B. A. Santamaria - Catholic Worker Movements

Catholic Worker Movements

In 1936 Santamaria was one of the founders of the Catholic Worker, a newspaper influenced by the social teaching of the Roman Catholic Church, particularly the encyclical Rerum Novarum of Pope Leo XIII. He was the first editor of the paper which declared itself opposed to both Communism and Capitalism which it saw as the greater threat.

Although the Catholic Worker group campaigned for the rights of workers and against what it saw as the excesses of capitalism, Santamaria came to see the Communist Party of Australia, which in the 1940s made great advances in the Australian trade union movement, as the main enemy. In 1937, at the invitation of Archbishop Daniel Mannix, he joined the National Secretariat of Catholic Action, a lay Catholic organisation concerned to permeate and improve society.

During World War II Santamaria gained an exemption from military service (it was later alleged that this was obtained through the political influence of Arthur Calwell, a leading Catholic Labor politician, but both men later denied this; it has also been attributed to the influence of former Prime Minister James Scullin and Archbishop Mannix). In 1941 he founded the Catholic Social Studies Movement, generally known simply as "the Movement" or Groupers, which recruited Catholic activists to oppose the spread of Communism, particularly in the trade unions. The movement gained control of the Industrial Groups in the unions, fighting the Communists and gaining control of many unions.

This activity brought him into conflict not only with the Communist Party but with many left-wing Labor Party members, who favoured a united front with the Communists during the war. During the 1930s and 1940s Santamaria generally supported the conservative Catholic wing of the Labor Party, but as the Cold War developed after 1945 his anti-Communism drove him further away from Labor, particularly when H.V. Evatt became Leader of the Labor Party in 1951. Seven Labor MPs, elected from Victoria and associates of Santamaria, criticised Evatt's leadership over the next four years.