XPost: alt.religion.christian.catholic, alt.christian.religion, alt.religion.christianity
XPost: soc.culture.south-africa, soc.history
From: hayesstw@telkomsa.net

Race and Catholicism in South Africa

ANTHONY EGAN South Africa 30 Oct 2017 01:36 (South Africa)

Framed by the important 1957 Statement on Apartheid of the Southern
African Catholic Bishops Conference, this article examines race and
racism in the church. Having teased out the meaning of race and
racism, I document the struggle of the Catholic church to deal with
conscious and unconscious racism in its 19th and 20th Century history.
By ANTHONY EGAN.

The 1957 Statement on Apartheid of the then 10-year-old Southern
African Catholic Bishops Conference (SACBC) has been hailed – by
Catholic and non-Catholic scholars alike – as the first statement by
any church institution in South Africa to theologically condemn racism
and apartheid. The emphasis on theological is important: it dived into Christian tradition for its justification and applied theology to the
political crises of South Africa in the 1950s. It did not simply
condemn an action of the state but the ideological foundations of
apartheid itself.

On apartheid:

“White supremacy is an absolute. It overrides justice. It transcends
the teaching of Christ. It is a purpose dwarfing every other purpose,
an end justifying any means… [The logic of separate development in the
name of people pursuing their own distinctive social and cultural
evolution] sounds plausible as long as we overlook an important
qualification, namely, that separate development is subordinate to
white supremacy. The white man [sic] makes himself the agent of God’s
will and the interpreter of His providence in assigning the range and determining the bounds of non-white development.”

This, the SACBC concludes, is blasphemy because there is “in each
human person, a dignity inseparably connected with his quality of
rational and free being”. The fundamental insight distilled from
centuries of thought is that humanity as a species, not just Christian
humanity or Catholic humanity but all humanity, is imago Dei:
literally the image and likeness of God. To discriminate on the
grounds of race is to deny this inherent imago Dei. Thus apartheid is
a fundamental evil, an intrinsic evil.

However flawed parts of it are (as we shall see below), this
proclamation of the SACBC set the church as institution firmly in
opposition to apartheid. It was not (as a future article in this
series will show) the first expression of official opposition, but it
was for its time the strongest and a pointer to what would be a
consistent and systematic challenge to the state until 1994.

Having said that, I must warn readers in advance. This essay will
present a less than pretty picture of the Catholic church and race in
South Africa. Despite the clear and courageous 1957 statement and
similar texts before and after it by the SACBC, there existed – and
arguably still exists – a mindset that lends itself unconsciously to
racism in different forms in the South African church. I have already
alluded to the ways in which the church was both pragmatically and
practically wedded to the colonial system of 19th and 20th Century
South Africa. Despite the church’s theological objections to
segregation, apartheid and racism, it did not escape from the culture
in which it grew and flourished. Like other European-originated
churches it was, to coin a phrase of theologian Charles
Villa-Vicencio, “trapped in apartheid”. More controversially, I shall suggest that part of this can be ascribed to the church’s own theology
and practice, a theology and practice with which it continues to
struggle.

Defining racism in church and society

Defining racism briefly (a necessity in an already long article) is a
daunting task. Sociologist David Wellman, writing from a North
American context, sums it up as:

“... not simply about prejudice… Racism can mean culturally sanctioned beliefs which, regardless of the intentions involved, defend the
advantages whites have because of the subordinated positions of racial minorities [or majorities in colonial societies like South Africa, I
must add]… Thus racism is analysed as culturally acceptable beliefs
that defend social advantages that are based on race… a defence of
racial privilege.”

To this I would add James Blaut’s theory of diffusionism: that
Europeans had (possibly still have) the assumption that they are the
centre of history and culture and that this culture should be spread
(diffused) to the non-European Other. “Europe” (including North
America) is normative, the template against which other cultures are
judged – and usually found wanting.

