Edmund Campion

Daniel Mannix: Priest and Patriot by Michael Gilchrist

July 1983, no. 52

What major figure in Australian history, apart from Ned Kelly, has had more biographies than Archbishop Daniel Mannix? Librarians can give a decisive answer to this far from rhetorical question. Certainly, Mannix looms large in serious Australian historiography. There are personal studies by Captain Bryan (1919), E.J. Brady (1934), Frank Murphy (1948 and 1972), Niall Brennan (1964), and Walter Ebsworth (1977), and B.A. Santamaria’s short, weighty lecture of 1977. As well, the Mannix shelf is crammed with books like Michael McKernan’s Australian Churches at War, Gerard Henderson’s Mr. Santamaria and the Bishops, Patrick O’Farrell’s The Catholic Church and Community in Australia, and B.A. Santamaria’s Against the Tide – in all of which Mannix is a dominating force. There is no lack of information about the archbishop.

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The Mansions of Bedlam: Stories and Essays by Gerard Windsor

by Edmund Campion •

June 2001, no. 231

Edmund Campion reviews 'The Mansions of Bedlam: Stories and Essays' by Gerard Windsor

Gerard Windsor had a rocky start to his writing life. Out of the Jesuits after seven years, he scored a contract with his old school, Riverview, in Sydney, to write its centennial history. I was one of the alumni he interviewed; I remember suggesting that he take steps to guarantee the publication of his text. After all, I argued, a school run by a religious order was like a family commissioning its history: it would have tender feelings towards its dead and be wary of any diminution of their legends.

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Australian Catholic Lives by Edmund Campion

by Simon Caterson •

June-July 2015, no. 372

Simon Caterson reviews 'Australian Catholic Lives' by Edmund Campion

‘Most history is simply lost.’ By means of a regular biographical column in the Jesuit magazine Madonna published over the past twenty-five years, Father Edmund Campion has preserved pieces of Australian personal history that might otherwise have been neglected, if not forgotten altogether. In this, the author’s second collection of biographical sketche ...

On the Park Bench

by Edmund Campion •

July 1999, no. 212

You know you are getting old when one of your students, genuine in her puzzlement, says to you, ‘Who was Bob Santamaria?’ Santamaria? The most famous lay Catholic since Ned Kelly! The man whose machine split Australian Catholicism for a generation; whose politics kept Labor from office for two decades; whose disciples and friends still move through the corridors of power in church and state! To meet someone to whom Santamaria is an unfamiliar name is to know that you too will soon be history.

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A Place in the City by Edmund Campion

by John Hanrahan •

November 1994, no. 166

John Hanrahan reviews 'A Place in the City' by Edmund Campion

The ‘place in the city’ of Fr Edmund Campion’s latest pilgrimage into Australian Catholic life and history is St Mary’s cathedral, Sydney. Campion spent six years here as a young-priest working in the shadow of both the cathedral and the august Normal Cardinal Gilroy.

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Rock Choppers: Growing up Catholic in Australia by Edmund Campion

by John McLaren •

September 1982, no. 44

John McLaren reviews 'Rock Choppers: Growing up Catholic in Australia' by Edmund Campion

The decisive influence on Australian politics and culture has been the fact that our society has always included a large minority who, even if they considered themselves British, were definitely Irish and not English. The fact that this minority has been Catholic and, as a result, has felt itself discriminated against, has shaped the church into an Irish rather than a European mode, so that, as Campion points out, not only was to be Irish to be Catholic, but to be Catholic was to be Irish.

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