Archbishop Leads Evolution From Segregated Seminaries to Militancy : Catholic Church Rides Cutting Edge of Apartheid Fight

Tall, white-haired, unfailingly courteous, almost patrician, Denis Hurley looks every bit an archbishop, not at all the sort of man to become known as a “meddlesome priest.”

But the Roman Catholic Church’s increasingly tough opposition to apartheid, South Africa’s system of racial separation and minority white rule, has put it into almost constant conflict with the government. And it has given the archbishop of Durban, as its senior prelate, the reputation of being one of the country’s most outspoken clerics.

“Once you take a ‘prophetic stance,’ saying that racial discrimination is immoral, that apartheid is wrong, that this whole sociopolitical system we have in South Africa is unjust and must be opposed, then continual confrontation with the government is inevitable,” Hurley said in a recent interview here reflecting on his 40 years as the head of the Durban Archdiocese.

“This conflict, however, is not just with the government but with all those whites--including, I am afraid, many of our own people--who want to preserve their power and privileges.”

Yet, the Catholic Church, 80% of whose 3 million members in South Africa are black, has intensified its opposition to apartheid and moved into the forefront of what blacks call “the struggle” after years of contenting itself with pastoral letters that denounced racial discrimination without directly challenging the government.

Should Be Church Concern

“It took us in the Catholic Church a long time to come to terms with the social change that was occuring in South Africa, often under the surface but still very profound, and to come to terms with such change as a matter that should be a church concern,” Hurley, 71, said.

“But, in a situation such as we have in South Africa, once you start on the slippery slope of involvement and end your detachment, you get more and more involved as you go on, and today we are deeply committed, deeply involved.”

Nine Catholic priests, nuns and lay workers, including Father Smangaliso Mkhwatsha, the charismatic general secretary of the Southern African Catholic Bishops Conference, are under detention without charge by the police under the 9-month-old state of emergency or other security laws. Six others, among them an American missionary priest, were released only recently.

In black townships around the country, Catholic parishes have become centers for “the struggle,” offering support to local activists and comfort to those caught up in the nearly three years of political violence here.

A weekly newspaper, the New Nation, begun by the Catholic Bishops Conference a year ago, has been raided repeatedly by security police in recent months. They accuse it of trying to foment revolution. Its activist editor, Zwelakhe Sisulu, is one of those detained.

Defying the government’s emergency regulations that restrict political activities and statements, the bishops this month called for the release of political detainees, declaring that “our country has seldom witnessed such a wave of repression and such an extensive denial of basic human rights.”

Pledged to Work for Liberation

Declaring its “solidarity” with the detainees, who are regarded by the government as a threat to national security, the Catholic leadership pledged to “work continuously for the liberation of our country.”

Hurley himself was charged but later acquitted of defaming the South Africa police by accusing them of atrocities in Namibia, the neighboring territory also known as South-West Africa that Pretoria administers in defiance of United Nations resolutions calling for its independence. The government this month agreed to pay $12,500 of his legal costs after he sued, charging “malicious prosecution.”

As a result of its tougher stance against apartheid, the Catholic Church was publicly warned by President Pieter W. Botha recently to stay out of politics. A delegation led by Hurley, then president of the Catholic Bishops Conference, was told by Botha to put the church’s own affairs in order before presuming to admonish him on the need for ending apartheid and establishing a new political system for the country.

“It was a head-on collision,” Hurley said.

The bishops argued for the repeal of the main laws enforcing apartheid, including those that give 87% of the land to whites, segregate residential neighborhoods, schools and many public facilities, and exclude blacks from national politics. For his part, Botha “lashed out” about their anti-apartheid activities, quoting Pope John Paul II’s admonition that the clergy should stay out of politics.

When Botha’s warning was repeated by the Vatican’s representative in Pretoria, Archbishop Jan Mees, Hurley said he would ask Pope John Paul II for “a good, solid, clear document on what is meant by involvement in politics, because there is so much confusion about the term.”

“We took it for granted that involvement in politics can mean, first of all, that a person seeks public office--that is, he wants to get into the power business--and that is not our intention at all,” Hurley said. “But involvement in politics can also mean, we believe, commenting on the ethical and moral implications of politics, and that is our job.”

Need for More Involvement

South Africa’s 34 Catholic bishops see a need for greater church involvement in politics, not less, if the nation is to avoid the racial civil war--”a blood bath,” Hurley has called it--that many fear is coming.

