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Cardinal Moran: Rerum Novarum, Federation and the Australian Labor Party

The Hon Dr Race Mathews is a former MP, Cabinet Minister and academic. He iscurrently working on a Doctorate of Theology thesis with the working title Manning’sChildren: Distributist Responses to “Rerum Novarum” in Australia, 1891-1966, and thearticle that follows is its third chapter. His history of Distributism, Jobs of Our Own:Building a Stakeholder Society appeared in 1999.

Cardinal Manning’s interpretation and advocacy of Rerum Novarum were adoptedand enhanced in Australia by his fellow Primate, Patrick Francis, Cardinal Moran. Threeinterwoven themes –the Encyclical, Federation and the Labour Movement – characterisedthe social and economic engagement of Moran’s Australian episcopate1. It was to theEncyclical that he looked for the content of social reform, to Federation as the contextmost conductive to reform, and to the Labour Movement as the means by which reformmight most usefully be driven forward. Each theme was in turn spelled out in key publicaddresses, most notably on Rerum Novarum in 1891, Federation in 1896 and the LabourMovement in 1905. His addresses attest to the radicalisation of his political and socialattitudes in the course of his episcopate, as do also the less overt interventions in thepublic sphere that on occasion accompanied them. In the eloquent testimony of the futureArchbishop Eris O’Brien, an intended author of a biography of Moran, but who diedbefore it could be completed:

The encyclical came at an opportune moment in Australian history. … It gaveMoran a Papal justification for intruding upon the social question in Australia. Hetook full advantage of the fact by expositions of the Papal teachings and fearlesslyadapted this to Australian conditions. … Ahead of his time, at least among theecclesiastical leaders of Australia, he realised that the existing class war was amoral as well as a social problem which this nation had to solve and not merelycheck2.

Moran’s initial public lecture on Rerum Novarum – delivered under the title “The Rightsand Duties of Labour”, to a packed audience in the Sydney’s New Masonic Hall inAugust 1891- embraced and articulated Manning’s insights in their entirety, with aneloquence, passion and wealth of information that rank it among Australia’s finer feats ofpublic interest oratory3. Like Manning – and consistent with the spirit of the Encyclical -Moran favoured a broad spectrum of economic and social reform. It included widespreadownership of productive property, profit-sharing, parity of esteem for labour and capital,worker representation in parliament, condemnation of employers who exploited theirworkers, approval of trade unions, arbitration of industrial disputes, protection of theright to strike, housing reform, self-help through co-operatives and other mutualist bodiesand denunciation of socialism in its more extreme statist forms.

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The 1891 Masonic Hall address was a clarion call for recognition of thepredicament of the poor and rectification of their privation. Elsewhere, Moranchampioned the resurgent Federationist sentiment of the day, and increasingly looked toFederation and the nascent Australian Labor Party (ALP) as key means of advancing theobjectives of the Encyclical, albeit while at the same time voting locally at NSW and laterfederal elections for the rabidly anti-Labour and opportunistically sectarian Sir GeorgeReid – in O’Brien’s view “the unscrupulous Reid”4 – on the basis that, as he was toconfide to a journalist in 1910, “on his merits he thought Sir George Reid was the bestman to represent the constituency”5.

His stance was in neither instance reflective of any party political affiliation, butof his faith and of the social and economic conclusions and imperatives that he saw asstemming from it. As the church historian Patrick O’Farrell – no great admirer of Moran– concludes in his 1977 The Catholic Church and Community in Australia: A History,“The stunning vision of a new religious world, free from the poison of old, hatred-riddenEurope, had its greatest prophet in Cardinal Moran”6. Moran saw his mission as thecreation of “A Free Church in a Free State”7. A Federalist no less in the ecclesiasticalthan the national sphere, he introduced Plenary Councils of the Australasian bishops thatmet respectively in 1885, 1895 and 1905. In O’Brien’s view, his practice of theFederalism he preached helped to convince the Australian public that “the Federal idealwas possible in politics as well as in ecclesiastical affairs”8.

In Australia as in Ireland, his episcopate was notable for his close attention to thesupervision and professional development of the local clergy, construction of newchurches and expansion of parochial education9. He tirelessly championed the standingand prerogatives of the Church and the political and civil rights of its adherents, albeit onoccasion to counter-productive effect, in as much as his rejection of overtures forinterdenominational co-operation and at times intemperate criticism of other faiths gaverise to avoidable ill feeling and fanned sectarian prejudice10. A lifelong passion forlearning and scholarship was reflected in his extensive body of historical research andwritings on the Irish and Australian Churches, and the archival and archaeologicalinterludes with which he interspersed his official duties.

He was unafraid to be unconventional. The Bulletin – the leading literary andpolitical weekly of the day - caricatured him on its front page as “the Chows’ Patron” forhis defence of Chinese migrants against racial prejudice and discriminatory legislation.He befriended Sydney’s Jewish community and its Chief Rabbi with expressions ofsympathy in the aftermath of the 1905 Odessa pogrom and his criticism of FrenchCatholic anti-Semitism as evidenced during the Dreyfus Affair, and pressed claims foradditional support of missionaries in indigenous communities to which the majority of hisfellow bishops were less receptive. He embraced the women’s suffrage cause thatpreviously in Ireland he had as vigorously opposed, and was impatient with excessivecensorship, as exemplified by the Index of Prohibited Books. His response when told ofthe removal of 2000 titles from the Index was that “If I had had anything to do with it,they should have struck out 2000 more names”11.

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His passionate devotion to Rome and strict adherence to Papal teachings anddoctrinal authority were matched by the no less fierce insistence on autonomy in localpolitical judgement that he characterised as “Religion from Rome, politics from home”12.He was unimpressed by the retreat from Rerum Novarum’s incipient ChristianDemocracy under Leo XIII’s anti-modernist successors. Following a day with theVatican curia in 1902, he wrote from Rome “Their ideas and ours run in quite differentgrooves”13. Addressing seminarians in 1906, he counselled “Let us take a lesson fromIreland, in the past century there were a whole series of political events, bearing on theinterests of the Church and in not one of those did the Catholics or clergy of Ireland askRome what course they should pursue”14. Responding to a papal directive to the bishopsthe following year, he established a committee to search for evidence of “modernism”,but concluded, perhaps unsurprisingly, that Australia had no cause for concern15.

Moran was the youngest of five children, born into a well-off family in Ireland in1830. His mother died when he was fourteen months old, as did his father when he waseleven. His upbringing and education were completed in Rome, in the care of hismaternal uncle, the then Rector of the Irish College and future Cardinal, Paul Cullen. Theconservative Cullen– “an ecclesiastical autocrat, reactionary and pro-English inpolitics”16 - became his orphaned nephew’s key mentor and formative influence, tutoringhim in the intricacies and exigencies of ecclesiastical governance and administration andassisting his advancement.

The circumstances of the day were unconducive to any precipitate or precociousadoption of the radicalism of his Australian incumbency, exposing him as they did to theturmoil and upheaval attendant on nationalist struggles for unity and independence:

As a student, he witnessed the excesses of the revolution of 1848. Mazziniannationalists and radical revolutionists assassinated the Prime Minister of the PapalStates, forced the Pope to flee from Rome, dispersed the Jesuits, searched the IrishCollege for counter-revolutionaries, and replaced the Pope’s temporal rule by aRoman Republic. Later, with the restoration of the Pope, French troops werequartered in Irish College buildings. In 1859-60 Moran saw the Piedmontesenationalists take over the Papal States and incorporate them in United Italy.Returning to Ireland in 1866, he saw fresh evidence of violence erupting allaround him17.

The effect was to leave him for the rest of his life “trying to come to terms with thecontinually evolving pattern of social reform, inhibited as he was by those earlyexperiences of revolutionary violence and yet increasingly convinced of the need for areformist movement”18. He was awarded his doctorate in 1862 by an admiring panel thatincluded the future Pope Leo XIII. He was ordained as a priest the following year, andheld positions in Rome as Vice-Rector of the Irish College and Professor of Hebrew inthe Propaganda College, before returning to Ireland as Cullen’s private secretary with therank of monsignor in 1866.

