The Knights of the Southern Cross.
This is a perfect setting for a talk about history.Just over there we have the honeyed Pyrmont sandstone of the Cathedral, the creation of William Wardell, the best Gothic architect ever to come to Australia, an English convert to Catholicism, part of the architectural recovery of the Church after centuries of repression and penal laws. The German poet, Goethe, said architecture was 'frozen music.' Our Cathedral has been called, a 'prayer in stone'.
Here, where we sit today, we have a school founded by poor Christian Brothers, who had only one shabby overcoat between them and had to climb a ladder to their meagre room. While the principal two parties in New South Wales will soon contest the State Election both with Catholic leaders we need to recall our humble origins. Jack Lang, the Big Fella, told me Sydney will never be a great city through big buildings, but through great families.
Just over there in the Crypt lie the remains of our archbishops, including Cardinal 'Jimmy' Freeman.
Jimmy was famous for his wit and brevity, I shall try to follow his example.
He told the story of a young priest who gave his first homily, and then made the mistake of asking the old parish priest what he thought of it.
Well, said the old priest, it reminded me of Heaven because it lasted an eternity, and it reminded me of God because it passed all understanding!
So I'll try not to make that mistake. Less is more.
Thank you for inviting me to talk about the history of the Knights of the Southern Cross in New South Wales.
In some ways their story is a simple one--a journey of faith--but is also complex and obscured by events inside and outside the Church.
That great American journalist, Edward R. Murrow, put it perfectly when he said:
The obscure we see eventually. The completely obvious, it seems, takes longer.
So if you find in this talk I am overlooking the completely obvious please raise your hand and speak up. It's corny to say that the Knights, like all parts of the Church stand at a 'crossroads' because that's been going on for two thousand years,
Someone asked me what will the Knights be like in twenty years? I said I do not know what the Church will be like then.
Certainly the support and counsel of laymen, from bottom to up, will be important as it has been in the past, albeit in a different fashion.
If the Knights of the future did nothing but follow the doctrine of reasonability amidst some of the 'take no prisoners' extremists from all religious directions then they'd be valuable. The Church is staying the same while changing, and we are part of that change.
Certainly, Knights can resist the New Barbarianism of consumerism and dishonest religious fundamentalism. Should they be 'political'?
Of course, the Knights have acted politically--they were in the front line in the fight to obtain State Aid for Catholic Schools. At the moment many of them are taking up the cudgels against Euthanasia, and fighting discrimination against people with disabilities.
Politics, however, should not be allowed to infest the Knights, indeed any part of the Church. When it has, it has been a disaster.
In my book I deal with how brother fought brother--Sydney versus Melbourne--in the squabble over The Movement. I must say nobody emerges unscathed. In one very amusing moment Cardinal Gilroy called in the two parties and made them swap sides! The Knights joined The Movement, and the Movement joined the Knights! And we think that role reversal is a modern thing! Alas it did not stop the brawling. Even now there's not a lot of love lost between Sydney and Melbourne. Recently I met our phlegmatic cardinal, and he confessed that he had ANGLICAN FOREBEARS. He roared laughing when I told him: "The problem, Eminence, is not the Anglicans, but that you are from MELBOURNE!"
I won't go into the history of how this book came existence other than to say the fact that the Knights, with their obsession for secrecy, kept burning their records, and those that existed said very little. The financial collapse of the Knights, and their loss of the Elizabeth Street headquarters are described largely from outside the KSC.
I was amazed that the KSC State chairman, Basil Toohey, a farmer from beyond the Blue Mountains and Sister Margaret Press RSJ, were able to help me transform a real jumble into a coherent form. It's not a boring history--it's about people like you and me.
The critics of the history were not always kind- at the outset I said 'This is not an obituary!'
Catholica's Brian Coyne wrote, 'This is a beautifully written obituary.'
Another reviewer in Annals Australasia took me to task for lack of references. What? Carton B covered with mildew?
I thought that I'd give you a synopsis of what the book's about.
