposed his own opinions or the changeable opinions of society. Sir Owen Dixon, often regarded as Australia’s most eminent Chief Justice of the High Court, expressed the old consensus in 1956: But in our Australian High Court we have had as yet no deliberate innovators bent on express change of acknowledged doctrine. It is one thing for a court to seek to extend the 116 The Mabo High Cour t and Nat ural Law Values application of accepted principles to new cases, or to reason from the more fundamental of settled legal principles to new conclusions, or to decide that a category is not closed against unforeseen instances which in reason might be subsumed thereunder. It is an entirely different thing for a judge, who is discontented with a result held to flow from long accepted legal principles, deliberately to abandon the principle in the name of justice or of social necessity or of social convenience ... The latter means an abrupt and almost arbitrary change. The objection is not that it violates Aristotle’s precept ‘that the effort to be wiser than the laws is what is prohibited by the codes that are extolled.’ The objection is that in truth the judge wrests the law to his authority. No doubt he supposes that it is to do a great right. And he may not acknowledge that for the purpose he must do more than a little wrong … It is for this reason that it has been said that the conscious judicial innovator is bound under the doctrine of precedents by no authority except the error he committed yesterday.5 This means, in plain terms, that if the legal system as a whole falls into a mistake, it can never dig itself out. One will not find in Dixon’s works a discussion of such matters as whether there is or could be any such thing as an abstract standard of justice. His view on such large philosophical issues is clear, though, from his remark, ‘An enquiry into the source whence the law derives its authority in a community, if prosecuted too far, becomes merely metaphysical.’6 Such inquiries were pursued nonetheless, by those less shy of metaphysics. Besides the work of Catholics, the massive volumes and long years of teaching of Julius Stone, Professor of Jurisprudence at Sydney University, served to bring questions about the source of legal authority to the fore. Though he did not precisely agree with the view that there are moral principles that the law must implement, that view was one he took seriously and expounded sympathetically. His students, who included three of the Mabo judges, were introduced to a range of opinions on the matter, and a habit of looking for the principles that informed the law.7 Dixon’s view was upheld by his immediate successors as Chief Justice, Barwick and Gibbs.8 Barwick did indeed allow that there 117 Cat holic Values and Aust ralian Realit ies is a community sense of justice and fairness that may occasionally be ‘pandered to’ when interpreting ambiguous laws, but went on to say, ‘it is not for the individual judge or judges to express his or their own views as to the law, views perhaps tinged by a philosophy of one kind or another. Such a course would, it seems to me, be a complete deviation from the judicial tradition of the common law. It would lead to a rule by men rather than a rule by law.’9 But by the 1980s, doubts had set in at the highest level. Sir Anthony Mason, Chief Justice at the time of the Mabo decision, wrote of Dixon’s passage, ‘Yet in some respects his Honour’s outline resembles an elegantly constructed mansion in which some of the windows have been deliberately left open.’10 He means that Dixon has neglected the possibility of inconsistency among precedents, or between precedents and principles. ‘If applied too rigidly, the doctrine of precedent produces both injustice and lack of rationality – the very flaws whose purpose it is to expel. Thus adherence to a past decision which reflects either a principle undermined by subsequent legal development or the values of a bygone era, will produce an unjust result, judged by the standards of today.’11 Mason thus emphasised the conflict an outdated precedent may have with ‘community values’ rather than with an abstract standard of justice, but the recognition that a precedent may conflict with something more basic was the major step away from Dixon’s reasoning. The most detailed and explicit answer to Dixon, in terms of the conflict between precedent and absolute standards of justice, came from Sir Gerard Brennan, the writer of first Mabo judgment and Mason’s successor as Chief Justice. His theory of the relation of morality and law is that of the Catholic natural law school. In earlier works he had praised such Catholic legal heroes as Thomas More, well known for his stand on the conflict of law and morality, and the colonial Irish lawyers Therry and Plunkett, whose ‘impartial enforcement of the law’ secured the convictions of the perpetrators of the Myall Creek massacre. He also commented favourably on Higgins’s adoption in the Harvester judgment of the phrase ‘reasonable and frugal comfort’, as the standard which a 118 The Mabo High Cour t and Nat ural Law Values basic wage ought to support, from an outside moral source, an encyclical of Pope Leo XIII.12 Lawyers, he also said, have moral duties beyond simply applying the law they find in place. ‘If the law itself is an obstacle to justice, the duty of a Christian lawyer extends to seeking its reform.’13 Most remarkably, in a speech on ‘Commercial law and morality’, he said: Moral values can and manifestly do inform the law ... The stimulus which moral values provide in the development of legal principle is hard to overstate, though the importance of the moral matrix to the development of judge-made law is seldom acknowledged. Sometimes the impact of the moral matrix is obvious, as when notions of unconscionability determine a case. More often the influence of common moral values goes unremarked. But whence does the law derive its concepts of reasonable care, of a duty to speak, of the scope of constructive trusts – to name but a few examples – save from moral values translated into legal precepts?14 The complex maze of rules that makes up commercial law may seem an inhospitable domain for moral imperatives, but the opposite is true, according to Brennan. It is for the commercial lawyer to discern the moral purpose behind each abstruse rule, and advise his client’s conscience of what is just in the circumstances, not merely what he can legally get away with. So when he comes to the specific matter raised by Dixon, whether a precedent can be overturned for conflicting with justice, it is no surprise to find him agreeing that it can: ‘The existing body of law may yield no relevant legal rule, or, in rare cases, may yield a legal rule which is offensive to basic contemporary conceptions of justice.’ In overturning it, however, the judge does not simply impose his private morality. ‘The reasons for judgment in the higher appellate courts increasingly look behind the legal rule to discover the informing legal principle and behind the informing principle to discover the basic value.’15 The answer of the innovators to Dixon’s charge that judges who upset a precedent are imposing their idiosyncratic notions of morality is thus a cunning one. Overturning an unjust precedent need not be a matter of judges implementing their personal morality, but instead (in 119 Cat holic Values and Aust ralian Realit ies Dixon’s own words) ‘to reason from the more fundamental of settled legal principles to new conclusions.’ It is simply that the judges now perceive that the offending precedent conflicts with more fundamental legal principles or values. Brennan’s successor as Chief Justice, Murray Gleeson, asserts that all judges must be for Dixon’s ‘strict and complete legalism’; what this means, however, is not an adherence to the letter of the law but that judges are appointed to ‘interpret and apply the values inherent in the law.’16 In the Mabo case, such a conflict was found between the existing law, which justified the dispossession of the Aborigines by the doctrine of terra nullius, and principles of justice which, the judges held, conflicted with that precedent. Terra nullius is not a phrase of English law, but its substance is contained in a judgment of the Privy Council in 1889, according to which New South Wales in 1788 was ‘a colony which consisted of a tract of territory practically unoccupied, without settled inhabitants or settled law, at the time when it was peacefully annexed to the British dominion.’ 17 Aborigines, in other words, have no more rights to the land they walk over than tourists. To explain what is wrong with this, the Court needed first to adopt a theory of native title. Obviously, this cannot be part of the existing (British) law, and must be found in more general principles of justice. An explanation close to that adopted by the Court is found in a 1988 article by Frank Brennan, Jesuit, barrister, son of Sir Gerard and adviser to the Catholic bishops on Aboriginal affairs: Where a traditional tribal community has continued to reside on its traditional land, discharging its spiritual obligations with regard to that land, and that land has never been occupied by any other persons, that community is entitled to a legal title to that land in legal recognition of the fact that they have always lived on that land, land to which no other persons have any moral claim. To deny legal title to that land would be to complete the act of dispossession commenced 200 years ago, or else it would be to deny the rule of law operation with respect to these citizens and their most precious possession.18 120 The Mabo High Cour t and Nat ural Law Values Insiders of scholastic philosophy will notice that the judges’ theory of native title is even closer to one of the scholastic classics, and a founding work of modern international law, Francisco de Vitoria’s De Indis. It was written in 1539 in response to the original question of this kind, the rights of the American Indians to their land.19 Having established that native title exists, the question of its conflict with precedent arises. Both of the two main Mabo judgments, the first written by Gerard Brennan and the second by Justices Deane and Gaudron, admit that to achieve justice in the case, the existing law will have to be overturned. Brennan writes, ‘According to the cases, the common law itself took from indigenous inhabitants any right to occupy their traditional land, exposed them to the deprivation of the religious, cultural and economic sustenance which the land provides, vested the land effectively in the control of the Imperial authorities without any right to compensation and made the indigenous inhabitants intruders in their own homes and mendicants for a place to live. Judged by any civilised standard, such a law is unjust and its claim to be part of the common law to be applied in contemporary Australia must be questioned.’ 20 Both judgments treat the overturning of precedent that this circumstance renders necessary as a serious matter, needing careful justification. Not any unjust law whatever can be overturned, they hold. ‘In discharging its duty to declare the common law of Australia, this court is not free to adopt rules that accord with contemporary notions of justice and human rights if their adoption would fracture the skeleton of principle which gives the body of our law its shape and internal consistency.’ To overturn a law like that of terra nullius, it must be found inconsistent with one of the basic underlying principles of the law. That principle is a simple one: equality before the law. ‘No case can command unquestioning adherence if the rule it expresses seriously offends the values of justice and human rights (especially equality before the law).’21 Even if there is such an inconsistency, 121 Cat holic Values and Aust ralian Realit ies one must weigh whether the disturbance to the settled rule of law would be ‘disproportionate to the benefit flowing from the overturning.’ (Even this last point, which appears at first sight to be a modern and sophisticated concession to the Dixonian view, can be found in Aquinas.)22 One must also consider international law. While the English legal system is not strictly bound by outside decisions, an influence from them is legitimate, ‘especially when international law declares the existence of universal human rights.’23 The same views are crucial to the other Mabo judgment, that of Deane and Gaudron. In writing of the natural law basis of international law, as founded by Aquinas and Vitoria, Deane had earlier said that ‘This basis gave international law a rich philosophical foundation which was a source of unlimited development. In it there is a reservoir of rules for all situations and cases. A law based on natural law can never grow out of touch with the current needs of nations.’24 The legal principle drawn out of the reservoir for Mabo is again that of equality before the law, on which he had written more explicitly in an earlier case: For one thing, there is the conceptual basis of the Constitution. As the preamble and s. 3 of the Commonwealth of Australia Constitution Act 1900 (Imp.) (63) make plain, that conceptual basis was the free agreement of ‘the people’ – all the people – of the federating peoples ... At the heart of that obligation [to act judicially] is the duty of a court to extend to the parties before it equal justice, that is to say, to treat them fairly and impartially as equals before the law and to refrain from discrimination on irrelevant or irrational grounds.25 The intrinsic equality of all people, he said, ‘might sound a bit wet, but it is just basic to the whole of my thinking.’26 Deane acknowledges the role of Catholic natural law philosophy in his Mabo judgment. ‘The basis of natural law’, he says, ‘is the belief that some things are innately right and some innately wrong, flowing from the nature of things, including our nature as human beings. That approach provides a philosophical basis for seeing such things as human rights as going deeper than any particular act of Parliament or what have you. That is not exclusively 122 The Mabo High Cour t and Nat ural Law Values Catholic. It runs through Christian belief.’27 Similarly, Mary Gaudron writes that ‘equality’ means more than a purely formal requirement that there be no irrelevant discriminations among litigants. The High Court, she says, has been embedding in constitutional interpretation a theory of equality ‘not dissimilar to that propounded by Aristotle.’ This theory, as she explains it, involves an active taking into account of relevant differences, so that true equality between persons is preserved; it implies, for example, the provision of legal aid and interpreter services in court, to prevent discrimination by default.28 The inevitable outcome of this philosophical orientation was the rejection of the law’s unjust past, in the passage of great moral force that became the most quoted part of the Mabo decision: If this were any ordinary case, the court would not be justified in reopening the validity of fundamental propositions which have been endorsed by long-established authority ... Far from being ordinary, however, the circumstances of the present case make it unique. As has been seen, the two propositions in question [that Australia was terra nullius, and that full ownership vested in the Crown] provided the legal basis for the dispossession of the Aboriginal peoples of most of their traditional lands. The acts and events by which that dispossession in legal theory was carried into practical effect constitute the darkest aspect of the history of this nation. The nation as a whole must remain diminished unless and until there is an acknowledgement of, and retreat from, those past injustices. In these circumstances, the court is under a clear duty to re-examine the two propositions. For the reasons which we have explained, that re-examination compels their rejection.29 For giving effect to philosophical principles, the law is supreme. Naturally, there were complaints from those who abhorred such judicial ‘activism’. The complaints entirely ignored the careful arguments of the Mabo judges concerning the basic principles of the law. Instead they returned to Owen Dixon’s jibes about the personal standards of judges. The ‘activists’ were said to replace ‘strict rules with flexible standards based on their own notions of reasonableness, fairness and efficiency.’30 In assuming there were 123 Cat holic Values and Aust ralian Realit ies no objective standards and moving discussion instead to the sociological entity ‘their own standards’, the conservative commentators were making the same move as the postmodernists in replacing objective standards of truth with relations of power and rhetoric. Why should we accept our laws as they stand? For no other reason than this, that they are ours. N OTES 1 J. Franklin, The Science of Conjecture: Evidence and Probability before Pascal (Baltimore, 2001), pp. 17, 345. 2 M. Krygier, ‘Law as tradition’, Law and Philosophy 5 (1986), pp. 237-62; summary in article ‘Common law/custom’ in Routledge Encyclopedia of 3 4 Philosophy. F.G. Brennan & T.R. Hartigan, An Outline of the Powers and Duties of Justices of the Peace in Queensland (Brisbane, 1967), p. 200. P.M. Farrell, Sources of St. Thomas’ Concept of Natural Law (pamphlet, Melbourne, 1957), reprinted from The Thomist 20 (1957), pp. 237-94; ‘The theological context of law’, Australasian Catholic Record 32 (1955), pp. 31925; ‘The location of law in the moral system of Aquinas’, Australian Studies in Legal Philosophy, ed. I. Tammelo et al. (Berlin, 1963), pp. 165-94; earlier, J.G. Murtagh, Australia: The Catholic Chapter (New York, 1946), pp. 252-3; M.V. McInerney, ‘Natural law’, Twentieth Century 1 (4) (June 1947), pp. 5868; D.P. O’Connell, ‘The natural law revival’, Twentieth Century 7 (4) (Winter 1953), pp. 35-44; Anon, ‘The natural law and Catholic social principles’, Social Survey 3 (7) (July 1954), pp. 13-17; later in ‘The natural law as a basis of social justice’, Australian Catholic Bishops’ Social Justice Statement, 