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Like Manning, he was an ultramontane conservative in matters of faith whobecame – albeit over a more extended period than Manning – a social and economicradical19. Both were present at the First Vatican Council In Rome in 1869, which Moranattended in his capacity as Cullen’s secretary. Majority support for the Council’sadoption of the doctrine of Papal Infallibility was whipped by Manning on the basis of aproposal from Cullen that Moran is thought to have drafted20. The contact wasmaintained, and Moran may not have been uninfluenced by his older and more seniorcolleague’s increasingly impassioned Social Catholicist convictions and advocacy.21.

Moran was appointed as Coadjutor Bishop of Ossory in Ireland in 1872, andsucceeded the incumbent, Bishop Edward Walsh, on Walsh’s death four years later.Enthusiasm for his advancement within the local hierarchy was not necessarily universalor unrestrained. The strengths that were to characterise his Australian episcopate were yetto become evident. The Cullen connection was no longer wholly to his advantage,tarnishing him as it did in the minds of some among his episcopal colleagues with aCullenite concern for the preservation in Ireland of the power and influence of Rome andantipathy for the nationalist cause to which he no longer in either case wholly subscribed.

The upshot was to render Moran in some circles “highly unpopular”. As O’Farrellreports:

Nor was he given much credit for ability or real importance. For this, hispersonality was also in part to blame. Orphaned young, and living from the age oftwelve in ecclesiastical institutions, Moran lacked warmth. He was reserved andshy, seldom even raising his eyes, never his voice. He had a habit of joining hishands in front of him, and rubbing them together softly. His whole demeanourspoke of stern, unruffled ecclesiastical taciturnity. As Walter McDonaldreminisced of him at Kilkenny: “He was a Churchman born, very much respected,a good deal feared, but little loved”. Volatile personalities could not stomach himat all. Archbishop Croke, of Cashel, dismissed Moran contemptuously as ‘somecold and colourless ecclesiastic’. True, the nationalist Croke had a hearty dislikeof Moran’s politics – or lack of them. But Cardinal McCabe, who, like Moran,fought shy of popular politics, also had a low opinion of him. Simply on groundsof ability, Moran’s reputation was not high. Cardinal Manning, in England, ratedhis ecclesiastical abilities as no more than ordinary22.

So dismissive a judgement of Moran by his peers was premature. Unbeknown to hisdetractors within the hierarchy, the episcopal ugly duckling of their imagining wasundergoing a quiet metamorphosis, whose magnitude and significance it remained for anew phase in his life and advancement to fully reveal. The man, the hour and a new landawaited one another.

Like Manning, Moran was appalled by the suffering of the Irish poor, but asresolutely as Manning rejected violence as a means of alleviating and or eliminatingpoverty, and favoured gradualist change such as the successive Irish Land Acts hadbegun to deliver. Commissioned by Pope Leo XIII in 1888 to report privately to him on

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conditions in Ireland, he denounced the ‘legal injustice’ of British rule with a fervour thatsome in Rome held to his discredit, as intemperate and unhelpful. As the religious historyscholar A.E. Cahill – like O’Brien deceased before his intended biography of Morancould be completed – has noted: “His famous step-uncle would not have written with thepassion – and the frankness – of Moran’s report”23.

For all that doubts as to Moran’s nationalist credentials may have lingered withinthe hierarchy, they in no way inhibited his fellow members from availing themselves ofhis diplomatic skills and Roman contacts in the face of crises, such as when in January1881 a papal letter publicly censuring the land movement was seen to be “insufficientlyharsh to please England, too harsh for the Catholics of Ireland and written at the behest ofpro-English agencies”, or later the same month a rumoured prospect of diplomatic tiesbetween Britain and the Vatican gave rise to fears that “Whitehall would representIreland in Rome”24. He was repeatedly an agent or intermediary for the expatriate Irishepiscopate within the NSW church, in negotiations with Rome consequent on theirdifferences with the English ascendancy of the day, as exemplified successively by hisBenedictine predecessors, Archbishops John Polding and Roger Vaughan.

The familiarity with the affairs of the colonies with which the carriage of hiscolleagues’ business endowed him now stood him in good stead25. Chosen to head theAustralian hierarchy as Archbishop of Sydney in succession to Vaughan in 1884, hisarrival in his antipodean diocese attracted ‘a tumultuous festive welcome, estimated toinvolve 100,000 people on harbour steamers gay with bunting, at the wharf, and liningthe route to the Cathedral’26. Setting foot for the first time on Australian soil, heunhesitatingly proclaimed his intention to be “an Australian among Australians”27. Hewas raised to the Cardinalate the following year, and shortly also became the Pope’sApostolic Delegate. Returning to Australia from Rome in the aftermath of his elevation,he was accorded a further rapturous reception.

The arrival of a new era in the willingness of the Australian Church to stand upfor its predominantly working class and underprivileged adherents was signalled byMoran’s response to the 1890 Maritime Dispute. Like Manning in the previous year’sLondon Dock Strike, Moran sided squarely with the workers, asserting as he did in aground-breaking press interview that they had based their claims on right and reason, andwere fully justified in their call for fairer wages, and proposing that a conference shouldbe called to resolve the impasse with the employers through negotiation. The strikers intheir turn reciprocated, responding as they did to the Mercantile Marine Officers’Association call for “Three Cheers for the Cardinal” as they marched 10,000 strong pastSt Mary’s Cathedral, on their way to a mass meeting in the Domain Gardens28.

When the strike failed in the face of an obdurate refusal on the part of theemployers to compromise or in any respect settle for less than the crushing of theirunionist adversaries, Moran congratulated the defeated and despairing workers for havingmaintained an “admirable order” reflective of “their stern determination to maintain theircase, despite the terrible odds arrayed against them”, and such that “the rights and dignityof labour were never so clearly set before the people”29. It was an apt and instructive

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prelude and curtain-raiser for his great Masonic Hall address on Rerum Novarum thefollowing year.

The Catholic Freeman’s Journal prefaced its verbatim report of Moran’s addresswith a preamble that reads:

The public interest was shown by the fact that, though contrary to the rule inSydney rather high prices were asked for the tickets the body of the hall wascompletely filled, while the large gallery at a shilling admission was crowded. Amore interesting platform has rarely been seen in Sydney, all political parties, andthe Parliamentary Labour Party in particular, being represented30.

Drawing, as had also Manning before him, on the predominantly British RoyalCommission reports and other official documents to which he had had greatest exposure,Moran gave chapter and verse for the basis of the Encyclical’s concerns and conclusions.Deploring “the misery and wretchedness that attend on insufficient wages, and are toooften followed by crime”, he cited the Royal Commission on Labour as having heardevidence to the effect that not only were wages in factories reduced to the lowest amount“barely sufficient to enable the labourer to live and work”, but in manifold ways workerswere unjustly dealt with in the payment of their wages:

Thus at times payment was made in public houses kept by the paymaster, but theproperty of the employer. The time of payment was prolonged till late at night andthe workman who would not drink became a marked man to be dismissed on thefirst opportunity. Sometimes payment was made in goods or by orders for goodson traders, who themselves were supplied by the employer, and too often theworkmen were found to have been cheated as to the quantity and quality of suchgoods. … Sometimes too, the employer erected cottages, and the workmen, whohad no choice of dwelling, were charged an exorbitant rent for them. All this maybe conformable to the maxim of political economy, “Buy labour as cheaply as youcan”, but there is a higher and holier law, which declares that “the labourer isworthy of his hire”, and to defraud him of it is a sin that cries to heaven forvengeance31.

