The Campion era : the development of Catholic social idealism in Australia, 1929-1939
Abstract
The nucleus of this work is to be found in an Honours thesis on the Victorian Campion Society which I wrote for the History Department, School of General Studies, Australian National University, in 1967. I have here extended and developed the themes
and areas of research which I first explored in that study. The nineteen-thirties encompassed the Great Depression, the victory of Nazism in Germany, the Italo-Abyssinian War, the Spanish Civil war, and the outbreak of World War II. It was an
age when European Liberalism, which fifty years before had been all-conquering, teetered on the verge of extinction; when political, economic and intellectual confusion were rife ; and when the future
of the West appeared to be dangerously dependent on the interplay of the contending totalitarian ideologies, Communism, Nazism and Fascism. Yet, for the Catholic Church, it was an era not of decline, but of consolidation and resurgence. For Australian Catholicism also, it was a decade of
revitalisation. Why this should have been so, how the renewal took form, and to what depth it permeated the Catholic culture
of this country, are the problems which I hope to elucidate in this thesis.