After that you can have a nap, if you like, but I am very keen to have you ask questions. Synopsis:
In 2009 the Catholic laymen's organization, the Knights of the Southern Cross in New South Wales celebrated ninety years of existence. The Order commissioned the author to write its history. The book, Reach for the Stars 1919-2009 NSW Knights of the Southern Cross: Bold Men of Faith, Hope and Charity, is published by Connor Court Publishing, Victoria $29.95.
The work describes how the Knights were founded in 1919 in Sydney at a time of extreme anti-Catholic fervour and employment discrimination. This was as a result of two public polls that rejected military conscription in World War I, largely through Catholic support and the two archbishops, Daniel Mannix and Norman Gilroy. 'Catholics Need Not Apply' employment notices appeared and many of their co-religionists were discriminated against in the public service and in commercial life. This, however, created a form of solidarity unknown to our present time. The vast majority voted Labor, supported trade unions and some even supported extremists like the IWWW, the 'Wobblies', and Irish revolutionary organisations. Thus it was not surprising that the leader of the Catholic backlash was a prominent Labor politician, Patrick Minahan, a wealthy bootmaker: first in the Catholic Federation, then in The Catholic Club, later as the first chairman of the Knights of Southern Cross. In and out of Parliament Minahan, an Irish firebrand, launched a constant verbal artillery against discrimination and anti-Catholic sectarianism. The executions of the rebels in Ireland were fresh in most minds. In one outburst Minahan claimed that if conscription had been carried secret groups would have risen up and turned Australia into a republic. When a political opponent called on the government to set up a Royal Commission to investigate the conditions of women in convents Minahan told Parliament that if Catholic institutions were interfered with 'there will be a mess-up here worse than that which occurred on the plains of Flanders'. There was a serious intent, however, behind the Hibernian hyperbole.
Minahan's co-founder, Joseph Lynch, was a mild-mannered country school inspector: coincidentally, they lived in the same street in Sydney's Lewisham. Lying in Lewisham Hospital after surgery Lynch wondered, 'if that operation had not been successful what would my record have been.?' and determined to set up a lay organisation of Catholic men.
While Minahan was flying the Catholic civil rights banner, Lynch was more concerned that Catholics were being turned into an ignorant underclass, lacking education and decent entertainment. They were denied good reading material and exposed to a host of agnostic literature. In his travels Lynch said he was shocked at the number of Catholics who had fallen away from the Faith through weakness, ignorance, self-interest or through reading Rationalist literature. In 1917, after a chance meeting with Father Bernard McKiernan while travelling by tram to Newcastle, where Lynch was a government school inspector, they agreed on the importance of setting up a lay organisation of Catholic men. They met frequently and by 1918 had drafted a constitution for such an organisation, to be called The Knights of the Southern Cross, to be set up in Maitland.
However his attempts to set up the movement in the country failed. Lynch then turned his attention to Sydney, but felt limited because he was in his city home only at weekends. He decided to try to get the help of the clergy but was met with a lack of interest or opposition. Similar efforts in Wollongong also failed.
Just as Lynch was thinking of throwing in the towel there was a knock on the door from his neighbour in Lewisham, Patrick Minahan, whom he had met some years before. He invited Lynch to join a new Catholic society to be called the Commercial Men's Association and handed him a copy of the skeleton constitution. Minahan had been having his own problems with the Catholic clergy but eventually Archbishop Kelly sanctioned "the establishment of a Commercial Men's Association as an offshoot of the Catholic Club". The first meeting of this Association was held on the 24th March, 1919 at the Catholic Club. The first executive was installed on 1st September, 1919 of the Knights of the Southern Cross, with Patrick Minahan as Grand Knight.
Within weeks of meeting in a room at the Catholic Club, the new Knights went out and mortgaged their homes, or took out loans, or signed over their inheritance to buy the old German Club in Elizabeth Street and turn it into their headquarters. It is impossible to see this happening in our times.