The exploitation of children was no less blatant. It was only as recently as the previousyear that the minimum age for child labour in factories had been raised from ten totwelve, in circumstances where in Lancashire, Yorkshire and Cheshire alone, 39,000children under twelve were employed, working as they did “every day from six-o’clockam till half-past twelve, one half hour only being allowed for breakfast, and the averagepayment was something less than three shillings per week or 1 penny per hour”. Thework in which they were engaged was remunerative for their employers, in as much as“one child suffices for what is called the spinning mule, which contains 950 spindles”32.And even those so grimly placed were not necessarily the worst off:

It was common for a master to send for the parent and offer an advance of money,an irresistible temptation, on the condition of the repayment of the loan by his

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child’s labour. The bond was duly signed and was enforced by the magistrates. Achild of tender age, under these conditions, seldom received as much as a shillinga week for its work, and as the wages were paid to the parent instead of beingallowed to gradually cancel the debt, the child continued to be worked as a slave,and its slavery was prolonged for an indefinite period. Some masters possessed asmany as four or five hundred of these unhappy creatures33.

Conditions in the mines had been no better. One of the sub-commissioners appointed toinspect the mines had stated in his official report that he had found children “only sixyears old carrying half a hundred weight and making regularly fourteen long journeys aday”:

There was a common practice of drawing loads by means of the girdle and chain.Children, boys and girls, had a girdle bound round their waist, to which a chainwas attached. In this way, going on all fours, they had to draw the cart throughnarrow and damp passages; their sides were blistered by the girdle, their backswere kept bent all day, and the pains they endured were sometimes intolerable.The sub-commissioner adds – “Any sight more disgustingly indecent or revoltingcan scarlet be imagined”34.

And home offered little respite. The housing of the labouring class in many countries was“little less than an outrage to our common humanity”:

The Royal Commission on the housing of the London poor witnesses to the factthat a great portion of the labouring class in that great commercial capital of theworld are forced to live in tenements quite unfit for human habitation, wholefamilies huddled together in dark and dismal apartments, in rickety houses or infilthy rooms, the lodging of a family being too often not one room but one cornerof a common room, with the result to brutalise thousands of human beings and todegrade them almost to the level of brutes. A popular writer of our day has put thematter in a clear light in a few words as follows:- “So long as the bodies aretreated as they at present are, to work for their souls is a hopeless, is even aridiculous task. How shall they be pure and temperate, how shall they have any ofthe virtues which good Christians prize, so long as they are housed like pigs, andfed worse than swine – so long as they have no knowledge, and no leisure, andnothing from their childhoods that so much as suggests happiness, except drinkand things worse than drink? How shall they you tell them to be clean, when theyhave only sewage to wash in?”35.

He was in no doubt about the root causes of the evils that the address so incisivelyidentified and outspokenly denounced. Every day the complaint was repeated, throughoutthe continent of Europe, that capital was ‘an insatiable sponge, absorbing all the fruits oflabour, and that whilst one man was enriched beyond measure, thousands were left in thelowest condition of drudgery and misery’. This was “an unnatural state of affairs, and, inthe experience of history, must lead to ruin”:

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Nowadays much is said about Freedom of Contract, and may I be permitted tocontend that that precisely should be the bulwark of the labourer’s industry andthe palladium of the workman’s rights. Nevertheless, no other form of words hasbeen so misused, perhaps, in modern times, till in the hands of designing men ithas been turned into an engine of robbery, and the very name of liberty hasbecome a mockery, a delusion and a snare. … In the Royal Commission on TradeUnions the question was asked by one who championed the capitalists’ claims, “Isit not optional with the miners to go into the pit?’ ‘Certainly’, was the reply, “butit is also optional with them to starve if they do not go’”. Thus it is that Freedomof Contract came to mean, in too many cases, liberty to plunder, to defraud, and tooppress, and linked with it was the liberty to adulterate everything we eat or drinkor wear; whilst on the part of the oppressed it was a liberty to endure the agoniesof hunger and despair, a liberty to die by want of food, or, as Carlyle hasexpressed it, “a still more fatal liberty to live in want of work”36.

The challenge was plain, as were the remedies. What was fundamental in Moran’s viewwas the payment of a just wage, such as would enable the worker “not only to maintainhis strength and vigour, and make provision for a rainy day, sickness and old age, butshould yield a competence moreover for the frugal support of his wife and family, andenable him to educate his children in the paths of virtue and industry and equip them fortheir career in life”37. For employers to provide - or workers to accept - other than a justwage was contrary alike to morality and religion:

Man is not a mere beast of burden, nor is it the sole purpose of his life to getthrough all the material work which his physical strength can accomplish.Religious and social and domestic duties await him, and these, if he be true to thedignity of his nature, he must faithfully discharge. The duties of wives andmothers, of husbands and fathers, the peace and purity of homes, and theeducation of children are written in the natural law of mankind, and these hecannot surrender. “To consent to any treatment which is calculated to defeat theend and purpose of his being is beyond his right; he cannot give up his soul toservitude; for it is not man’s own rights which are here in question, but the rightsof God, most sacred and inviolable”38.

Nor was it by wages alone that the entitlement of workers to a just remuneration couldwholly be satisfied. Citing specific examples of profit-sharing and co-operative jointstock companies, the address continued:

The skilled workman is entitled to fair wages for his day’s toil, but it appears tome that he may with all justice contract to have a fair share in the abundant fruitswhich result from his toil. … What holds good for the labourer must hold true forthe capitalist also. He is entitled to his support in frugal sobriety with a sufficientcompetence and all the comforts that befit his position and maintain his dignityand repay his outlay. But in the name of common sense why should he be entitledto receive a thousand per cent on his capital, whilst the workman receives only thefixed wages of his daily toil? The workman’s industry and skill and toil are as

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much capital which he invests, and why should not a share in the thousand percent reward his investment as well as that of the employer? This would be an actof justice to the labourer, and it would be an effective way of bridging over theever-widening gulf between capital and labour that the best friends of the Empiredo not cease to deplore39.

Acting as workmen now did in concert with one another, and forming unions with theobject of enhancing the price of their labour, they were ‘only doing what the shareholdersin a bank, a railway, or any other joint stock company’40. The right of workmen to formunions was inalienable, as was also – albeit as a last resort – the right to strike. Settlementof industrial disputes should preferably be through arbitration, either on a voluntary basisor through boards appointed by statute:

In Germany the new Industrial Code which came into operation last yearrecognises local arbitration courts, composed equally of employers and employed,which are empowered to decide all trade disputes between masters and workmen,and their decision has legal force. In Norway the boards of conciliation have beenfor some years established. The Commissioners of the Board are elected bypopular vote, and 88 per cent of the many cases that have come before them havebeen amicably settled. It is only a few weeks since some similarly voluntary boardwas established in Belgium. It is composed of workers and employers, and has forits object “mutual aid among the members, the improvement and prosperity of thetrade, and the peaceful solution of all disputes between masters and men, on thebroad basis of Christian charity”41.

No less were workers entitled to the representation in parliament through which alone sogreat a number of their grievances could be addressed and wider needs satisfied:

The cause of labour should have its representatives in Parliament. An ableGerman writer sets forth in a few words the grounds on which this claim rests:-“The demand of labour to be properly represented in Parliament is just. They bearthe burden of the State, by way of indirect taxation on articles of consumption,often to a disproportionately large extent as compared to their smaller incomes.They perform the labour requisite for the production of the wealth of the country.They are in the eyes of the law ethical responsible members of society. And,finally, they have a class interest to represent”. … May I not congratulateAustralia, in that, though the youngest on the roll of nations, she has been the firstto add the strength and vigour of a labour party to her Parliamentaryrepresentatives?42

And co-operatives and other mutualist bodies were seen to have key roles, not least in theprovision of social insurance and housing. Highlighting as did Moran the Germanexperience where ‘A special law guarantees the Labour Insurance Union to provide acompetence for the workman or his family in case of sickness, accident, or death’43, healso foresaw its wider application in the sphere of facilitating home ownership:

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It would be in the interest of the whole community that the workingman’s homein all its circumstances and surroundings would partake of comfort, security andindustry. The excellent building societies of this country would afford specialopportunities for realising such a project, and in payment of the annual premiumby which the loan and its accruing interest would be repaid in 20 years the samecourse might be pursued which we have seen is adopted in Germany in theWorking Man’s Insurance Union; one-third of the premium would be paid by theState, one-third by the employer and one-third by the working-man, who thusafter 20 years would himself be a small capitalist and the owner in fee simple ofhis comfortable home44.

