AD2000

Bartholomew Augustine Santamaria, usually known as B. A. Santamaria (14 August 1915 – 25 February 1998), was an Australian Roman Catholic anti-Communist political activist and journalist. He was a guiding influence in the founding of the Democratic Labor Party (DLP).

Santamaria was born in Melbourne. The son of a greengrocer who was an immigrant from the Aeolian Islands in Italy, Santamaria was educated at St Ambrose's Catholic Primary School in Brunswick, behind his father's shop, and later at St Joseph's North Melbourne by the Christian Brothers. He finished his secondary education at St Kevin's College as dux of the school. One of his teachers, Francis Maher, belonged to a newly founded Roman Catholic association, the Campion Society. Santamaria attended the University of Melbourne, where he graduated in arts and law. He completed his Master of Arts degree with a thesis entitled "Italy Changes Shirts: The Origins of Italian Fascism". Santamaria was a political activist from an early age, becoming a leading Catholic student activist and speaking in support of Franco's forces in the Spanish Civil War. He also supported and wrote about Benito Mussolini, but denied he had been a supporter of fascism.

Santamaria was married in 1939 and had eight children. In 1980 his wife, Helen, died. He later married Dorothy Jensen, his long-time secretary. His brother, Joseph, was a Melbourne surgeon and prominent in the Roman Catholic bioethics movement.

In 1936 he co-founded The Catholic Worker, a newspaper influenced by the social teaching of the Roman Catholic Church, particularly the encyclical Rerum novarum of Pope Leo XIII. He was the first editor of the paper which declared itself opposed to both Communism and Capitalism. Although the group campaigned for the rights of workers and against what it saw as the excesses of capitalism, Santamaria came to see the Communist Party of Australia, which in the 1940s made great advances in the Australian trade union movement as the main enemy. In 1937 he was persuaded by Archbishop Daniel Mannix, he joined the National Secretariat of Catholic Action, a lay activist organisation.

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