Soon they had their own library, places to hold functions with strictly moderate drinking, correspondence schools in office skills and accountancy for young Catholics, Lectures on Faith from visiting dignitaries. They were able to send out inspectors to investigate discrimination in employment. Sometimes discrimination was at a junior level and the organization corrected it but if it continued Catholics retaliated and boycotted the company's products or services.
By today's standards recruitment was nothing short of astonishing, The man responsible was one William Ross, a former amateur actor and a Catholic Action polemicist, invited by Minahan to be the first general secretary, at a salary of five pounds a week. They certainly got their money's worth from Ross, who was general secretary until 1946, when he took up immigration, a man always on the move, on first name terms with prime ministers and clergy--he was a regular visitor to 'John O'Brien' (Monsignor Patrick Hartigan) at Narrandera. The Knights gave Ross two-years' paid leave to organize the 29th Eucharistic Congress in 1928. An arrangement was made with Station 2UE to broadcast talks, music and vocal items from the Cathedral and promote the Eucharistic Congress, However nobody told Ross that the services of the radio announcer was only for a limited period. He was given notice he had to take over the air waves in thirty minutes--as always Ross rose to the occasion. He enjoyed being a radio announcer. The Vatican honoured him with the Cross of Leo for the organization of the '28 Congress. Papers found after Ross' death in 1967 disclose that he regarded the staging of the Congress as his life's triumph.
Ross even sent Australian, champion egg-laying hens, chickens to the Pope--perhaps their descendants are still clucking away in The Vatican. So successful was he in his picaresque travels, meeting people, high and low, that during the 1920s the password in the Knights was 'Do you know Bill Ross?'. I think he was the greatest 'travelling salesman' for the Catholic laity of all time. Prime Minister Billy Hughes was no admirer of anti-conscriptionist Catholics but he and Ross allied against communism. He entertained Ross in his Lindfield home and for months Hughes contacted Ross about his anti-communist plans, listening to him on his ear trumpet at lunch at David Jones.
The Knights always had a close relationship with the clergy. To this day their first chaplain, Monsignor Richard Collender, is revered and his portrait hangs in their office. Some might say it was 'pray, pay and obey', but it went much deeper.
The Knights came of age, indeed so did their Church, when they organised the 29th International Eucharistic Congress in 1928. It will be forever a diamond in their helmet. At last Catholic people could stand up in public for their Faith. At a previous Congress in London the Blessed Sacrament was banned from the streets because of Protestant objection.
Who could forget '28? they said. The Church had gone from defensive adolescence into sturdy, unapologetic adulthood in Australia.
The Knights have always objected to being regarded as 'Catholic Masons', but it must be admitted that in the early years the KSC imitated some of their practices. Initiates were led blindfolded into a dark room where there was a human skull and a candle and they promised solemnly never to disclose secrets. Members were admitted by degrees.
Records were often burned, making life difficult for future historians (such as me). The old robes are now stored in boxes, food for moths.
When I told a friend I was coming here, he said:
Whatever you do, DO NOT READ FROM THE BOOK.
Damn it, I'm going to read a couple of excerpts:
The Pope and the champion chooks
More than five hundred Knights served overseas during the Second World War. The Order gave them free membership. Back home money was short. The KSC took a sympathetic view of unfinancial members. The Order also opened its heart to some fellow Catholics--the Italian prisoners of war.
Though fascism and the corporate state was conceived in their country, most of them never had the slightest interest in war. If a German gun was not trained on them they surrendered at the first opportunity. The Germans treated them with contempt.
Australians had little animosity towards their prisoners. In the Western Desert they were surprised to find white table cloths with silverware and china on the tables of the defeated Italians, and flagons of WINE! This was not a luxury, but brought in by trucks as an essential component of the Italian art of war. Alas, the Aussie soldiers were not allowed to drink it lest it be poisoned. Aghast, they watched as the plonk was poured by their superiors into the sand.