His audience was left in no doubt that the comprehensiveness of his agenda for changewas matched by its urgency:

It is said at times that the relations which have so long subsisted between capitaland labour cannot be changed. Better by far, they say, to build up new barriersagainst the advancing tide than to give legal sanction to what is nothing less arevolution in the existing order of things. Gentlemen, this is a view of matterswith which our statesmen will have to deal. The rising tide too often breaksthrough the barriers that are raised against it and spreads ruin and desolationaround. It is at times more prudent to open new channels and water-courses sothat the rising tide may become a source of freshness and fertility and beauty tothe surrounding plains. I do not think that there is any wrong to be redressedwhich in a free country may not be reached by the just laws of the land, but if, toremedy a manifest injustice and redress the crying hardships under which a greatmajority of the people are oppressed, a revolution may be necessary, then I say arevolution for me will have no terrors45.

Added urgency was imminent. Moran’s address coincided with the onset of a cripplingrecession and near collapse of the colonial economy. As Brian Fitzpatrick recounts in hisseminal The Australian People 1878-1945:

A fifth of the ‘the people’s’ building societies of 1890 had closed their doorsbefore 1893, and those remaining in 1892 lent only an eighth of their 1888advances. Of 1154 business companies formed in the six years to mid-1893, morethan a third, with nearly ten million pounds paid up capital, were ‘defunct’ (thestartled statistician’s word) by the end of that year. Lugubrious thousands sawtheir income and capital shrink and even vanish in this calamitous liquidation, orin the failure of the land banks. A score of these last in Sydney and many more inMelbourne closed their doors in the eight or nine months of 1891-2 with liabilitiesof £25 millions. Nearly £15 million of this was depositors’ money. And when abaker’s dozen of banks of issue went into ‘reconstruction’ in a single month of1893, they owed their depositors no less than £72 millions46.

The impact of the downturn was devastating. Jobless urban workers joined a mass exodusin frequently fruitless search of new livelihoods in country districts, or as fossickers on

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the West Australian gold fields. The dependents they left behind them made ends meet asbest they could, or turned for relief to the over-stretched benevolent societies andcharities of the day. Middle class casualties of the ‘changed conditions of the colony’ –including in particular older or single women – went hungry in preference to the stigmaof accepting charity47. A contemporary account reported ‘over twenty thousand houses tolet in and around Melbourne’:

Many of these houses will go to ruin. Vagabonds go round to the emptytenements and strip them of everything portable. They break into houses andremove the fixtures, and even piping is not safe from them, as they tear it up andsell it for old lead. Coppers are coolly carted away; and I have seen housesliterally stripped of everything by these thieves. … The scarcity of employmentdrove men, who would otherwise have been honest, to desperation48.

Moran’s response was to intensify the articulation of his aspirations and concerns.Having affirmed and amplified the teachings of Rerum Novarum in terms of socategorical and uncompromising a character – and wherever possible extending relief andcomfort to the needy among his co-religionists through the numerous parishorganizations and other lay bodies such as the St Vincent de Paul Society, the AustralianHoly Catholic Guild and the Hibernian Australian Catholic Benefit Society that hisincumbency had seeded or fostered49 - he now also became the more overtly sympatheticto Labour and outspoken in his advocacy of the Federalism that was so logical a corollaryof his outspoken Australian nationalism and hopes for a solution to the festering socialproblems whose gravity the recession was so cruelly exacerbating.

Federation had had a protracted and troubled gestation. Whitehall considered butshelved the idea even before the colonies had become self-governing, in 1850 and againin 1855-56. A select committee to look into it was established by Victoria’s firstparliament, but failed to bear fruit. The adoption by the 1883 inter-colonial convention ofa resolution for federal union prompted the British Parliament to enact legislation for aFederal Council of Australasia, that NSW refused to join and to which South Australiaonly once sent delegates.

A conference attended in Melbourne in 1890 by two delegates from each of thecolonies saw justification for “the union of these colonies under one legislative andexecutive government”, but none of the colonial parliaments adopted the draft bill for aCommonwealth constitution that resulted from the convention chaired the following yearby the NSW Premier, Sir Henry Parkes, and only the Victorian parliament debated it. Itwas largely through the convening by the Australian Natives’ Association of a series ofthree unofficial “people’s conventions”, culminating at Bathurst in 1896, that momentumfor the final push was at last achieved, and the process set in train that enabled – albeitnot without further vicissitudes – referenda to be carried, the constitution of theCommonwealth of Australia to become law on 9 July 1900 and the new nation to be bornfinally at the opening of the new century, on 1 January 190150. All told, the colonies hadtaken “fifty years to get as far as Whitehall would have taken them”51.

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Moran was no latecomer to the Federation cause. Consistent with his declarationon his arrival in Sydney that he was to be “an Australian among Australians”, he from theoutset of his incumbency embraced and encouraged the development of the distinctivelyAustralian national identity to which Federation alone could give effective political andinstitutional expression. As he told the prominent 1897-98 Federal Convention delegateand future NSW Attorney-General, B. R. Wise, his eagerness for political Federation hadbeen impelled by the hope that it would facilitate a national survey of the social problemand a national solution to it52. By O’Brien’s account:

It was noticed that he spoke of “Australia”, and viewed it, not as a series ofcolonies, but as a continent and its people as one. In 1885, at Maitland, he askedAustralians to realise that the time was opportune for them to take their place as aunited nation in the political and trade affairs of the world. With surprisingboldness he stated that this broader view of the political destiny of Australia hadbeen adopted by the Bishops who had met recently at the Plenary Council, andbluntly told Australians that when all men, irrespective of religion, began to worktogether for the common good and not merely in the interests of some colonialstate, the continent would be able to achieve its destiny as a nation. At theCentenary of 1888 he assured the nation that the Bishops of his Church wouldactively support political Federation. He stood by Deakin in that statesman’sattempts to convince London that the self-governing colonies were integral partsof the Empire, rather than mere dependencies; he progressed step by step withDeakin in emphasising that, if Australia’s voice was to carry weight in England, itcould do so only when it ceased to be the divided voice of multiple Australiancolonies. Moran consistently manifested this attitude, attempting whereverpossible to revivify councils, conventions and parliaments, which easily lostenthusiasm or allowed the Federal issue to become submerged beneath thepolitical interests of the States53

His address at the 1896 Bathurst “People’s Convention” captured the spirit of the timesand gained him a standing ovation54. Why not leave well alone? The answer was obvious:

The separate condition of our colonies may have been best adapted to thebeginnings of colonial life, giving ample field to individual enterprise and energy.But at the present stage of colonial development our Australian patriots feelassured that by the united resources and united strength of all these colonies andby the stimulus this given to the energies of our citizens and the wider experiencethat is available, a Commonwealth of bright name and peerless fame may be builtup in this southern world, in grander proportions and with vaster influence andgreater power than any separate colony could ever aspire to’.

Federation was needed in order to secure for Australians the international respect andattention that “the present scattered condition of the colonies” and their “divided andoccasionally discordant voices” would otherwise deny them. As with the United Statesand Canada, the flag of United Australia, the symbol of freedom and of peace, would oneday be saluted with respect by other nations, and an enlightened people marshalled under

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that banner could not fail to exercise “an abiding influence, imparting to surrounding andeven distant lands some part of the abundance of blessings of Christian civilisation whichthey themselves enjoy”.

Given a people such as he believed Australians to be – “a people enjoying theblessings of liberty, and rich in material resources, who are quickened by patriotism andguided in their daily dealings with their fellow men by the genuine Christian altruism thatis compendiated in the golden maxim ‘Do unto others as you would wish others to do toyou”’ – he would unhesitatingly say that such a people must become a great centre ofcivilisation and an important factor in the world’s progress:

I need not dwell on the persevering and successful efforts of our citizens toexplore the hidden resources and develop the mineral wealth of all our colonies,how universities have been founded and education placed within the reach of all,how communication with the home countries has been improved, and ourrailways pushed forward on every side. All this tells of great things alreadyaccomplished, and speaks of an energy and spirit of enterprise on the part of ourgifted people equal to any destiny, no matter how grand or glorious, that mayawait the Southern Continent.

