Catholic Church

For centuries, popes have been remote figures, information about their private lives carefully controlled to safeguard their image and promote the mystique of the office. Jesus Wept, describing the past seven popes, provides a good argument for this traditional strategy; it shows what fallible, flawed men they are when details emerge. They were often unpleasant, sometimes bullies, sometimes cowards, sometimes expedient, always intensely political – though the last is an unavoidable part of the job.

Many people have heard of Gerald Ridsdale, defrocked Catholic priest of the diocese of Ballarat and a notorious convicted paedophile. But comparatively few people have heard of Ridsdale’s contemporary John Day. A priest in the same diocese, he too preyed upon many hundreds of children ...

This lengthy analysis of Catholics and the anti-Communist struggle in Australia during the 1950s uncovers important and previously unreleased primary sources. In line with the author’s background as a Catholic Redemptorist priest, this particularly applies to material from Australian church archives and those of the Vatican, and from the files of B.A. Santamaria’s anti-Communist ‘Movement’. At the time, Santamaria’s ‘crusade’ against the atheistic and allegedly revolutionary Communist Party was strongly supported by the Redemptorist order, especially in Victoria.