1959, in Justice Now!, ed. M. Hogan (Sydney, 1990), pp. 206-12; R.D. Lumb, ‘The scholastic doctrine of natural law’, Melbourne University Law Review 2 (1959/60), pp. 205-21; R.D. Lumb, ‘Natural law – an unchanging standard?’, Catholic Lawyer 6 (1960), pp. 224-33; B. Miller, ‘Being and the natural law’, Australian Studies, ed. Tammelo, pp. 219-35; F.A. Mecham, ‘Philosophy and law’, ACR 46 (1969), pp. 137-46; and Australian Society for Legal Philosophy, Preliminary Working Papers, 1972; D.W. Skubik, ‘The minimum content of natural law’, Bulletin of the Australian Society of 124 The Mabo High Cour t and Nat ural Law Values Legal Philosophy 12 (1988), pp. 101-46; J. Finnis, Natural Law and Natural Rights (Oxford, 1980); on which V. Kerruish, ‘Philosophical retreat: A criticism of John Finnis’s theory of natural law’, University of Western Australia Law Review 15 (1983), pp. 224-44; J. Finnis, ‘Natural law and legal reasoning’, Cleveland State Law Review 38 (1990), pp. 1-13. O. Dixon, ‘Concerning judicial method’, reprinted in Jesting Pilate and Other 5 Papers and Addresses (Melbourne, 1965), pp. 152-65, at pp. 158-9; P. Ayres, Owen Dixon (Melbourne, 2003), pp. 251-4; some doubts as to whether Dixon’s practice accorded with his pronouncement, K. Mason, Continuity and Change (Leichhardt, NSW, 1990), pp. 38-9. 6 O. Dixon, ‘The Statute of Westminster 1931’, Australian Law Journal 10 (Supplement) (1936), pp. 96-112, at p. 96. 7 J. Stone, Human Law and Human Justice (London, 1965), pp. 249-52; J. Stone, Precedent and Law (Sydney, 1985), pp. 238-9; see L. Star, Julius Stone: An Intellectual 8 9 Life (Sydney, 1992), pp. 176-9. G. Barwick, A Radical Tory (Sydney, 1995), pp. 224, 274-5; H. Gibbs, ‘Law and government’, Quadrant 34 (10) (October 1990), pp. 25-9, at p. 28. G. Barwick, ‘Judiciary law: Some observations thereon’, Current Legal Problems 33 (1980), pp. 239-53, at pp. 243-4; G. Barwick, ‘Courts, lawyers and the attainment of justice’, Tasmanian University Law Review 1 (1958), pp. 1-19, at pp. 3-7; criticism in M. Atkinson, ‘Trigwell in the High Court’, Sydney Law 10 11 Review 9 (1982), pp. 541-67. A. Mason, ‘Future directions in Australian law’, Monash University Law Review 13 (1987), pp. 149-63, at pp. 155, 159. A. Mason, ‘The use and abuse of precedent’, Australian Bar Review 4 (1988), pp. 93-111, at p. 94; also A. Mason, ‘Courts and community values’, Eureka Street 6 (9) (November 1996), pp. 32-4; Lionel Murphy’s view in G. Sturgess 12 and P. Chubb, Judging the World (Sydney, 1988), p. 362; cf. pp. 346, 351. G. Brennan, ‘The peace of Sir Thomas More’, Queensland Lawyer 8 (1985), pp. 51-66; G. Brennan, ‘The Irish and law in Australia’, in Ireland and Irish Australia, ed. O. MacDonagh and W.F. Mandle (London, 1986), pp. 18-32; Higgins and Leo XIII from J. Rickard, H. B. Higgins: The Rebel as Judge (Sydney, 1984), pp. 173-4; on which see also J. Dynon, ‘The social doctrine of Leo XIII and Australia’, Twentieth Century 6 (1) (Spring 1951), pp. 12-21; full details in K. Blackburn, ‘The living wage in Australia: A secularisation of 125 Cat holic Values and Aust ralian Realit ies Catholic ethics on wages, 1891-1907’, Journal of Religious History 20 (1996), pp. 93-113. 13 14 G. Brennan, ‘The Christian lawyer’, Australian Law Journal 66 (1992), pp. 25961; cf. G. Brennan, ‘Pillars of professional practice: Function and standards’, Australian Law Journal 61 (1987), pp. 112-8. G. Brennan, ‘Commercial law and morality’, Melbourne University Law Review 17 (1989), pp. 100-6, at p. 101; see also G. Brennan, ‘The purpose and scope of judicial review’, Australian Bar Review 2 (1986), pp. 93-113, at pp. 104-5; P. Finn, ‘Commerce, the common law and morality’, Melbourne University Law Review 17 (1989), pp. 87-99. 15 G. Brennan, ‘A critique of criticism’, Monash University Law Review 19 (1993), pp. 213-6. 16 M. Gleeson, The Rule of Law and the Constitution (Sydney, 2000), p. 134; cf. p. 98; similar in M.H. McHugh, ‘The judicial method’, Australian Law Journal 73 (1999), pp. 37-51, esp. p. 46; some backsliding from Dixon himself in Jesting Pilate, p. 165. 17 Cooper v. Stuart (1889) 14 AC at p. 291, per Finding Common Ground, ed F. Brennan et al. (2nd ed, Melbourne, 1986), p. 13; other philosophical perspectives in D. Ivison, P. Patton and W. Sanders, eds, Political Theory and the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (Melbourne, 2000); G. Lloyd, ‘No one’s land: Australia and the philosophical imagination’, Hypatia 15 (2) (Spring 2000), pp. 2639. 18 19 F. Brennan, ‘The absurdity and injustice of terra nullius’, Ormond Papers 5 (1988), pp. 51-5, at p. 54; see also F. Brennan, ‘Aboriginal aspirations to land’ in Finding Common Ground, pp. 11-49. Original in F. de Vitoria, Political Writings ed. A. Pagden and J. Lawrance (New York, 1991), pp. 231-92, especially pp. 239-40 and 264-5; see J. O’Rorke, ‘Francis de Vitoria’, Australasian Catholic Record 17 (1940), pp. 308-20; Stone, Human Law and Human Justice, p. 62; a slightly different discussion also from scholastic principles in E. Azzopardi, Human Rights and Peoples (Drummoyne, 20 21 22 NSW, 1988), pp. 131-2, 159-64. G. Brennan in The Mabo Decision with Commentary by Richard H. Bartlett (Sydney, 1993), p. 18. The Mabo Decision, p. 19. Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae I-II q. 97 art. 2. 126 The Mabo High Cour t and Nat ural Law Values 23 24 The Mabo Decision, p. 29. W.P. Deane, ‘Crisis in the law of nations’, Social Survey 6 (1957), pp. 8-15, at p. 12; also briefly in W. Deane, review of Oppenheim and Lauterpacht, International Law, Sydney Law Review 2 (1957), pp. 382-4; W. Deane, ‘Vatican diplomacy’, Twentieth Century 15 (1960-1), pp. 347-52; cf. W.P. Deane, ‘An older Republic’, Hermes 1950, pp. 5-10. 