The advantage of this definition is that it includes not simply
prejudice (sometimes based on 19th and 20th centuries racial
pseudoscience) but also power, notably economic power. “Europe” (which
is shorthand for the Global North) held – and arguably still holds – economic, political and cultural power throughout the period. The
underlying values (including Christianity, liberalism and Marxism)
that judge, defend or critique the colonial project are,
paradoxically, part of the values of “Europe” itself.

Steve Biko observed in 1972 that though Christianity had gone through
cultural adaptations in its early history, by the time it got to South
Africa “it was made to look fairly rigid”. It helped define the norms
of the colonial order and expected indigenous people to “cast away
their indigenous clothing, their customs, their beliefs which were all described as being pagan and barbaric”. Knowingly or not it served the colonial project, even when it critiqued its excesses. Though not
always overtly racist in practice, its assumptions – built into the
very fibre of its theology, even dare I say the positive theology of
the 1957 Statement – by privileging the European and “Othering” the African made it an ambiguous discourse that could both support and
critique a racist society.

Institutional ambiguity and institutional ‘racism’

For most of its history in South Africa, and to some degree still, the
Catholic church’s understanding of race in its own institutions is
formed by this ambiguity. It accounts for its complex relationship
with racism. The racism of a colonial, then segregated, then apartheid
state – and arguably that of living in the present day “post colony”
(to use Mbembe’s intentionally ambiguous term) was part of the social
glue that held South Africa together. Within this contest some white
Catholics have been profoundly and openly racist; others have been
radically anti-racist.

There are also suggestions that their faith may at times have made
some of them less racist: a survey published in the mid-1970s of white Christians in three churches (Presbyterian, Catholic and Dutch
Reformed) showed that the more committed Catholics were to the faith,
the less racist they were.

This makes sense. Deeper involvement beyond geographically (and
racially) segregated parishes would bring them into church structures
and organisations that crossed the racial divide and more reflected
the universal nature and vision (theology) of Catholicism.

Even here, however, for much of the time there may still have been an undercurrent of institutional racism operating. I use the term
“institutional racism” with caution here, but the history I describe
seems so shot through with racial (and ultimately racist) assumptions
that I can do no other. In using this term I must issue a firm
qualification: as the 1957 Statement on Apartheid eloquently put it,
racism is inimical to Catholic theology, to Christianity and to common
decency. However, the underlying Eurocentrism of most dogmatic
formulations and theological assumptions of Christianity in general
and Catholicism in particular makes it easy for a non-racial theology
to be undermined by cultural presuppositions that generate a
disconnect between theory and practice that lead to “racist” practice, however unintended.

The most blatant disconnect between church theory and practice can be
found in the way the church dealt with African vocations in the 19th
and early 20th centuries. It was very difficult for African men to
seek ordination in the church, or for African women to join sisters’ congregations. This was not a uniquely South African phenomenon. For
centuries the Catholic church was wary of ordaining “native clergy” in countries as varied as Brazil, Peru, Congo and the Philippines,
believing that the “natives” were physically incapable of maintaining church disciplines such as celibacy. Many religious orders in the
Philippines, for example, only started to admit “natives” in the early
20th century. And clear social and economic class distinctions between
foreign and local clergy existed in the Philippines until the end of
the 19th century.

Though not to exonerate the local South African hierarchy and
religious orders, it shows that problems existed within the way the
church was governed at the time, despite commitment from Rome to
indigenous clergy from at least 1920 onwards. The encyclical Maximum
Illud of Pope Benedict XV explicitly called on the church in “mission lands” to recruit local, indigenous candidates for the priesthood and religious life. A series of articles in Catholic publications like the
South African Catholic Magazine suggest that white Catholics in
general, and clergy in particular, while accepting the Pope’s message, believed that adopting Benedict’s exhortation would be quite
challenging.

Challenging, at very least, to the status quo and to patterns of
existing practice, one might add.

