Book review: Australian Catholic lives

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Book review: Australian Catholic lives

By Peter Craven

AUSTRALIAN CATHOLIC LIVES
Ed Campion
David Lovell Publishing, $24.95

When I used to edit a literary magazine, Edmund Campion was the chair of the Literature Board of the Australia Council. And he was also for a long time Professor of History at St Patrick's College, Manly, the Catholic seminary (where he described Tony Abbott as being like a whale in a wading pool).

Sparkling: Edmund Campion is a Catholic of the Catholics

Sparkling: Edmund Campion is a Catholic of the CatholicsCredit: Michele Mossop

He is one of the most sparkling and least clerical-looking of priests and he also happens to be a natural-born prose stylist.

Campion is famous as a liberal man of the cloth but, liberalism aside, he is a Catholic of the Catholics. He has been known to quote that scriptural precept "What does it profit a man if he gains the whole world and suffers the loss of his soul?" And although he always speak on behalf of mercy and forgiveness, he is a man of faith, as these pen portraits testify.

<i>Australian Catholic Lives</i> by Edmund Campion.

Australian Catholic Lives by Edmund Campion.

Australian Catholic Lives is almost a modern-day version of the lives of the saints. Not least because it is Campion's belief in the holiness in the hearts of ordinary men and women that animate him and allows to give a sense of wonder to his depiction of these brief sketched lives.

So we read of Cynthia Menadue, the wife of the head of Whitlam's and Fraser's PM's office, who converted to Catholicism with her husband and met an unfair, premature death like a heroine. We read of Patrick O'Farrell, the historian who establishes, as if it were a law of infallibility, that "Irish Australians, however notional their sense of the green might have been, were always effortlessly Australian."

We hear of Father Ted Kennedy, speaking at the funeral of the Aboriginal activist Shirley Smith. And Liz O'Neill, the courageous journalist who died in the Indonesian plane-crash of 2007.

Edmund Campion tells the story of Margaret and John Brink and the fight against apartheid and of Sister Peg Flynn, the Loreto nun who went bush and among the Nyungar people, and said to her indigenous friends, talking about spirituality, "I often just sit and say nothing but God knows and he's with me."

A hundred wispy ghosts from a Catholic background or an Australian lifetime walk through these pages. There is stained glass on the cover, beautifully resplendent, but it is Australia in old time particularity that shines through this book. That and the individual fineness of men and women who are committed to serving their truth and abiding by their light.

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