25 26 27 28 Deane J. in Leeth v. The Commonwealth, Commonwealth Law Reports 174 (1991-2), pp. 486-7; cf. CLR 168 (1980), p. 522; I am grateful to George Winterton for calling these passages to my attention. T. Stephens, Sir William Deane: The Things That Matter (Sydney, 2002), p. 94. W. Deane to author, 14/5/1996; Stephens, Sir William Deane, p. 100. M. Gaudron, ‘Equality before the law with particular reference to Aborigines’, Judicial Review 1 (1992-4), pp. 81-9; implications in Dietrich v. The Queen, Commonwealth Law Reports 177 (1992): p. 292; similar in Gleeson, The Rule of Law and the Constitution, pp. 61-3; opposite view in Barwick, A Radical Tory, p. 274. 29 Deane and Gaudron, in The Mabo Decision, p. 82; reflections in R. Gaita, A Common Humanity (Melbourne, 1999), pp. 73-86. 30 J. Gava, ‘The rise of the hero judge’, UNSW Law Journal 24 (2001), pp. 747-59; D. Heydon, ‘Judicial activism and the death of the rule of law’, Quadrant 41 (1) (January-February 2003), pp. 9-22. 127 Cat holic Values and Aust ralian Realit ies 128 CH APTER ELEVEN I s Jensenism Com pa t ible w it h Christ ia nit y? A RECENT BIOGRAPHY of Marcus Loane, evangelical Anglican Archbishop of Sydney in the 1960s, records that as a student at Moore Theological College he would read during lectures to avoid having to listen to the liberal Principal. When you are committed to a closed system of thought, you can’t be too careful when it comes to letting ideas in from the outside. But what about the ideas already inside? How does the Sydney Anglican interpretation of Christianity compare to what Jesus said? Sydney’s Archbishop Peter Jensen and Dean Phillip Jensen are the public face of a proudly ‘narrow’ interpretation of the Bible that has had an immense success in the English-speaking world in the last quarter of Christianity’s history. The basic tenets of ‘Biblebased’ faith are clear. They are summarised in what Peter Jensen calls the great alones of the Reformation: scripture alone, Christ “alone”, grace alone, faith alone. The point of the word ‘alone’ is what it excludes: there is no role for good works as opposed to faith, for human effort in addition to God’s help, for the insights of other faiths as well as Christ, for Original source: Quadrant 48 (12), December 2004, pp. 30-1 129 Cat holic Values and Aust ralian Realit ies the tradition of the church as well as the written word of scripture. ‘Faith alone’ means exactly what it says: what God wants is belief in certain propositions about Jesus and salvation, and without that belief good actions are not pleasing to God. In fact, they deserve his punishment. ‘The final sin of religious people,’ Peter Jensen writes, ‘is moralism, by which we trust that we can come to know the living God and to gain his approval by the quality of our lives.’ He condemns ‘any religious system which involves even a modicum of human merit’. That means, in plain terms, that Jensenites believe God disapproves of the ordinary person’s virtue for the same reason he disapproves of Mother Teresa’s charity – it is not badged by them. There are many objections that spring to mind – is that not a narrow view, intolerant, prejudicial to the good health of society? Jensenites rejoice in those criticisms – the best persecution going, they think, in our sadly lion-free age. But what will immediately strike anyone who has read even casually in the Bible is how grossly it is out of tune with the Jesus of the Gospels. The big statements of Jesus’ message that the Gospels themselves foreground, like the Sermon on the Mount and the story of the Good Samaritan, are all about God’s concern that humans should act rightly, with love and compassion. ‘Blessed are the peacemakers,’ says Jesus, not ‘Blessed are the staunch subscribers to Reformation formularies of doctrine’. The very point of Jesus’ choosing to illustrate care for one’s neighbour by a Samaritan – by Jewish lights, one of woefully heretical beliefs – is to emphasise that God does love compassionate action irrespective of belief in doctrinal details. In a key passage (Matthew 25) that so-called Bible-based Christianity has always been keen to downplay, Jesus discusses the principles on which God judges people: ‘I was hungry and you gave me something to eat ... I was in prison and you visited me.’ There is no mention of ritual observances, none of assent to propositions. That is not to say Jesus was unconcerned by doctrine – he was very eager to reveal that there is a God who cares for humans and wishes humans to have a relationship with him. But his emphasis was always on how that relationship plays out in 130 I s Jensenism Com pat ible w it h Chr ist ianit y ? action, not on details of doctrine or religious ceremonies. It is impossible to imagine him getting hot under the toga about doctrinal and liturgical trivia like stained glass or church choirs. What would Jesus have thought of a ‘Christianity’ that plays up St Paul’s statements in a minor letter about women in church, and hides in embarrassment the peaks of Jesus’ own teaching? Jensenism believes it has an answer to these criticisms in the words of St Paul on the importance of faith. In addition to the obvious incoherence of preferring a follower of Jesus to Jesus himself, Paul has a few choice remarks about those in his own day who said, ‘I am for Paul.’ The faith Paul spoke of, he makes clear, is not his own but refers back to Jesus. The extraordinarily low profile of the Gospels in the writings of the Jensens – except for carefully selected snippets – is the clearest indication possible of what is really happening. They fear the Gospels, for the gospel message is inconvenient. Fear of the plain meaning of the Gospels explains several other distortions in the Jensenite approach to the Bible. The Jensens are not strict biblical literalists. Phillip Jensen admits that Jesus’ statement, ‘If anyone comes to me, and hates not his father and mother and wife and children, he cannot be my disciple’, is an exaggeration. That is plainly right, since a literal interpretation of the text would be out of tune with the moral tone of the whole. Why then are the Jensens uniformly suspicious of historical and linguistic studies that might cast light on the meaning of the whole? It can only be a fear of what might be revealed about the gospel as it really is. It also explains the evangelical practice of ‘Bible study’, in taking a very tiny portion of text and embroidering obvious comments on it for an hour. Will the text for comment ever fall beneath the size of a sentence, as in the classic Tory political broadcast from the British comedy Not the Nine O’Clock News, ’tis easier for a rich man to pass through the eye of a needle, than for a camel to’? If one could give a single piece of advice to those who have fallen into the rut of this kind of ‘study’, it would be: read the Gospels less often, but in longer portions. 