In the case of religious congregations of women, one finds a
succession of “solutions” tried by German, Irish or French sisters
from the 19th Century onwards. One model was to create “local” congregations, copies of the European original under the leadership
(i.e. Provincial Superior and Novice Mistress) of sisters from the
founding order. Another model was the creation of “diocesan
congregations” – local orders set up under diocesan bishops, run by
and imbued with the spirituality of one or other European
congregation. The logic of these new congregations was rooted in the
assumption that African sisters would find adapting to the
institutional cultures of the founding orders difficult to impossible.
That the reverse might be in order – European sisters adapting to
African culture, or creating a synthesis of cultures – was apparently unthinkable.

By the time many of the missionary sisters’ congregations changed
their mind on admitting African women, the damage was done: vocations everywhere were starting to decline. As we shall see when we look
later in this series at Catholic education and healthcare, the net
effect was the closing down of large parts of a substantial network of
schools, hospitals and nursing homes originally founded by missionary
sisters. In contrast, many of the new congregations thrived and
continue to exist, at least until the 1990s, which was marked by a
dramatic drop in all South African vocations.

Among diocesan and religious priests there was by 1920 an already
complex story emerging. In 2008, a book, The Other Side of the Story:
The Silent Experience of the Black Clergy in the Catholic church in
South Africa (1898-1976), was published by historian George Sombe
Mukuka. Based on his Masters and Doctoral research at the University
of KwaZulu-Natal, it recounts the often difficult experiences of the
first black Catholic priests in South Africa.

Mukuka’s central thesis is that European missionary control of the
Catholic church in the 19th century was informed by notions of
European cultural, educational and political supremacy that demanded
the acceptance and compliance of local African cultures and especially
the nascent African clergy. Those who bucked the system – who
challenged this hegemony – got hurt. Mukuka recounts the ongoing
struggle by black African priests for full participation in – and
ultimately identification with – the Catholic church in which they
served. It starts in the then Natal in the area around present-day
Mariannhill with four young men who travelled to Rome to train as
diocesan priests. Returning with doctorates, they found themselves
treated very much as perpetual assistant priests, subject to
discrimination in state and, as Mukuka points out, the church. Drawing
on very limited documentary evidence – often representing the “other side” of their conflicts – and on interviews (many of which are
grassroots recollections of what might be called “folk memory”), the
author tells of their conflicts with religious authorities and their
ultimate marginalisation.

Father Edward Kece Mnganga (1872-1945), ordained in 1898, was placed
as an assistant to Mariannhill priest A T (David) Bryant, an eminent ethnographer, historian and Zulu linguist. Initially doing very well – popular in the parish and developing a successful mission school –
Mnganga began to feel that Bryant was undermining his work. Whenever
he was away, for example, Bryant would – Mnganga argued – expel his
most promising students. Confrontation ensued and Bryant and Mnganga
apparently came to blows. Bryant then accused Mnganga of threatening
to kill him, had him declared insane and shipped off to a mental
asylum in Pietermaritzburg, where Mnganga remained for 17 years.

For Father Alois Majonga Mncadi (1877-1933), ordained in 1903, the
issue with his superiors was that he was unwilling to live alone. He
wanted family members to live with him and – to make matters worse –
he bought a farm for himself, which his bishop ruled was against canon
law prohibitions on priests’ trading. Similar problems arose between
Fathers Andreas Mdontswa Ngidi (1881-1951) and Julius uMkomazi Mbhele (1879-1956). Ngidi was also accused of being a radical African
nationalist and complained bitterly that his superiors stole his
writings and tried to obstruct his pastoral work when it entailed what
we would today call development work among the Zulu people. Mbhele,
too, clashed with his superiors over pastoral work, his refusal to
sell his farm, and was suspended for a while after allegations that a
divorced woman was living on his farm.

In the 1920s, the farm-owning priests brought their complaints with
their bishops to Bernard Gijlswyk, the Apostolic Delegate of the Holy
See to South Africa, arguing that they were not in violation of canon
law, since they employed farm managers to run their farms. They also
denied the claim that they were disobedient to their bishops and

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