AUSTRALIAN CATHOLIC LIVES
By Edmund Campion, David Lovell Publishing, RRP $24.95
Reviewed by Br Brian Grenier CFC
OVER the years, many readers of The Catholic Leader have told me that they always read the back page first.
I assume that this is because they enjoy well-written accounts of how ordinary people like themselves live generous and creative lives informed by their common Catholic faith.
These readers, I believe, will find Father Edmund Campion’s new book both very enjoyable and personally enriching, as will anyone else familiar with the author’s earlier titles.
Collected in Australian Catholic Lives are 70 three-page stories that Sydney historian, Father Campion, has written over several decades—most, if not all of them, for publications such as Madonna Magazine.
They cover a representative sample (if one overlooks the lack of Queensland content) of Catholic men and women—clerical and lay, of recent and not so recent vintage, people of high public profile and people whose names will be new to most readers.
A partial listing might include: Jim Lynch, a Waverley College old boy who worked as a prisoner of war on the infamous Burma railway; Fr Leslie Rumble MSC, the famous radio priest; Chris Ringstad who was one of John Dease’s ‘Quiz Kids’; Julian Miller, ‘a priest of Vatican II’; Shirley (‘Mum Shirl’) Smith, friend and co-worker with Fr Ted Kennedy in Redfern; Henryk Skrzynski, a survivor of Auschwitz; Mary Lewis, social work pioneer; Sister of Mercy Margaret McGovern, counsellor and advocate; pianist Eileen Joyce, possessor of ‘a most transcendent gift’; Irish-born Canberra historian Oliver McDonagh; and Kate Leigh, a rival of Tilly Devine.
Father Campion has a gift for writing of this kind.
His subjects are invariably well chosen; and, without exception, his stories are engagingly told.
Here, rather than in erudite tomes and detailed chronicles, is Australian Church history at it most readable.
I am pleased to note that the writer has appended to his text a ‘resources guide’ which will assist readers who, their appetites whetted by these brief profiles, wish to learn more about any of Edmund Campion’s chosen subjects.
In this connection, I can recommend (among other works) Herbert M Moran’s autobiography, Viewless Winds, and Brenda Niall’s superb biography, The Riddle of Father Hackett.
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