The Catholic Elite and the Issue of Loyalty During the Great War in Australia

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ABSTRACT The historiography of the Great War in Australia tends to emphasise the ostracisation of the Irish Australian Catholic community from the dominant discourse of imperial loyalty espoused by Australia’s Anglo-Protestant majority. Such readings have neglected the Catholic elite, whose support for the war, and later conscription, aligned with the higher-status Protestant elite. It was from the latter group that established Catholics sought acceptance and in whose ranks they sought inclusion. The navigation between those ambitions and the loyalty demanded by the church and its working-class following effectively bifurcated the Catholic community along class lines during the Great War in Australia. This article examines the attitudes of the Catholic professional and commercial elite to the war and conscription to determine the extent to which those attitudes were shaped by the cultural hegemony of Protestant elites in wartime Australia. It argues that Catholic elites adhered to Protestant norms of Britishness and imperial loyalty to combat the perceptions of Irish and Catholic treachery and to secure their positions within elite society.