Catholic Thought and Catholic Action: Scenes from Australian Catholic Life by James Franklin (review)

Reviewed by: Catholic Thought and Catholic Action: Scenes from Australian Catholic Life by James Franklin Felicity Jensz Catholic Thought and Catholic Action: Scenes from Australian Catholic Life. By James Franklin. (Redland: Connor Court Publications. 2023. Pp. 297, with images. 39. 95. ISBN 978-1-922-81536-1. ) In 2018, Stuart Piggin and Robert D. Linder published their 674-page book entitled The Foundation of Public Prosperity. Evangelical Christians in Australian History, 1740–1914 with Monash University Publishing. Piggin and Linder's book is a well-structured, methodologically sound history of the contributions of Evangelical Christians in the colonies that would form Australia. With the title Catholic Thought and Catholic Action. Scenes from Australian Catholic Life, James Franklin's book could be assumed to have undertaken a similar function for the history of Catholics in Australia. It, however, fails. Franklin's book, despite the inclusion of footnotes, is not an academic history of Catholic thought and Catholic action in Australian history. Nor is it a complete overview of that history. Rather, it a collection of sixteen chapters that focus on various topics, such as a discourse into the short duration of toleration for the first Catholic priests in the initial years of the colony of New South Wales, an overview of Catholic missions to Australian Aborigines, the Magdalen Laundries, and Catholic response to the threat of communism. These chapters have generally been published previously, with half of them appearing in the Journal of the Australian Catholic Historical Society. Of these, many are based on talks given to the Australian Catholic Historical Society. According to the journal's own website, "Most articles are not refereed but authors may request refereeing and refereed articles are so identified in the Journal" (https: //australiancatholichistoricalsociety. com. au/journal, accessed 29 January 2023). Franklin's articles would have benefited from rigorous academic standards before being printed and re-printed in this anthology. In their current form, they End Page 429 have little potential to contribute to serious scholarly debate on the contribution of Catholics to Australian public life. For example, in using the nuns' own perspectives to postulate why they might have reacted as they did in the Magdalen laundries in Australia, Franklin writes: "It would not be surprising if some nuns' personalities became twisted, especially when added to chronic tiredness, lack of hormone replacement therapy and the like, and reacted with cruelty" (145). Such statements are not demonstrative of solid academic research or based on evidence. Moreover, this text could be read to insinuate that women turn cruel partly because of biological "deficiencies. " This is not the only passage of the book that could be viewed as difficult; there are many other examples. One particularly problematic chapter is one in which Franklin gives voice to a convicted pedophile priest "in his own words. " It is not clear what the scholarly or more general benefit of this chapter is meant to be. Moreover, by focusing on an individual, the structural problems that enabled such sustained abuse to occur remain unquestioned. Throughout the book, the text is often sweeping in its generalizations and not uncommonly polemical. It ends with a chapter entitled "Random Thoughts, " and these are indeed random. Franklin's book makes for difficult reading, although some readers might casually find a sentence or two of interest. It is indeed unfortunate that Franklin's writing is so haphazard, as the topics that he writes about are very worthy of attention. Anglicans and Catholics have been, and continue to be, the largest Christian denominations in Australia. In the last Australian census of 2021, Catholics reportedly made up 20% of those who reported to be religious. Many of Australia's 2021 Catholics were of Irish heritage, the "original" source of Catholicism in Australia, or descendents of the Displaced Persons from Central and Eastern Europe after WWII, while a significant proportion of migrants arriving in Australia between the censuses of 2016 and 2021 were from the Philippines (Religious affiliation in Australia, Australian Bureau of Statistics, released June 4, 2022, from https: //www. abs. gov. au/articles/religious-affiliation-australia, accessed January 29, 2024). Franklin does not include a chapter on new forms of Catholicism and how these new migrants have. . .