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The Australian elections have left a tense standoff between an atheist woman and a traditionalist Catholic man
If conservative leader Tony Abbott emerges victorious from this week's Australian electoral wrangling, he will be the island continent's sixth Catholic prime minister and the first of those to have been born in England.
All five of his predecessors raised in the Catholic tradition were of Irish extraction at one generation's remove: James Scullin (from 1929 to 1932), Joe Lyons (1932-39), Frank Forde (1945), Ben Chifley (1946-49) and Paul Keating (1991-96).
Anyone who has visited the laid-back hedonists' paradise that is modern Australia might be excused for doubting that this secular society could care, in the way that, say, the American electorate cares, what religious beliefs its leaders hold. It was treated almost as an aside when, soon after becoming Prime Minister in a party-room coup two months ago, Tony Abbott's rival "“ Julia Gillard "“ told a talkback radio host in Melbourne that she was an atheist.
Her political instincts, however, are famously acute, which may explain why Gillard "“ the daughter of 1960s immigrants from South Wales who raised her as a Baptist "“ went on to make a virtue of her candour, saying she would not pretend to "a faith I do not feel".
Disregarding the question whether professions of religious conviction by politicians influence Christian voters to render unto Caesar an allegiance that belongs to a higher power, her refusal to disguise unbelief in the name of expediency was shrewd in a nation where Catholics have been the largest group of believers since they surpassed Anglicans in number more than two decades ago. Census data show one-quarter of Australia's self-described believers are Catholics.
Cynical realists point out that they are disproportionately numerous in the western suburbs of Sydney, one of the main battlegrounds in this year's poll.
If Abbott does gain the support of enough independents to become PM he will create a first of his own. No previous incumbent of The Lodge (Australia's equivalent to No. 10) had trained as a priest: none therefore had acquired his sobriquet of the Mad Monk.
At the age of 26, Abbott was accepted as a novitiate at St Patrick's Seminary in the northern Sydney beach suburb of Manly. The tabloid press would later play merry hell with allegations that as a youth Abbott resembled St Augustine before he found sanctity, fathering a son out of wedlock at the age of 19, a presumption of paternity the man himself shared until DNA tests proved otherwise just six years ago.
Never ordained, Abbott decided "“ apparently without any crisis of faith "“ that his life's calling lay elsewhere. He soon turned to journalism, writing for publications ranging from The Catholic Weekly to Rupert Murdoch's flagship newspaper, The Australian.
As a politician he has consistently, if unostentatiously, taken what he would call moral – and others brand as boilerplate right-wing – positions in the most contentious areas of public policy from euthanasia ‐ absolutely opposed – and abortion – opposed in almost all circumstances – to same-sex marriage.
In spite of his principles, Abbott does not go about the country with a holier-than-thou attitude. He knew better than to attack his opponent as godless. Candidates for public office Down Under do well to hide their light under a bushel.
It was not always so. In a nation whose parliamentary sitting days invariably begin with the Lord's Prayer and descend into the pit from there, the pulling power of religious loyalty in generations past was undoubtedly much stronger. It was so in 1917, when the Irish-born Archbishop of Melbourne, Daniel Mannix, crusaded successfully against a referendum to conscript Australians to join the volunteers fighting alongside the Tommies in the trenches of the Western Front; and still so when he and other prelates supported, and narrowly failed to secure, a ban on the Communist Party, in the mid-century.
But the single most influential role Catholics played in the nation's history transcended a single moment, defining a political epoch instead: from the mid-1950s until the early '70s the Liberal (conservative) government was kept in office by a schism within the Australian Labor Party promoted by a traditionalist Catholic and vocal critic of Vatican II, Bob Santamaria.
Himself a confidant of Archbishop Mannix "“ who remained an intensely conservative political force right up until his death at the age of 99 "“ Santamaria in his own old age became a "father figure" to the politically ascendant ex-seminarian.
Ten years after his patron's death in 1998, a waspish Abbott spooked straitlaced political observers by remarking that on some policy issues he was "channelling" Santamaria. He grinned while saying it but no one was really sure if he was joking.
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