The Italians surrendered in their thousands to the Australians. When they had their first taste of canned spaghetti they thought they were being punished, and protested to Geneva.
For Catholics, conflict with the Italians was a slight embarrassment. The Pope was an Italian. He lived in Rome and could never be accused of being a fascist. He was no enemy of the A.I.F.
When the Italian prisoners discovered Australia they loved it. Here was plenty of land. If you are an Italian what do you do with it? You grow things!
More than a few of the Italians became friends with Australian families. Some of them fell in love and later married and settled in the new country.
The love affair between Italians and Australia is comically illustrated in They're a Weird Mob, a popular 1957 novel by John O'Grady under the pen name "Nino Culotta". Nino meets his future wife, Kay, in a Manly cafe while trying to teach her that she cannot eat spaghetti using a spoon. He takes a job as a bricklayer's labourer to improve his English. The comedy of the novel revolves around his attempts to understand English as it was spoken in Australia, by the working classes, in the 1950s and 1960s.
Bill Ross, the ever-helpful KSC general secretary, was asked to visit the Italian POWs at Hay. He went there with Father Carroll, the parish priest, to be welcomed by the friendly Australian commandant.
He said his charges were born gardeners and spent most of their time in growing their vegetables and flowers. Our main duty was to meet the chairman of the prisoners and deliver and receive messages. During our visits the lot of the prisoners greatly improved. My last memory is seeing an Italian prisoner cultivating the presbytery garden while an Australian soldier with rifle and bayonet leisurely followed. An unexpected service for the [Papal] delegation was when I was asked to select a chicken coop of Australian hens for His Holiness at Castel Gandolfo.
Castel Gandolfo is the Pope's summer residence. It is built on land once owned by the cruel emperor Diocletian. Like the Cardinal, the Ancient Roman Emperor's legate may once have asked for champion chooks and a few eggs for the larder of his imperial master. Bad luck if he did not get them. The Pope did not need any coercion to get his egg-layers.
Anti-Catholics would have loved it had they learned of Bill's chicken search for the Beast of Rome.
One problem: Bill, our hero, knew diddly-squat, zero, zilch about hens and their egg laying abilities--so he went with Monsignor King and the Papal Delegate to the Hawkesbury Agricultural College.
After consulting the experts, Ross chose a chicken coop of Australorps, a breed of hen derived from the Australian Orpington. The Australorp has a big, bold black eye, a glossy black plumage with a rich beetle-green sheen, and is a magnificent egg layer.
His Holiness was pleased with the selection, and later in the year of arrival the coop of New South Wales hens won an Italian egg laying competition.
So there is a part of the Papal Household that may be forever Aussie.
Perhaps an "Orpie" reneged on egg laying, and graced the Papal table.
R.I.P. Orpie.
An "Orpie".
During the Depression of the 1930s, the Order established an Employment Committee, placing thousands of Catholics in jobs. World war was hot on the heels of the economic downturn. The optimism of the Twenties had vanished.
More than five hundred KSC members served in World War II. Their subscriptions were paid for them while they were overseas. When they came home the KSC Employment Committee helped them find jobs. The Knights were also very active in postwar Immigration.
NSW Catholics and Knights were at the front in the 1942 Battle of El Alamein when the German general Erwin Rommel was defeated in North Africa and the tide of war turned for the first time.
Others were there when Australians repelled the attack by Japanese marines on their base at Milne Bay on the eastern tip of New Guinea. They inflicted on the Japanese their first undoubted defeat on land.
Dr Bob McInerney, now a retired Knight, gynaecologist and obstetrician, said: "The New Guinea campaign was kill or be killed--no quarter." He operated to save wounded men while bullets whizzed overhead, and sat all night with dying men of all religious persuasions or none.
Stan Arneil, who survived the concentration camps to become a credit union pioneer and an historian, said: "No one ever died alone--they were surrounded by love and prayers."
The late City KSC chairman Alex Holst recalled climbing up into his gun turret on the Lancaster bomber only to find, to his horror, that the pilot had revved up the engine, let go the brakes and was hurtling down the runway headed for Germany.