To his Catholic people he would say: “Go hand-in-hand with your Protestant fellow-citizens in every measure that may have for its purpose to advance the interests, todevelop the resources, or promote the welfare of Australia”:

This fair land justly claims the united energies of all her sons; she stands in needof the conservative strength of all her citizens to achieve her glorious destiny. Hewho sets himself to sow dissention should be regarded as an enemy no less ofreligion than of his country. Discord being banished from amongst Australians,how happy would be the result. Our citizens all united in harmony and concord,emulating each other with friendly rivalry in eagerness to promote the commongood, who can doubt that a grand future must await such a land?

As a motto for a United Australia, he would “inscribe upon the triple leaf of the littleshamrock of his native land Patriotism, Prosperity and Peace”:

With such a motto the flag of Australia, unfurled over as free people, cannot butbe the herald of blessings to the whole Southern and Eastern world, andgenerations yet unborn in many lands will joyfully salute it as marking the centreand source whence came to them Christian enlightenment and the manifoldblessings that follow in its train55.

His advocacy of Federation was appreciated and applauded, even in unlikely quarters. AsParkes – no friend of the Church - so unreservedly acknowledged in an 1894parliamentary tribute to supporters of the Federalist cause:

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There is another person who is an entire stranger to me, and, I should think, agentleman who has no very high opinion of me, whose services I shouldacknowledge. Of all the voices on this question, no voice has been more distinct,more full of worthy foreshadowing of the question’s greatness and more fraughtwith a clear prescience of what is likely to come as a result of Federation, than thevoice of this eminent prelate56.

Parkes told Wise that Moran’s advocacy of Federation had “swayed thousands whom thepoliticians could not have reached”57. Wise for his own part wrote to Moran in theaftermath of the acceptance of Federation, expressing “his deep gratitude to HisEminence for his outspoken, courageous and unselfish utterances on this greatquestion”58. Even so, the good will that had accrued to Moran was insufficient to securehim election to the place on the NSW delegation to the decisive 1897 Federal Conventionthat he perhaps imprudently sought, in the face of what proved to be insurmountablesectarian opposition. With ten positions to be filled, he was placed fourteenth of the fiftycandidates.

Moran wrote to the ALP federal minister Hugh Mahon in 1904 that “I have beenmyself always a labour man”59. He saw the ALP as being the closest in spirit of theparties to Rerum Novarum, and the most likely of them to in some degree give effect tothe Encyclical’s teachings. It was also the party to which the overwhelming majority ofhis predominantly under-privileged co-religionists looked for understanding andalleviation of their predicament. It was the ALP that he singled out for praise as “the onlyparty above religious prejudice”60. The Liberal Party and the ALP represented in his view“two phases of the same liberal idea, the Labour Party being the more advanced”61.

He supported further strikes including the 1903 Victorian railways strike and the1909 NSW miners strike. He backed the ALP at the 1904, 1906 and 1910 federalelections and addressed meetings in three states in support of the federal ALP’s 1911referendum bid for powers to regulate workplace relations and trade and commerce, andnationalise corporations that the Parliament declared to be monopolies. When shortlybefore his death in 1911 the NSW ALP government of the day faced defeat consequent ofthe likely resignation of a Catholic MP, he counselled the prospective defector to suchsalutary effect that “A very few words set him right”62. The ALP increased its majority atthe subsequent elections and retained office for a further five years. The key historian ofthe party’s NSW Branch, Graham Freudenberg, sees its early success as having beenowed “a lot more to Cardinal Moran at St Mary’s Cathedral, Sydney, than to Karl Marxat the British Museum, London”63.

The convergence of his social and economic concerns and aspirations with thoseof the ALP was in no sense instantaneous or without its setbacks and vicissitudes.Throughout much of the 1890s he and the party circled one another in a process ofmutual appraisal, in which each sought to satisfy itself of the other’s intentions andmerits, Moran for his part seeking certainty that the ALP was, as he supposed, free of thetaint of the “extreme Socialism” that Rerum Novarum had so comprehensivelyanathematised and he personally execrated, while the party in its turn overcame thelingering suspicions of numbers of its leaders and adherents that, as so frequently in

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Europe, the Church would side with the rich, privileged and powerful against thedowntrodden and destitute.

And their differences may have been less great than has sometimes beensupposed. Suggestions by some – most notably Father Patrick Ford in his 1966 CardinalMoran and the ALP: a Study in the Encounter between Moran and Socialism 1890 to1907 – that Marxism was Moran’s major concern are now seen widely as having been asuperimposition on the 1890s of the Cold War and ALP Split passions andpreoccupations of half a century and more later. Moran’s biographer concurs with Cahillthat “It is unpersuasive to present him as a crusading anti-Marxist given that he quotesMarx just once (on the social consequences of capitalism) and never actually refers tohim”64. A scholarly review of Ford’s book characterises the author as having madeMoran “too alarmist in the 90s to be the same man who ridiculed notions of a socialistthreat a few years later”65. Nor has the episode lacked unintended consequences. AsCahill concludes, “Uncritical acceptance of Ford’s argument has resulted in Moran’sappearance in a recent study as a symbol of clerical reaction in defence of capitalism”66.

Even so, misunderstandings and instances of working at cross purposes were notinfrequent, as when Moran’s candidature for the NSW delegation to 1897 FederalConvention not only resulted in his own defeat and fanned sectarian sentiments, but also,by splitting the Catholic vote, denied the ALP the representation that it might otherwisehave anticipated, and the Convention the benefit of its input. Rapprochements in eachcase followed. By the turn of the century his doubts had been resolved and hisreservations satisfied.

His new certainties were reflected in an interview for the French magazineL’Univers in 1902. Asked by his interviewer “But has not the Labour Party been formedthrough a vile antagonism against capital? Does it not likely give rise to unpleasantforebodings?”, Moran answered in the trenchant tone and terms with which manythroughout Australia had become familiar:

Decidedly not. Our Labour Party does not cherish any vague theories, anyambiguous and high-sounding formulae. Its object is precise reforms, andconcrete measures in favour of the toiling masses. … If we showed aversion tothe labour movement we would drive the toiling masses from the Church, whichwould become unpopular, but do not imagine that our sympathetic attitudetowards this movement is one of opportunism, or that it is a kind of apostolicmanoeuvre. No! It is with our whole heart that we sympathise with the rise of thepeople. We wish always to elevate the people more and more, and everything thatwill advance (them) will most assuredly meet our greatest and most heartfeltsympathy67.

His address to the 1905 Annual Breakfast of the Irish National Foresters Benefit Societyin Sydney – delivered at the height of a heated political controversy, and in Cahill’s view“the most important” of his twenty-seven year Australian incumbency68 - gave detailedexpression to what was now his settled position. Initially, a Catholic delegate to the 1905

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Political Labour Leagues conference in Sydney, H.E. Kelly, had written in a letter to theweekly Catholic Press – a competitor of the longer established Freeman’s Journal - thata statement of principles adopted by the conference was proof positive that the party wassocialist in the sense that Rerum Novarum had so explicitly condemned, and that a newbody should be formed to reverse the conference’s decision. That the letter appeared as afront page article under the banner headline “Labour Party Now Undisguised Socialists”,and was accorded editorial support equating the party’s aims with those of the GermanSocial-Democratic Party’s Ehrfurt program, ensured that its allegations would become asmuch an issue of party political as of Church significance.

The secular press seized on Kelly’s allegations to berate and belittle the ALP, as did alsothe anti-ALP Prime Minister of the day, Reid, in announcing that the party had “thrownoff the mask” and exposed “the party’s soul”, and accordingly he would lead a nation-wide campaign in the cause of anti-socialism69. Opinion among Catholics was divided,with the Freeman’s Journal offering “an unequivocal defence of the Labour Party andthe new Objective”, and condemning its co-religionist competitor for “a ‘scare issue’ forwhich no justification could be found in the actual state of the party”70.

