Bob Santamaria was not a name familiar to most Americans. But when he died in Melbourne, Australia, on February 25, 1998, he was mourned within his country and beyond as one of the greatest Australians of the century and as one of the world’s leading champions of freedom.

Born in 1915, the son of Italian immigrants, Bartholomew Augustine Santamaria grew up during the Depression and the rise of totalitarian ideologies and empires. At the state funeral accorded him in St. Patrick’s Cathedral in Melbourne, Archbishop George Pell focused on the influence of the Spanish Civil War in the young Santamaria’s life. With admiration, he cited Santamaria’s words at the end of an historic 1937 debate on the war at Melbourne University: “When the bullets of the atheists struck the statue of Christ outside the cathedral in Madrid, for some that was just lead striking brass, but for me those bullets were piercing the heart of Christ my King.”

This young man soon became the protege of Melbourne’s famed Irish archbishop. Dr. Daniel Mannix. In Santamaria, Mannix found the kind of lay leader who could mobilize people in the struggle against totalitarianism, not only with a clear mind, but through deep faith. This combination of faith and intellect later influenced the spiritual journey of friends such as Malcolm Muggendge.

In an era when being Italian was not the way to “get on” in Australian WASPdom. Bob Santamaria was always proud of his ethnic roots. It is said that he was told that if he changed his surname he would surely end up prime minister. But he scorned the enticements of the establishment and ultimately came to exercise deeper influence on the nation than most prime ministers. Although he never was a member of a political party, his abilities in political, social, and economic analysis were matched by his skills as a strategist and organizer.

He was the mind behind the network of anti-communist cells or “industrial groups” set up within the powerful Australian trade unions during and after the war, when the Comintern had targeted Australia. But the left resorted to sectarianism in an attempt to destroy Santamaria and his friends. The result was the 1955 split in the Australian Labor Party, an event that drove many Catholics out and led to the formation of an anti-communist Democratic Labor Party, which held the balance of power and kept the conservative Liberal Party in office for nearly 20 years. A positive outcome was the granting of government aid to independent (mainly Catholic) schools, a feasible policy in a nation where the separation of Church and State is not a dogma.

Santamaria’s role in the Labor Party split made him a household name, hailed or reviled, but rarely ignored. When Rome responded to his foes in the Catholic hierarchy, he could no longer work within official Church structures. The Catholic Social Movement he headed was transformed into the independent National Civic Council. This think tank eventually included people of all faiths and some prominent agnostics, a particular advantage in this era of ecumenism.

Bob skillfully guided Catholic social thought through the Cold War and beyond, steering a course that never alienated working people from the Church yet helped Catholics and others to resist the totalitarians of the right and left. As the leading Australian opponent of communism and a loyal friend of the Diem brothers, he supported Australia’s involvement in the Vietnam War. He claimed it could have been won, had it not been for treachery and ineptitude on the part of American politicians and evident sabotage by the left.

In later years, he turned his attention to the internal struggles of Christianity. His widely read monthly AD 2000 still gives hope to those who resist the incursions of modernism and politically correct globalism into religion.

Thousands responded to his oratory. With a familiar, slightly staccato voice (easy target for mimics), he steadily marshaled rational arguments and laced his analysis with homely analogies. His sternest critics followed his “Point of View” on television, reprinted in his own journal News Weekly. He could be ironic, but always with charity. His humble self-effacement was proverbial.

My first recollections of Bob Santamaria are of a small patient man who warmly welcomed a nervous young convert, just returned from Oxford in mid- 1969. He asked me to speak about the Oxford “Slant” group and “Catholic Marxism,” the European grassroots of what later became Liberation Theology. A subsequent excursion with his family revealed a beloved husband and father, challenged in argument by his children (and enjoying every minute of it). He was also an unabashed devotee of Australian- rules football.

When Bob Santamaria ended his earthly journey, he was respected, even admired, by former foes, including old communists. He was recognized as an effective critic of economic rationalism who gave prophetic warnings of the disastrous effects of the unbridled power of the banks. Yet there was continuity of thought here, a consistency that marked his whole life. Bob taught us to see beyond the standard categories of left and right to what matters: the struggle for freedom, morality, family, and civilization.

In Australia, we mourn the passing of our captain and guide. But Bob Santamaria lives on in thousands of men and women formed and encouraged by this champion in the perennial struggle for freedom. He showed us what one man and much faith can achieve.