South Africa, as Hurley describes it, has become “a classic situation of an immovable object, that being white power, and an irresistible force, this being black liberation, and I don’t see how this tension is going to be resolved without violence (and) bloodshed. Ultimately, it will be resolved, and, inevitably, as a result of sheer numbers, we must end up with a black government, but how we are going to get there is a puzzle and a threat.”

“Personally, I have two conflicting emotions. On the purely human level, I have the fear of a total, total disintegration of society, of violence fermenting and festering and exploding throughout the country. On a Christian level, I have the hope that by some miracle whites will see the light and see the necessity to offer full participation to the black population. . . . I have these two contrasting themes, and I cannot resolve them.”

The Bishops Conference is planning an education program in what Hurley calls “Christian social consciousness,” with the goal of preparing Catholics for political changes that include a black-led majority government.

“It’s not so easy to educate a population that enjoys privilege and power and will have to give them up,” Hurley said of the country’s 5 million whites, about 600,000 of whom are Catholics. “It’s almost impossible, in fact, but we have not made the effort. Neither have we educated our black population in the Christian vision of liberation.

“Maybe this is too late now, but once you see what is required you have to do it. The present situation might, I suppose, drag on for another 10 years, even 15 years, and by then we may be able to get this Christian social consciousness over to whites.

“The Bishops Conference leadership must be more specific still in regard to what action must be taken under the present circumstances,” he said, in reply to mounting criticism that the church was already too involved in politics. “We have a repression greater than ever to prevent the dismantling of apartheid. We must come to practical conclusions about our conduct.”

White Backlash

But the Catholic Church, like other mainline denominations, is already experiencing a white backlash among its own members.

“Whites are unhappy about positions taken by the bishops,” Hurley said, “and we are very conscious now of the gap between the things we say and the attitudes of most whites.”

The Catholic Church’s involvement in sociopolitical issues in South Africa was very slow in developing, Hurley recalled.

“When we spoke about the possibility of justice and social change,” he said, reflecting on the mood in 1947 when at 31, a priest for only eight years, he became the youngest Catholic bishop in the world, “we did so in a very, very paternalistic way, as if everything depended upon what whites would decide and when they would decide to grant concession and make changes. Most whites assumed then that no great changes would occur for a long, long time, an indefinite time. How wrong we were!”

The Catholic Church’s first declaration opposing apartheid was made in 1952, four years after the National Party came to power and began transforming the racial segregation of the past into a system ensuring continued white privilege and political domination.

“This was all on a very theoretical level,” he said. “We thought, rather naively, that if the bishops spoke, the people would listen and then things would change. We were wrong. Nobody paid any attention, not even our people.”

But the church stood back from involvement in the great anti-apartheid campaigns of the 1950s.

“We felt uneasy about being associated with what looked to us like a revolutionary movement,” Hurley said. “By definition, Catholic hierarchies are adverse to revolutions, having had too much experience of them in other countries.”

Impetus From Vatican II

Twenty years elapsed before the church began to move, he recalled, and then the impetus came from the vast changes within the Catholic Church itself as a result of the Second Vatican Council of 1962-65.

“First, there was the great, intense emphasis on lay participation, and then there was the discussion on the church’s role in the transformation of human society,” he said. “This, of course, was brought home to us in South Africa very strongly.

“Another factor that began to affect us in the early ‘70s was the growing number of black priests. South Africa had been very slow to produce its own ‘native’ clergy, but after World War II a great impetus was given to local vocations and the training of black priests. Emerging in the late 1960s and early 1970s, they began to make their opinions heard. They found themselves as priests in an inferior role, experiencing themselves as second-class priests in relation to white priests, and they let us know. This helped us understand that we had to move.”

The bishops began by integrating their own seminaries, which--”to our shame,” Hurley said--had been racially segregated like all South African educational institutions. In 1976, the church opened Catholic schools to all races in defiance of apartheid laws.

“That was our turning point,” Hurley said, recounting how it led the church to campaign against the forced resettlement of blacks, to oppose the 1983 constitution for its exclusion of blacks, to criticize South Africa’s continued administration of neighboring Namibia and to object to harsh police measures to curb unrest over the last three years.

The church’s position on political and social change in South Africa today poses a serious challenge to the country’s white-led minority government.

“We see very clearly that the people have a right to their liberation,” Hurley said. “They have a right to confront the government and to oppose it. And we quite understand if they go as far as committing themselves to violence. . . . We don’t yet say we support the revolution, that we support violence--that is difficult--but we do well understand how as a last resort a community can turn to violence to overthrow tyranny.”