Moran would have none of it. His address cut through the morass of misinformation andconfusion to devastating effect, repudiating “completely and entirely” the actions of thosewho attributed communist or extreme socialist principles to the ALP:

There are some gentlemen who would call themselves Socialists. Well, I don’tlike the name of Socialism, but, then, what’s in a name? If gentlemen assume thename of Socialists while they are repudiating all that is fallacious and deceitful inthe principles of Socialism, then they are quite within their rights in assuming thatname. For my part, I do not like it, for the reason that in the English-speakingworld of today Communism and Socialism are partially convertible terms, and noone in his senses would look to its maxims as a source of blessing and peace tosociety at the present hour. But if men in the advancement of their politicalinterests choose the name of Socialists, I say again what’s in a name if the falsemaxims of Communism are not adopted by those men?

It would be “unfair an unjust” to assign to the leaders of the ALP “those false maximsthat implied the name of Communism”:

Some time ago a leading politician – I will not call him a statesman – who oftenappears on Orange platforms in Sydney and elsewhere, happened to meet arepresentative of the Labour Party, and he said “How does it happen that nearlyall Irish Roman Catholics are associated with your party?”. The representative –he has a very Scotch name, and is shrewd, as Scotchmen generally are in theirremarks – at once replied: “Well, I don’t know whether your statement is correct,but one thing is certain, that those Irish Roman Catholics are very shrewd menand men of common sense”. Well, I repeat what the representative said, and Iwould extend the compliment beyond our Catholic fellow citizens, that they aremen of common sense, and hence I have no hesitation in saying there is not the

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slightest danger of the Australian people ever being contaminated by the extremeviews of Socialism and other dangerous associations.

During the past few days a great deal had been said about the Encyclicals of his HolinessPope Leo XIII. One of the correspondents had suggested that the Daily Telegraph shouldpublish encouraging extracts from these letters. Some correspondents had complained ofthe difficulty in getting them. He begged to assure them that it was not so difficult:

They have been published by the Catholic Truth Society in London, and may behad for a penny a piece. A very complete and cheap edition of the greatEncyclical letters of Leo XIII has been published by Benziger Bros. in the UnitedStates. I have here a volume of thirty of them, and if the Daily Telegraph wouldundertake to publish every week one of them, I will undertake to supply themgratis.

Speaking of these Encyclicals, he thought it well to read for a few extracts that it mightbe realised how the Christian wisdom of His Holiness permeated the questions of the dayand how it presented the principles that guided in attaining those results to which all theiraspirations should lead them. In the Encyclical on ‘Christian Democracy’, one of thelatest, His Holiness had exhorted them to be united in attaining the just ends to whichthey aspired. He had written:

That this most desirable agreement of wills should be maintained, it is essentialthat all refrain from giving any causes of dissension in hurting and alienating theminds of others. Hence, in newspapers and in speeches to the people, let themavoid subtle and useless questions, which are neither easy to solve nor tounderstand except by minds of unusual ability, and only after the most seriousstudy. It is quite natural for people to think differently in doubtful questions, butthose who address themselves to these subjects in a proper spirit will preservetheir mental calm, and not forget the respect which is due to those who differ fromthem71.

And sterner strictures were to follow. Moran had not finished with those he saw asexploiting the Encyclical for party political advantage. Addressing the 25th AnnualGeneral Meeting of the Hibernian Australian Catholic Benefit Society a few weeks later,he called on those present not to be deterred or distracted from making their country greatamong the nations of the earth and fit to carry out its great destiny:

Let them not be led away by any cries of “Socialism” meant only to alarm. Hehad been unable to find this much-talked-of Socialism. There was an academicSocialism in the old country, and opponents of reform used its name by way ofgrasping at the last straw. When Mr Gladstone had proposed to disestablish theChurch of Ireland he was met with cries of “Socialism”. But he had gone on andsucceeded, and no terrible results had followed, and the country was moreprosperous than ever before. And so with the settlement of the Irish land question– again the cry had been raised. But the work had been done, and the abyss

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between landlord and tenant bridged. Let all work together to secure the rights ofthe people, and be terrified by no political will-o’-the-wisp72.

Refuted and rebuked in so unlooked for a fashion from so unexpected a quarter as theChurch, Reid cited Rerum Novarum’s denunciation of extreme socialism as “theconsidered warning of the great head of a great Church”, and declared that Moran’sdefence of the ALP was contradictory of papal pronouncements:

The alliance between Cardinal Moran and the Labour-Socialists is of a mostextraordinary character, because the latter have never disguised their socialisticprinciples and the most eminent Prelates of the Church to which I refer havebecome the strongest opponents of Socialism. We may be sure an alliancebetween two such parties, working upon an arrangement of ‘support in return forconcessions’ constitutes one of the gravest of dangers in Australian politicstoday73.

Moran was not for turning. His ripostes ridiculed Reid as “a tilter at windmills”74. Reid’sbiographer sees Moran’s intervention as having imposed a “political handicap” on Reid’scareer75.

O’Brien’s magisterial analysis of the fracas characterises Moran and Reid as having been“one of them bent on crushi”g Labour and the other equally determined to justify Labourto the utmost possible extent’:

Moran clearly differentiated the varying degrees of socialism then existing,emphasising that the Pope clearly had in mind the anarchical and communisttypes that existed on the continent. He maintained that the objectives of theAustralian Labour Party were clearly not of this type, but were democratic andsought to remove those social anomalies of capitalist domination which the Popehad specifically condemned, and which Reid conveniently ignored in theEncyclical which he was then exploiting. … The Cardinal usefully intervened onbehalf of the Australian Labour Party at a moment that was fateful in its destiny76.

Meanwhile, an increasingly radical advocacy and explanation of the Encyclical, itsconcern for the poor and the measures necessary for their relief remained a frequenttheme in Moran’s innumerable addresses and interviews. He applauded that thedemocracy “that had once been a synonym for violence and encroachment on the rightsof others’ had now become ‘a source of blessing for all mankind”77. He warned againstthose who would “place the wealth and comforts the country in the pockets of the few”,and urged NSW’s newly enfranchised women to ensure through their votes that even thepoorest within the community should enjoy all the comforts that the Holy Father had inRerum Novarum told them was “a right to which all might aspire”78. He endorsed –subject to the observance of “fundamental principles” – the sweeping away ofmonopolies and the nationalisation of “every bit of land as far as you please”79.Increasingly as much a centraliser as a Federalist, he argued that – subject to themaintenance of State governments “for purely local interests” – “There should be one

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powerful Government for Australia … We should strengthen the hands of the FederalParliament and give it all the support it needs”80.

As with Manning, none of this meant that Moran’s social and economic prioritieswere not in some instances and quarters resented or resisted. The wisdom of hiscandidature for the 1897 Federation Convention was widely questioned both within theChurch and externally81. As early as 1902, numbers of his fellow bishops were critical ofhim for what they saw as his pursuit of social reform at the expense of their demands for‘educational justice’82. His 1905 denial that the ALP’s platform made it unacceptable toCatholics offended not only Reid but also such prominent laymen as the influential editorof the Catholic Press, J. Tighe Ryan, who had editorialised in Reid’s favour. Hisadvocacy of the “Yes” case at the ALP government’s 1911 reference of powersreferendum prompted anxious requests from Cardinal James Gibbon of Baltimore andArchbishop John Ireland of St Paul, for clarification of US press reports to the effect thatthe party responsible for the referendum had drawn the majority of its members “from theranks of the Socialists”, and yet had received “the bulk of the Catholic vote”83. Thewealthy Sydney Catholic Thomas Donovan may have reflected the sentiments ofnumbers of the better-off among his co-religionists when, following Moran’s death, hewrote to the then Abbot of Downside and soon to be Cardinal, Aidan Gasquet, that “reliefhas come to many a sore heart” and Moran’s “firebrand” politics should be buried withhim84. Donovan’s complaints may not have fallen on deaf ears. Gasquet had previouslycharacterised Moran as “an aged Cuckoo, who having got possession”of a Benedictinenest has always tried to ignore the work of his Benedictine predecessors’85.