131 Cat holic Values and Aust ralian Realit ies It explains too the Jensenite hostility to the other (‘idolatrous’) branches of Christianity. A fundamental contradiction in ‘Biblebased’ Christianity is that the Bible itself does not say that Jesus left a book but a community. Yet evangelicals have cut themselves off from the great body of Christian believers, Orthodox, Catholic and Coptic, the church to which Jesus promised his unending help. Evangelicals have created instead an inward-looking and recent sect, interested neither in understanding the Hebrew background of the Biblical text, nor in the person of Jesus, nor in the simplest ‘big picture’ understanding of the gospel message. The real gospel does not make itself an object of worship, as in Peter Jensen’s talk of ‘the gospel, by which men could be saved from the wrath due to their sins’ (actually, he writes ‘saved for the wrath’ but I am assured that is a Freudian typo). The slogan ‘scripture alone’ is not just narrow, but self-contradictory. The most unsavoury aspect of the Jensenites’ distortion of the simple message of Jesus is its concentration on sin and guilt, without a compensating sense of human worth. The Gospels are quite free of the extreme evangelical ‘heads I win, tails you lose’ attitude to guilt, where everything I do wrong deserves God’s wrath but anything I do right is done by him. The dark mindset of guilt alone is designed to prey on early teens and technically smart but socially unconfident older teens who, for one reason or another, have a shaky sense of self-worth. Missing is the sense, clear in the Gospels, that God is only displeased when we have done something evil that we might not have done. Harming ‘little ones’, the Gospels record, was what made Jesus most angry. As to Phillip Jensen’s accusing the Archbishop of Canterbury of taking his salary under false pretences, there is no escaping the obvious applicability of Jesus’ throwaway remark about noticing first the beam in one’s own eye. 132 I s Jensenism Com pat ible w it h Chr ist ianit y ? N OTE There was considerable discussion of this article by the Rev Michael Jensen and others on the Sydney Anglicans website, http://www.sydneyanglicans.net/ community/viewtopic.php?t=1148. In the course of the discussion I conceded that the claim that ‘the Jensens are uniformly suspicious of historical and linguistic studies that might cast light on the meaning of the whole’ is incorrect. Moore College courses certainly include considerable attention to those matters, though it could still be doubted if their choice of detail is ideal for casting light on the meaning of the whole. 133 Cat holic Values and Aust ralian Realit ies 134 CH APTER TW ELVE St ove, H um e, a nd Enlight enm ent T HE DRUIDS WERE no doubt tempted to make as a big a production as they could of the ceremonies at the winter solstice, since bringing back the year was all they could do. Just so, David Stove thought, the Enlightened persistently exaggerated the evils that humankind labours under as a result of priestcraft and superstition. Those were the only evils they knew how to cure. True, they promised that the advance of reason would cure wooden legs and old age, eliminate the need for hard work, and relieve all the other ills of the species, but in the eighteenth century, before the industrial and medical revolutions, those promises were even more hollow than they are today. But was the Enlightenment’s abolition of ‘superstition’ an unalloyed blessing, or did it bring with it equal or worse evils? That is exactly the sort of question that was not on its agenda. In contrast to Leibniz’s Best of All Possible Worlds theory, which is entirely about how the necessary interconnections between evils makes it hard to remove all of them at once, the shallowness of the Enlightened consisted especially in their invincible optimism that eliminating evils is easy. Voltaire’s Candide portrays Leibniz as a fatuous optimist, but he was not in the same class as Voltaire himself 135 Cat holic Values and Aust ralian Realit ies and his allies. Superstition? Mock it and the dark clouds of blind faith will evaporate, leaving the masses carefree atheists. Political oppression? Overthrow the tyrants and the rule of the people will usher in a golden age of liberty, equality and fraternity. Economic inequality? Let the workers throw off their chains and communism will see the state wither away. Imperialism? A paper tiger. Economic inefficiency? Let the state and its virtuous bureaucrats plan the allocation of resources for the good of all. No matter if some of these plans contradict human nature, or one another. Reason can keep itself occupied sorting out any loose ends. Almost every twentieth century intellectual was a man of the Enlightenment, but David Stove more so than most. His technical work in philosophy was on Hume’s arguments about induction, and he regarded Hume’s Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion as an unsurpassed and unanswerable demolition of the claims of religion. Humans, he thought, have no greater hope of immortality than any other land mammal. Where Stove differed from the Enlightened was in being unable to delight in the results of the end of faith. He belonged to the tradition of pessimism about ‘progress’. The first to blow the whistle on the facile optimism of the men of Reason (unless one counts the practical demonstrations of the Terror of 1793) were Joseph de Maistre and Malthus. De Maistre’s remark about Rousseau, ‘You might as well say sheep