Daniel Mannix - Coadjutor Archbishop of Melbourne

Coadjutor Archbishop of Melbourne

On 1 July 1912, Mannix was consecrated titular Bishop of Pharsalia and Coadjutor to Archbishop Carr of Melbourne in Maynooth College Chapel. Mannix was not consulted about his appointment. Melbourne was one of the great centres of Irish emigration, where the Roman Catholic Church was almost entirely Irish. In Australia at this time, the Irish Catholics were commonly treated with disdain by the English and Scottish majority (who were mostly Anglicans and Presbyterians respectively) and also as potentially disloyal. Mannix was regarded with suspicion from the start and his militant advocacy on behalf of a separate Roman Catholic school system, in defiance of the general acceptance of a secular school system, made him immediately a figure of controversy.

In 1914 Australia entered World War I on the side of Great Britain and when Mannix denounced the war as "just a sordid trade war", he was widely denounced as a traitor. When the Australian Labor Party government of Billy Hughes tried to introduce conscription for the war, Mannix campaigned against it and it was defeated. He spoke out more frequently about the 1917 referendum, which was also defeated. The extent to which Mannix influenced the outcome of the vote has been debated widely. When the Labor Party split over conscription, Mannix supported the Catholic-dominated anti-conscription faction, led by Frank Tudor (although Tudor was not a Catholic). Among the Catholic politicians whose careers he encouraged were James Scullin, Frank Brennan, Joseph Lyons and, later, Arthur Calwell. In 1917, when Carr died, Mannix became Archbishop of Melbourne.