And historians too may have given Moran less than his due. Would the Moran ofO’Farrell’s strictures, who “left to himself … thought in unrealistic vaguenesses, pioussentiments attempts to please everybody and cautious platitudes” and whosepronouncements lacked “either originality or clear practical application”, have aroused sopassionate an antipathy on the part of a co-religionist as that exhibited by Donovan86? Orattracted so passionate an approbation as was expressed following his death by the ALPleaders whose cause his support had so boldly advanced? And might not the advocacy ofRerum Novarum by so inconsiderable a man as O’Farrell depicted have been insufficientto inspire the Encyclical’s most immediate antipodean legacy, in the adoption by thePresident of Australia’s newly created Arbitration Court, Henry Bournes Higgins, of itsconcept of the just wage – a wage sufficient to support a wife a three children “inreasonable and frugal comfort” as understood by a civilised community – in his 1907Harvester Case judgement? As Higgins’ biographer notes, “In his 1896 lecture, AnotherIsthmus in History, Higgins, in reviewing the Encyclical, had actually quoted the phrase‘reasonable and frugal comfort’; in the Harvester judgement he made the words hisown”87. And might not O’Farrell’s censure of Moran for a supposed lack of interest in thenuts and bolts of reform have missed the point that it was a specifically moral and ethicalguidance that his priestly office was called upon to provide?

No such reservations or recrimination troubled the rank and file of Catholics andwell-wishers of other faiths or none, who turned out 250,000 strong for Moran’s funeral.

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Fittingly, the most heartfelt tribute may well have been that of the NSW ALP Leader ofthe day, William Holman. Holman mourned:

To say that the death of the Cardinal will throw many thousands of his Churchthroughout Australia into deep affliction is only to present in a very feeble waythe loss which the removal of his great figure represents. The Cardinal was notonly a great Churchman, but a great statesman. During the latter years of his life,when the combative spirit which pre-eminently distinguished him at an earlierdate, had a little subsided, I don’t think there could have been found any to doubtthat his great powers were uniformly exerted to the advantage of Australia88.

Even so, for all Moran’s championing of Rerum Novarum, the extent to which itssignificance and content were internalised elsewhere in the local Hierarchy or there wasawareness of them at the parish level may not have been profound. A relevant anecdotefrom the historian John Molony reads:

Many years ago, Bishop Basil Roper told me a story of an event in his life whichhe much regretted. Before the First World War he was a young priest at thecathedral presbytery in Ballarat. One day, he was called to the parlour where ayoung man awaited him with a small document in his hand. It was a copy ofRerum Novarum and the young man wanted the priest to explain its contents tohim. The priest was forced to tell him that he could not do so because, although hewas aware of Leo’s encyclical, he was unable to explain it as he had never studiedit. The young man went away unsatisfied, according to the bishop, and ceasedfrom that day to interest himself in the social teachings of the Church to which hebelonged. It was regrettable because he was James Scullin, who, later, in the veryweek of the Wall Street crash in New York in 1929, became the first Catholicprime minister of Australia89.

And worse was to follow. New sources of upheaval and distraction were shortly torelegate the Encyclical from the fragile prominence with which Moran’s advocacy hadendowed it, to a twenty-year relative obscurity from which it would only in the nineteen-thirties fully re-emerge and achieve its finest flowering.

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1 ‘Labor’ as in the Australian Labor Party (ALP) and ‘Labour’ for the wider movement including both itsindustrial and political wings. Spelling in quotations as in the original. For a useful historical account of thedifferentiation, see Nairn B. 1973. Civilising Capitalism: The Labour Movement in New South Wales 1870-1900, Canberra, Australian National University Press, p xii.2 O’Brien E. 1942, ‘Cardinal Moran’s Part in Public Affairs’ in Royal Australian Historical Society Journaland Proceedings, Vol XXVIII, 1942, Part I, p 21. O’Brien was at the time of writing a parish priest atNeutral Bay and former diocesan director of Catholic Action.3 Moran P.F. 1908 ‘The Rights and Duties of Labour’ in The Freeman’s Journal, 22 August 1891, pp 17-19.4 O’Brien 1942, Op Cit, p 22.5 Sydney Morning Herald 1 August, 1910, as quoted in Ayres P. 2007, Prince of the Church: PatrickFrancis Moran 1830-1911, Melbourne, The Miegunyah Press, p 170.6 O’Farrell P. 1977, The Catholic Church and Community in Australia: A History, Melbourne, ThomasNelson (Australia) Limited, p 195.7 Ford P. 1966, Cardinal Moran and the ALP: A study in the encounter between Moran and Socialism,1890-1907: its effects upon the Australian Labour Party: the foundation of catholic social thought andaction in modern Australia, Melbourne University Press, p 101.8 O’Brien 1942, Op Cit, p 16.9 See for example O’Brien 1942, Op Cit, p 26: ‘In 1884 there were in the Sydney archdiocese 100 priests,120 churches, 102 schools, 330 religious teachers, 11,000 pupils at all Catholic schools, and the Catholicpopulation was 93,600. In 1911 there were 200 priests, 189 churches, 1600 religious teachers in schools,336 schools, 24,000 pupils, and the Catholic population had grown to 175,000. It has been estimated, withwhat degree of accuracy I know not, that during Cardinal Moran’s administration £2,000,000 was spent onbuildings for ecclesiastical, charitable and educational purposes’.10 Duncan B. 1991, The Church’s Social Teaching: From Rerum Novarum to 1931, Melbourne,CollinsDove, p 168.11 Moran to Archbishop W. Walsh, 29 May 1902, Moran Papers, as quoted in Ayres 2007, Op Cit, p 237.See also Ayres 2007, Op Cit p 32 and O’Farrell 1977, Op Cit, p 248.12 Cahill A.E. 1989, ‘Cardinal Moran’s Politics’, Journal of Religious History 15, 4 December 1989, p 531.The adage may well have originated with Daniel O’Connor, who famously declared ‘We take our theologyfrom Rome, but our politics we prefer to home manufacture’. Purcell E. 1896, The Life of CardinalManning (Two Volumes), London, Macmillan and Co, p 622.13 Moran to Archbishop W. Walsh, 29 May 1902, Dublin Catholic Archdiocesan Archives, As quoted inCahill 1989, Op Cit, p 531.14 Moran P.F. 1906, 13 December Address at St Patrick’s College, Manly, Freeman’s Journal, 22December 1906.15 Cahill A.E. ‘Moran, Patrick Francis’ in Nairn B. and Serle G. (eds) 1986, Australian Dictionary ofBiography, Volume 10:1891-1939, Melbourne University Press, p 580.16 O’Farrell 1977, Op Cit, p 220.17 Luscombe T.R. 1967, Builders and Crusaders: Prominent Catholics in Australian History, Melbourne,Lansdowne Press, p 104.18 Luscombe 1967, Op Cit, p 105.19 Ultramontane – literally ‘beyond the mountains’ – opinion within the Church upheld increasing Romancontrol and centralisation in policy and the appointment of bishops, as against those seeking to be wholly orin part free from papal direction. See for example Duncan 1991, Op Cit, p 7-8.20 For a representative account of the episode, see Ayres 2007, Op Cit, pp. 50-54.21 They had been in touch with one another at least as far back as 1862, and, following Moran’sappointment to Australia, he called on Manning while passing through London in 1884 and 1888.22 O’Farrell 1977, Op Cit, p 230. For McDonald’s assessment in full, see Ayres 2007, Op Cit, pp121-123.23 Moran to Leo XIII, 21 October 1888, as quoted in Cahill 1989 Op Cit, p 530.24 Ayres 2007, Op Cit, p 104.25 Notable examples included his preparation on behalf of Archdeacon McEnroe in 1859 of a petition to theVatican calling for the creation of new Australian Sees for Irish bishops, and a request for his interventionfive years later to secure an Irish bishop for the new Goulburn See in preference to an English appointee as