are born carnivorous, but everywhere they eat grass’, exposed the difficulties in the Enlightenment’s assumption of the infinite malleability of human nature (‘it’s all a question of education’). Malthus – the subject of one of the essays in this collection – showed the problems that would arise if Reason did eliminate the evils of war, vice, pestilence and famine: namely, more war, vice, pestilence and famine caused by over-population. Later high points in the tradition include Sir James Fitzjames Stephen’s attack on John Stuart Mill (Stephen’s victory in argument and defeat in practice is described in Roger Kimball’s aptly named Experiments Against Reality) and Keynes’ summary of the absurdity in Bertrand Russell’s hyper-Enlightenment views: ‘Bertie in particular sustained 136 St ov e, Hum e, and Enlight enm ent simultaneously a pair of opinions ludicrously incompatible: he held that in fact human affairs were carried on after a most irrational fashion, but that the remedy was quite simple and easy, since all we had to do was to carry them on rationally.’ Hayek’s arguments on the inevitable failure of state planning were an application of the same line of thinking in social and political theory – a field touched on in the same vein by Stove in his essays ‘Righting Wrongs’ and ‘Why You Should Be a Conservative’, reprinted in this collection. Good arguments certainly, but, as Stove was honest enough to ask, were there not some grounds to support the forces of Progress in their optimism, at least in the West? Has not progress actually happened, in many ways, as the Enlightened predicted? They enjoyed, Stove said, a series of lucky accidents. The Industrial Revolution – not of their making – came along at just the right time. When they sent an ill-planned colony to the ends of the earth, devised on their principles, it was saved from the disaster it richly deserved by the efforts of a Spanish-bred sheep, as described in John Gascoigne’s The Enlightenment and the Origins of European Australia. Malthusian disasters were later staved off by such unlooked-for developments as the electric motor and contraception. Can it go on? To return to religion, and the question as to whether the abolition of superstition did anyone any good. Stove quotes Hume’s opponent James Beattie, ‘in the solitary scenes of life, there is many an honest and tender heart pining with incurable anguish … racked with disease, scourged by the oppressor; whom nothing but trust in Providence, and the hope of future retribution, could preserve from the agonies of despair. And do they [the Enlightened], with sacrilegious hands, attempt to violate this last refuge of the miserable … ?’ Stove comments, ‘I do not see, much as I admire and love Hume, what satisfactory reply he could have made to it. What reply could any of the Enlightened have made to it, at least while they rested their case for Enlightenment on the happiness it brings?’ If they had said that one must, sadly, prefer the hard truth 137 Cat holic Values and Aust ralian Realit ies to consolation, that would have been understandable. But that is far from what they said, as they believed in the happy harmony of all goods. The religious will not find any consolation in Stove’s work. Neither will the village atheist heirs of the Enlightenment. 138 I N D EX Accountancy: 88, 97, 100-101, 105-109 Action Française: 64 Affaire des Fiches: 9 ALP: see Australian Labor Party Anderson, Professor John: 24-26, 54, 66, 91 Anglicanism, Sydney: 86, 129-133 Apologetics: 23, 28, 51-52, 64 Aquinas Academy (Sydney): 25, 65-66 Aquinas, Thomas, Saint: 52, 54, 59, 65-67, 70, 74-75, 78, 122 Aristotle: 54, 66, 98-99, 102, 117, 123 Armidale: 9, 15, 32 ASIO/CIS: 33-36 Australian Labor Party: 1, 16, 36, 38-41 Banks, Sir Joseph: 10 Barnwell, Bill: 34 Barruel, Augustin, Abbé: 6 Barton, Sir Edmund: 10 Barwick, Sir Garfield: 108, 117 Beattie, James: 137 Beg, Wazir: 5-6, 9 Belgium: 5, 9 Bernie, Frances: 29 BHP: 97 Bradman, Sir Donald: 10-11 Brennan, Frank, Father: 120 Brennan, Sir Gerard: 70, 107, 118, 121 Bruce, Stanley Melbourne: 10 Callinan, Ian: 107 Calwell, Arthur: 16, 34-36, 48-49 Cameron, Clyde: 48 Campion, Fr Edmund: 57-61 Campion Society: 23 Capitalism: 30, 32, 40, 97, 106, 109 Casuistry: 98-99 Carroll, James, Bishop: 39 Catechism: 52 Catholic Action: 27-28, 33-35 Catholic Commission for Justice and Peace: 61 Catholic Worker: 63-64 Chain letters: 29 Charlesworth, Max: 63 Clark, (Charles) Manning (Hope): 10 Classics, Greek and Roman: 90 Communism: 5, 27, 29-33, 40-41, 136 Condoms and AIDS: 68, 78-80 Connor, Xavier: 63 Contraception: 77-79, 85, 137 Conway, Ronald: 61 Cook, Sir Joseph: 10 Costigan, Francis Xavier: 61 Czechoslovakia: 38, 63 Darville (‘Demidenko’), Helen: 6 Deane, Sir William: 70, 85, 121-122 Deery, P.: 41 De Maistre, Joseph: 136 Descartes, René: 26 ‘Demidenko, Helen’: see Darville Democratic Labor Party (DLP): 39, 66 Dixon, Sir Owen: 84, 91, 116-120, 122123 DLP: see Democratic Labor Party Dobson, W. J. (‘Diver’): 35-37, 41 Donagan, Alan: 74-75 Dreyfus Affair: 9 Dunlop, Sir Edward (‘Weary’): 10 Edward VII, King: 10 Empire, British: 89-90 Enlightenment: 7, 10, 78, 135-138 Ethics, objectivity of: 1-2, 54, 67-68, 7174, 80, 83-84, 86, 98-99, 103, 115 Evatt, H. V.: 29 Everingham, Doug: 28 Evil, problem of: 53-54, 73, 136 Evolution: 24-25 Existence of God: 24, 27-28, 52-54, 67 Fadden, Sir Arthur: 10 Farrell, Fr P.M.: 116 Fitzgerald, Tony: 61 Franklin, Benjamin: 7 139 Cat holic Values and Aust ralian Realit ies Franco Francisco, 6 Francoism: 27 French Revolution: 6-8, 136 Fraser, Malcolm: 49 Freemasonry: 1, 4-17, 78 Free will: 52 Gair, Vincent: 16 Gaita, Raimond: 66, 84 Galleghan, Sir Frederick (‘Black Jack’): 34 Garcia Moreno, Gabriel, President: 8 Gascoigne, John: 137 Gaudron, Mary: 121-123 Gibbs, Sir Harry: 117 Gilroy, Sir Norman, Cardinal: 33, 39 Gleeson, Murray: 120 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von: 7 Gorton, Sir John Grey: 10 Greece: 48, 91 Greenway, Francis: 10 Greer, Germaine: 53, 59 Griffin, James: 63 Haile Selassie, Emperor: 64 ‘Hamilton, Diana’ (alias Glatzel): 37 Hammer, A.G.: 25 Hargrave, Lawrence: 10 Hargraves, Edward: 10 Hawke, Robert James Lee: 33 Haydn, Josef: 7 Hayek, Friedrich August von: 137 Hazzard, Shirley: 91 Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich: 30 Higgins, Henry Bournes: 118 Hitler, Adolf: 29; see also Nazism Hogarth, William: 7 Horne, Donald: 25, 27-28 Howard, John: 70, 88, 94 Humanae Vitae: 40, 77 Hume, David: 136-137 Hume, Hamilton: 10 Immigration: 1, 16, 34, 37, 47-49 Irish origins of Australian Catholicism: 1, 52, 118 Italy: 8, 38, 48, 64 Jackson, Denys: 64 Jensen, Michael: 133 Jensen, Peter, Archbishop: 86, 129-132 Jensen, Phillip, Dean: 129, 131-132 John Paul II, Pope: 67, 72, 77 Johnson, Hewlett, Dean: 29 Keneally, Thomas: 52 Keynes, John Maynard: 136 Kimball, Roger: 136 King, Philip: 8 Kingsford-Smith, Sir Charles: 10 Knopfelmacher, Frank: 32 Latham, Mark: 106 Law and ethics: 97, 106, 116-117 Leibniz, Gottfried Wilhelm von: 135 Leichhardt, Ludwig: 10 Leo XIII, Pope: 30, 119 Letters, Frank: 14-15 Lewis, C.S. 51 Loane, Sir Marcus, Archbishop: 129 López Trujillo, Alfonso, Cardinal: 79-80 Lying: 53, 74-75 Lyons, Patrick Francis, Bishop: 39 Mabo case: 69-70, 85, 107, 115-122 Mackie, John L.: 83 Macquarie, Lachlan: 10 Malthus, Thomas: 136 Mann, Thomas: 15 Mannix, Daniel, Archbishop: 11, 61 Mao Ze Dong: 100 Marx, Karl: 30 Mason, Sir Anthony: 118 Masons: see Freemasonry Materialism: 4, 24, 60, 69 McAuley, James: 37, 60 McEwen, Sir John: 10 McKillop, Mary: 58 McMahon, Sir William: 10 Menzies, Sir Robert Gordon: 10-11, 31-32 Mill, John Stuart: 136 Microsoft: 105 More, Thomas, Saint: 118 Movement, the: 28, 32-33, 36-40, 63 Mozart, Wolfgang Amadeus: 7 Musgrove, Sid: 15 Natural law ethics: 54, 65, 68, 70-73, 75, 78-80, 85-88, 115, 118, 122 Nazism: 6, 28, 37, 68, 72-73, 87 Newman, John Henry, Cardinal: 51 Nicholson, Sir Charles: 91 Noone, Val: 63 Not the Nine O’Clock News: 131 Nuremberg Trials: 68, 75 O’Farrell, Patrick: 60 140 I ndex Ogburn, John: 65 Opus Dei: 60 Orange Order: 5 Ormonde, Paul: 63 Oxley, John: 10 Paganism: 4 Page, Sir Earle: 10 Parkes, Sir Henry: 13 Pascal, Blaise: 99 Passmore, John (philosopher): 26 Paul, Saint: 131 Paul VI, Pope: 77 Petrov Affair: 29 Pius IX, Pope: 6 Plunkett, John Hubert: 118 Pope, Alexander: 7 Protocols of the Elders of Zion: 6 Pryke, Roger, Father: 38 Reid, Sir George: 10 Richardson, Graham (‘Richo’): 39 Ross, Edgar: 30 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques: 136 Rumble, Fr Leslie: 27, 29 Russia: 8, 29, 31, 105 Russell, Bertrand: 136 Ryan, Fr P. J. (‘Paddy’): 1, 23-41, 46, 54, 69, 85 Santamaria, B.A.: 1, 33, 37, 39, 51-52, 54, 61, 63-64, 85 Scholastic philosophy: 23-24, 40, 52, 6569, 75, 99, 115-116, 121 Second Vatican Council: 66, 86 Secular education: 5, 9, 12-13, 52, 84, 88, 92 Sexual abuse scandals: 2 Sexual ethics: 2, 76-77, 88-90 Sharkey, Lance: 29 Sheehan, Michael, Archbishop: 51-52, 64 Singer, Peter: 78 Socrates: 87 Spain: 8, 30, see also Franco Split, Labor: 39-40 State aid for church schools: 3, 88 St Vincent de Paul Society: 59 Stephen, Sir James Fitzjames: 136 Stone, Julius: 117 Stopes, Marie: 64 Stove, David: 72, 135-138 Stove, R. J.: 49 Suttor, Tim: 60 Sydney University: 11, 14, 24-25, 27, 38, 52, 61, 66, 91, 117 Teresa, Mother: 86, 130 Thérèse of Lisieux, Saint: 58 Therry, Sir Roger: 118 Thornton-Smith, Colin: 64 Tribune: 35-37 Universal Declaration of Human Rights: 78 Values education: 92-94 Vatican II: see Second Vatican Council Vaughan, Roger Bede, Archbishop: 3-6, 9, 12, 78, 88 Vietnamese: 49 Vitoria, Francisco de: 121-122 Voltaire: 4, 7, 135 Walpole, Sir Robert: 7 Washington, George: 7 Wells, H.G.: 29 Wentworth, William Charles: 12 Whitlam, Gough: 28, 48 Wilkins, William: 12 Woodbury, Austin: 65-67 Woolley, John: 12 141 Cat holic Values and Aust ralian Realit ies 142 A ust ralian Cat holics have m ade a unique cont r ibut ion t o t he nat ion. At it s cent re is a solid grasp of t he obj ect ivit y of et hics. Persons or societ ies cannot “ choose t heir ow n values”, because w hat is right and w rong is founded in t he w ay t hings are. I n his wide- ranging book on Aust ralian Cat holic t hought and act ion, Jam es Franklin, aut hor of t he m uch- praised polem ical hist ory of Aust ralian philosophy, Corrupt ing t he Yout h, shows how core Cat holic values have played out in t he issues where Cat holics have challenged t heir host societ y - in debat es on land right s, i m m i g r a t i o n a n d v a l u es i n sch o o l s, a n d i n co m b a t s w i t h Freem asons, Prot est ant s and Com m unist s. “ I n t his br illiant and hum ane collect ion, Jam es Frank lin effect iv ely dram at izes t he dist inct ive shape of Aust ralian Cat holic life t oday. He is bot h sound and accom m odat ing, r et aining t he m aj est y and m yst er y of Cat holicism .... This is a lear ned and engaging volum e t hat w ill int er est Cat holics and non- Cat holics alike.” Roge r Kim ba ll, Edit or a n d Pu blish e r , Th e N e w Cr it e r ion “ Jam es Franklin is sim ply t he best w r it er on t he hist or y of ideas now pract ising in Aust ralia. His w or k is a com pelling r ead for anyone, of w hat ever fait h, w ho want s t o under st and t he m ost decisive cont est s ov er t he polit ical, philosophical, m oral and r eligious ideas t hat have shaped t his count r y.” Ke it h W indschut t le , Publishe r a nd Aut hor of The Killing of H ist or y “ Deft ly br ings t oget her Aust ralia’s past and pr esent in explor ing t he abiding int er play bet w een per ennial Cat holic values and t he shift ing sands of cont em porar y et hical debat e.” Pr ofe ssor Joh n Ga scoign e , Sch ool of H ist or y , Un iv e r sit y of N e w Sou t h W a le s Jam es Frank lin is t he aut hor of Cor r upt ing t he Yout h: A Hist or y of Philosophy in Aust r alia ( 2003) and The Science of Conj ect ur e: Evidence an d Pr ob ab ilit y Bef or e Pascal ( 2 0 0 1 ) . He w as aw ar d ed t h e 2 0 0 5 Aust ralian Cat holic Univer sit y Eur eka Pr ize for Resear ch in Et hics. He lect ur es in Mat hem at ics at t he Univer sit y of New Sout h Wales.