"I just hung on by my fingertips and prayed," recalled Alex.
After a Hail Mary and an Our Father he was able to pull himself into the plane and cock his gun ready for the German night fighters.
The comradeship and closeness of death gave many Knights of the Southern Cross great solidarity when they returned home.
They were also highly organized due to their military experience.
John Fletcher KSC, of Pymble, recalls that many Australians flying with RAF Bomber Command wore or carried good luck charms. His rear gunner, who was proud of his Scots ancestry, wore a tartan scarf.
"I carried always, and used frequently, a very compact set of Rosary beads in a leather pouch purchased at the stall outside St Patrick's Cathedral in San Francisco on the way to Europe on New Year's Eve 1943," said John.
He and his mates saw many Allied planes shot down after being coned by a blue light master beam searchlight. Few planes escaped after being caught in the "cone".
The crew agreed that if caught in the light, the skipper would put the plane into a spiral dive, and the navigator, a husky wheat and wool lumper from Gulgong, would leap forward to help pull the plane out of the dive when it had escaped the light.
Over Potsdam, after dropping its bombs from 20,000 feet, the Lancaster bomber, "C Charlie", was caught in the "cone" and the pilot threw the plane into a dive.
"As the Nav moved forward, he drawled, 'Fletch, get those Beads out!' to which my somewhat quicker response was, 'George, I'm already through the first decade'."
The pilot and the navigator "in a joint effort bordering on the miraculous" pulled the plane out of the dive at 500 feet with the air speed indicator off the clock at more than 400 m.p.h.--twice the normal cruising speed.
"On future missions the Nav, not an overly religious chap, asked, not in jest, 'Have you got those Beads, Fletch?'."
"I still use that same set of Rosary beads in thanksgiving for the wonderful life that Our Lord has gifted me with my loving wife and family.
"I held up that same set of beads as I gave the funeral eulogy for that excellent navigator after he had a heart attack while cleaning out a dam on his property."
The Knights were very immigration-aware. Some of their ancestors had been among the 160,000 shipped out to Australia as convicts, or the survivors of the Irish Famine, or the hundreds of Irish Catholic orphan girls brought out as servants. They sympathized with the millions of people displaced by war in Europe.
When the Commonwealth Immigration Scheme was launched in 1945 the Knights' committee was in the box seat.
Five years after the end of World War II almost 200,000 migrants had arrived.
Ross, in his anecdotes of the postwar immigration, recalls meeting a tall man from the Bathurst migrant hostel. He was dressed in ill-fitting clothes and was working as a waiter. He asked Ross if he could persuade the Department to let him and his wife stay in Sydney so that he could visit the ABC broadcasting office. Ross phoned them and they agreed. It was Tibor Paul, the famous conductor.
Much later Ross attended one of his concerts at the Albert Hall in Canberra. He met him at interval:
Tibor Paul would not stop thanking me. That's why the interval was so long.
36
The miracle of Boronia Drive
When a new Catholic church opened in Canberra in the Seventies the parishioners wondered how it could ever be paid for. They were told: "God will provide."
The priest kept a poker face because he knew that He had already, with a stroke of good fortune and some assistance by Knights of the Southern Cross.
The Knights have always been good fund-raisers, but who would have thought they could pay off a church in a day?
In the 1970s they ran Bingo games in support of the building of St Joseph's Church in Boronia Drive, O'Connor, Canberra.
It was the good "sixty-six, clickety-click", and the money rolled in, but only slowly.
The spare change, the "shrapnel" from ticket sales, was thrown into a cardboard box.
Bert Hobbs KSC and his mates had to decide what to do with the leftovers.
They decided to buy an Opera House lottery ticket.
Wait for it. It won $200,000.
This would probably be $1.3 million in today's terms.
St Joseph's opened and was dedicated in 1973 debt-free. When they heard the news that they had a church for free, the parishioners were openmouthed, gob-smacked, stunned. Nobody had ever heard of such a thing.
