Journal Article

MCAULEY BEYOND DESPAIR

Hitchens, Dan

2018

Overview

In addition to promoting his own program, whose priorities included the redistribution of land, Santamaria was determined to drive out communist influence from the labor movement.The Church he had joined in 1952 conspicuously honoured Our Lady, said the rosary, was not embarrassed by apparitions, or miracles, or martyrdom, was the ultimate adamantine rock of resistance to Communism, was quite, quite sure that marriage was indissoluble, that pre-marital unchastity was wrong, that sexual perversion was wrong, that Satan and his angels were the enemies of man as Christ and his angels were the allies of man, that there was a hell of damnation as surely as there was a heaven of beatitude, that the Gospel narratives were true, that Christ died and rose again from the dead not in some Pickwickian or Bultmannian sense but really and truly. . [...]McAuley had already given his answer to the turmoil in the Church and in the world.The search for Terra Australis is the soul's journey to somewhere as yet unseen, the existence of which, even if it stands to reason, must be to some extent a matter of faith, a journey on which physical and spiritual evils can never be wholly defeated.

• Publisher: Institute of Religion and Public Life
• Subject: 20th century / Australian literature / Christianity / Civilization / Death & dying / McAuley, James (1917-1976) / Modernism / Personal profiles / Poetry / Poets / Spirituality