Santamaria's Salesman: Working for the National Catholic Rural Movement 1959-1961

Santamaria's Salesman is the first book to draw on primary resource material from the Santamaria files held by the State Library of Victoria since the publication of the Santamaria documents edited by Patrick Morgan. Unlike most books on Santamaria, which focus on his involvement in the Labor movement, this one analyses his leadership of the often mentioned but little understood National Catholic Rural Movement (NCRM).

Author Kevin Peoples was a leader in the YCW in the 1950s and his book celebrates both the critical role played by young workers in the Church and their world in the 1950s, and the genius of Joseph Carijn whose 'See Judge and Act' technique of formation integrated the spiritual with the secular.

Peoples was an organiser for the NCRM from 1959–1961. Through the lens of his own association with the movement, he shows how Santamaria's autocratic style and charismatic personality undermined the NCRM's aims as an official form of Catholic Action. After the attack on Santamaria's industrial movement by the leader of the ALP, Dr HV Evatt in October 1954, Santamaria controversially pressed the NCRM into acting as his anti-communist arm in rural Australia. The book analyses opposing views of Catholic Action and argues that Santamaria's failure to adopt the Jocist system of Catholic Action was one of the main reasons for the failure of the NCRM. There is drama as events rush towards the inevitable confrontation and rupture at the La Verna monastery in Melbourne in 1961.

In his engaging memoir Santamaria's Salesman, Kevin Peoples tells the story of a brief period in the history of the National Catholic Rural Movement. However, in doing so he paints a compelling picture of life in Australian church and society in the 1950s and 60s. He casts a historian's eye over the characters, events and settings of the period and interweaves these with his own personal journey. The result is an engrossing and entertaining story which goes beyond mere historical events to make his own insightful comments on faith, family, power, friendship, youth, innocence and the getting of wisdom.