The church burned down on the Feast of Mary MacKillop on August 8, 2007, but Fortune had not deserted St Joseph's parish. Insurance covered its restoration at a cost of more than $2 million. Precious items were not destroyed by the fire.
"The wonderful stained glass windows by Harry Clarke from Dublin and the altar carvings by Polish artist Jozef Steliga were saved," said parish priest Father William Kennedy.
The church reopened on March 19, 2009.
"Nobody will ever forget the day the Knights won the lottery," said Father Kennedy.
Bert Hobbs died in 2008 aged ninety-seven.
Bill Ross certainly had the gift of the gab. P.J. Minahan chose the right man in 1920. He was a real all-rounder: much of his success he attributed to his training as a teenage debater with Catholic Action at St Charles Debating Society at Waverley.
As a young man he spoke in a contest held in the School of Arts Hall in Pitt Street. The Catholic team was opposed by "champions of the day" led by T.J. Ley, later a Liberal Minister. The young Catholic did not know it, but he was debating with a future murderer. Ross recalled:
When I was asked to speak I started eagerly. Then to my horror I went out of matter with two minutes still to go. In a panic I spoke to the Adjudicator, Mr M.D. Watt, a leading barrister of his day. "Mr Adjudicator," I said, "I ran out of matter, and I must sit down." How I dreaded his summing up and his verdict. When he spoke I was the first he mentioned. "I give high marks to Mr Ross," he said. "When he had nothing to say he had the good sense to sit down."
Ley rose to be New South Wales Attorney General as a strong Protestant temperance leader. He was known as Lemonade Ley. He stood on a prohibition platform, with a local brewer of beer funding him. He was the ultimate hypocrite.
Ley tried to bribe a Labor MP to stand aside so that he could enter federal politics. When the man refused he "went missing", presumed murdered.
He raised money to produce herbicides against the pest prickly pear and spent all of the money on a holiday with his mistress.
When one of Ley's backers squealed he was found dead beneath the cliffs at Coogee. Ley fled to England where he set up illegal gambling. In 1946 he had a man murdered because he suspected he was having an affair with his mistress. He escaped the death penalty on the grounds he was insane, and died in Broadmoor asylum.
But Ley first met his match in young William Ross, a future general secretary of the Knights of the Southern Cross.
As the years went along, the Knights pioneered aged care through Southern Cross Homes, at the instigation of Cardinal Gilroy.
The movement quickly spread to country towns where to this day it provides a spiritual and practical backbone to the KSC whether chopping wood for nuns or helping on drought and flood relief and suicide prevention.
It is a far cry from the days when Sir Henry Parkes said he wore a gun to protect himself from Catholics, when politicians claimed there was going to be Catholic Takeover of Society, as in Ireland.
We cannot live in the past lest we become like potatoes--the best part of us is under the ground. The fight against sectarianism drove us then--what drives us now?
Perhaps it is a war against relativism where in the postmodern times anybody's opinion is as good as another's. Or is it defending the Pope and Church against religious hyperbolists whatever direction they come from? Is it a war against consumerism, where everything is to be used up, including people? Or is it a struggle for recovery, to win back the hearts and minds of young people, listening to them, respecting them and giving them their place in the sun? Perhaps the critical word here is listening. Let us say the word again, Listening.
by Cliff Baxter *
* Cliff Baxter is a retired Catholic Weekly journalist and author of Reach for the Stars 1919-2009." NSW Knights of the Southern Cross, Bold Men of Faith, Hope and Charity (Connor Court, 2009). This is the text of his talk to the Australian Catholic Historical Society at St Mary's Cathedral College on 13 Mar 2011.
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| Author: | Baxter, Cliff |
|---|---|
| Publication: | Journal of the Australian Catholic Historical Society |
| Article Type: | Speech |
| Geographic Code: | 8AUST |
| Date: | Jan 1, 2010 |
| Words: | 4712 |
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