B.A. Santamaria: The Power of One
by Veronica Brady
Zadok Perspectives Issue No. 60
Autumn 1998

Longing for the past

THE NOSTALGIA IS REALLY about a form of medievalism where the Church is imagined as playing an influential, if not dominant, role in society and politics The late John Boswell has shown that this medievalism is highly contestable in his The Kindness of Strangers: the abandonment of children from late antiquity to the present (Collins, 1988). Like all fabricated memories, the religious nostalgia of modern Catholicism has encouraged some horrifying fanaticisms.

In the 20th century this facilitated the collaboration between Catholicism and fascist ideologies (in Spain and Italy, for example). This sort of collaboration produces a most 'unholy' alliance between church and state, where the church plays a powerful moral and legal (or, to be precise, power-political) role. The resultant ideologies (triumphalist, militaristic, apocalyptic) falsely conjure up, as Fernandez-Armesto reminds us, "a model of fraternal community life" (Millennium: a history of the last thousand years, Scribner, 1995). They do so while masking the development of repressive and totalitarian controls over nations, states and peoples.

It is against this backdrop that we may systematically assess B.A. Santamaria's public philosophy. In fact, Santamaria's religious thinking and his politics dramatically reflect Catholicism's largely European failure to come to grips with modernity (see in particular Leszek Kolakowski's Modernity on Endless Trial, University of Chicago Press, 1990). As Geoffrey Barker observed in The Australian Financial Review, Santamaria was a "reactionary-a person who wished to return to an older tradition of the ages of faith and who believed in the indissolubility of the sensual and spiritual attributes of human beings..." ("Santamaria: A Formidable Mind", 26 February 1998).

His extraordinary impact on Australian politics comes directly from his nostalgia, and an especially bleak pessimism. The pessimism is bluntly highlighted by Santamaria himself, in the Epilogue to his last book, A Memoir, the revision of his 1981 title, Against the Tide. He wrote the book, he explained, to account for "a number of significant events in certain critical decades of Australian history". He then ruefully notes that "they were part of the more universal drama of an old civilisation that, having overcome the Communist threat, found itself confronted with the disintegration of the very institutions it had sought to protect" (Oxford University Press, 1997).
Santamaria's mixture of nostalgia and pessimism resulted in probably the most sustained reactionary theological advocacy ever to emerge in this country. It resulted, too, in a rigidly reductive social and political analysis, a regressive rural utopianism and a relentless Cold War warriorship. His capacity to foster divisiveness has gravely, possibly fatally, affected the Catholic Church in Australia. It has stunted policy thinking within the Australian labour movement. It aided and abetted the growth of complacency in the Australian Liberal Party at a time when it should have been far more actively engaged in imagining new ways forward for Australia. And the Santamaria influence retarded the development of Australian foreign policy throughout the entire Cold War period.

But it is the Australian labour movement, and especially the ALP, which are arguably the chief victims of Santamaria's religious nostalgia and political pessimism. From the 1940s he began to insinuate an extraordinarily oppositional anti-modernist viewpoint into Labor politics. This appeared to many to coalesce around a passionate anti-Communist position. However, its roots go far deeper and his public philosophy has far wider ramifications. It was often destructively at odds with mainstream Labor policy objectives, especially during what was perhaps the height of public policy-making in Australian political history, 1945 to 1949, the period of post-War reconstruction.

It is within the Chifley Government's post-War policy-making that we see richly utopian and Fabian socialist (and some Marxist) influences most fruitfully at work in ALP and labour movement policy-making contexts. These influences promoted the ideals of a modern, industrialised economy, an urbanised workforce, a secular welfare state and a carefully regulated developmental environment in which government was to play a major role in promoting the public good.

To: The Catholic Church as saviour

Allan Patience Allan Patience is Professor of Political Science at the Victoria University of Technology, Melbourne.