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favoured by Polding. For detailed background to the rivalry between the Irish and English interests, see forexample O’Farrell 1977, Op Cit, pp 195-225.26 O’Farrell 1977, Op Cit. p 231.27 Luscombe 1967, Op Cit, p 105.28 Ford 1966 Op Cit, p 74.29 Catholic Press, 21 May, 1903, as quoted in Luscome 1967, Op Cit, p 114.30 Freeman’s Journal 22 August 1891, p 17. The nineteen MPs present included almost all the NSWLabour MPs of the day, the Postmaster-General, Daniel O’Connor, the Opposition Leader, George Dibbs,and the then MLC who was to become Australia’s first Prime Minister, Edmund Barton. The sequence ofsections within the extensively abridged version of the address that follows has in some instances beenvaried to preserve the intentions and thrust of Moran’s presentation.31 Moran 1891, Op Cit, p 17.32 Moran 1891, Op Cit, p 17.33 Moran 1891, Op Cit, p 17.34 Moran 1891, Op Cit, p 17.35 Moran 1891, Op Cit, p 18.36 Moran 1891, Op Cit, p 17.37 Moran 1891, Op Cit, p 17.38 Moran 1891, Op Cit, p 17.39 Moran 1891, Op Cit, p 17.40 Moran 1891, Op Cit, p 18.41 Moran 1891, Op Cit, p 19.42 Moran 1891, Op Cit, p 18.43 Moran 1891, Op Cit, p 18.44 Moran 1891, Op Cit, p 18.45 Albeit a bloodless revolution, as exemplified in his view by the entry into Rome of Constantine’s legions‘with the banners of the Cross unfurled in triumph’, or the extortion of Magna Charta from the King by thebarons at Runnymede. Moran 1891, Op Cit, p 18.46 Fitzpatrick B. 1946, The Australian People 1878-1945, Melbourne University Press, p 220.47 Melbourne Ladies Benevolent Society 1894,Forty-Eighth Annual Report, and Illustrated AustralianNews, 1 May 1894, as quoted in Grant J. and Serle G. 1957, The Melbourne Scene 1803-1956, MelbourneUniversity Press, p 211.48 Gould N. 1896, Town and Bush, London, George Routledge, pp 122-123.49 Bodies such as the Society of St Vincent de Paul apart, ‘At the end of his career the Catholic charitableinstitutions in Sydney comprised nine hospitals, eight orphanages, eight industrial or specialised schools,and seven institutions for the blind, mentally affected and other classes of unfortunate people’. O’Brien1942, Op Cit, p 15.50 In all, three ‘unofficial’ conferences or conventions – namely Melbourne in 1890, Corowa in 1893 andBathurst in 1896 - are credited with having stimulated interest in Federalism, or revived it when legislativeaction on the Draft Bill of 1891 had broken down in colonial parliaments. Norris R 1975, The EmergentCommonwealth: Australian Federation: Expectations and Fulfilment 1889-1910, Melbourne UniversityPress, p 49.51 Fitzpatrick 1947, Op Cit, p 226.52 O’Brien 1942, Op Cit. p 21.53 O’Brien 1942, Op Cit, pp 17-18.54 Anon ND, Cardinal Moran and The Federal Convention, Sydney, F. Cunningham and Co, Printers.55 Anon ND, Op Cit, pp 19-29.56 New South Wales Hansard, 13 November 1884, Folio 2194/5.57 Wise B.R. 1913, The Making of the Australian Commonwealth. This edition a digital text sponsored bythe New South Wales Centenary of Federation Committee, University of Sydney Library, p 144. Accessed5 February, 2008.58 As quoted in Ford 1966. Op Cit, p 235.59 Moran to Hugh Mahon, 1 May 1904, as quoted in Cahill 1989, Op Cit, p 531, and characterised by himas ‘a letter that Moran knew would be circulated in the new Labour cabinet’.

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60 Moran P.F. 1906, as quoted in Nairn and Serle 1986, p 580.61 Moran P.F. 1911, ‘Cardinal Moran: An Observer of the Times’, Advertiser (Adelaide), 27 March 1911.62 Moran Papers 29 July 1911, as quoted in Cahill 1989, Op Cit, p 526.63 Freudenberg G., as quoted in Campion E. 2008, ‘Were Irish & Catholic Synonymous?’. Tintéan, March,2008. P 1964 Ayres 2007, Op Cit, p 170.65 Mansfield B. 1966, in Politics, Vol 1, No 2, November, 1966.66 Cahill 1989, Op Cit, p 529, referring to Buckley K. and Wheelwright E.L. 1988, No Paradise forWorkers: Capitalism and the Common People in Australia, 1788-1914, Melbourne, Oxford UniversityPress, pp 12, 154. Cahill notes that: ‘The relevant references all cite Ford’.67 Moran 1902, ‘Un Entretien avec S. Em. Le Cardinal Moran’ in L’Univers, (Paris), 15 June 1902.Translation as in Catholic Press, Sydney,16 August 1902.68 Cahill A.E. 1960, ‘Catholicism and Socialism – The 1905 Controversy in Australia’, Journal of ReligiousHistory No 1 (1960), p 93.69 Cahill 1960, Op Cit, p 94.70 Cahill 1960, Op Cit, p 93.71 Moran P.F. 1905, ‘The Cardinal’s Speech’, Freeman’s Journal, 25 February 1905, pp 14-15.72 Moran P.F. 1905, ‘Speech by the Cardinal’, Daily Telegraph, 15 March 1905, p 9.73 Daily Telegraph, 11 January, 190774 O’Brien 1942, Op Cit, p. 23.75 McMinn W.G. 1989, George Reid, Melbourne University Press, p 222.76 Ibid.77 Moran P.F. 1903, ‘Consecrated by the Cardinal at Armidale’, Freeman’s Journal, 9 May 1903, p 14.78 Moran P.F. 1903, ‘Australian Women and the Franchise’, Freeman’s Journal, 23 May 1903, pp 23.79 Moran P.F. 1903, ‘Fundamental Principles of the Catholic Citizen’, Freeman’s Journal, 18 November1905, pp 23.80 Moran P.F. 1911, ‘Cardinal Moran: An Observer of the Times’, Advertiser (Adelaide), 27 March 1911.81 See for example Ayres 2007, Op Cit, pp 194-204 and Mahon J.M. 1963 ‘Cardinal Moran’s Candidature’,in Manna, No 6, 1963, pp 66-67.82 Cahill 1986 Op Cit p 580.83 Cahill 1989, Op Cit, p 528.84 Cahill 1989, Op Cit, p 526.85 O’Farrell 1977, Op Cit, p 244.86 O’Farrell 1977, Op Cit, p 280.87 Rickard J. 1984, H.B. Higgins: The Rebel as Judge, Sydney, George Allen & Unwin, pp 173 -174.88 As quoted in O’Brien 1942, Op Cit, p 25.89 Molony J. 1991, The Worker Question: A New Historical Perspective on ‘Rerum Novarum’, Blackburn,Collins (Vic), Collins-Dove, p130. Roper judged himself too harshly. Scullin’s interest in the Church’ssocial teachings was undeterred. The enlightenment that he had been denied at the presbytery door waspursued instead through widespread reading that included the Distributist weeklies, the Eye Witness and theNew Witness. Articles by Belloc were re-printed in the Ballarat newspaper, the Ballarat Echo, that heedited from 1913 until 1922, and his biographer sees the encyclical as having influenced him on questionsof social justice. It was his strong view that ‘If Christians don’t try and leaders the workers, the atheists andagnostics will’. Duncan 1991, Op Cit, p 203; Robertson J R, ‘Scullin, James Henry (1876-1953)’ in SerleG (Ed) 1988, Australian Dictionary of Biography, Vol II: 1891-1939, p 554; Kelly K. ‘Scullin’, CanberraHistorical Journal, September 1975, p 106.