Denis Hurley, 88; S. African Prelate a Key Foe of Apartheid

Denis Hurley, a Catholic archbishop in South Africa who was considered one of the most effective crusaders against apartheid, the government’s segregationist system, has died. He was 88.

Hurley died Feb. 13 in Durban after a stroke.

With former President Nelson Mandela and Anglican Archbishop Desmond Tutu, Hurley was among the last surviving giants of the anti-apartheid struggle.

As one of South Africa’s most prominent Catholics, he was not stopped outright by government authorities from pursuing his activism. However, his home in Durban was firebombed, and he was charged with a criminal offense in the 1980s for issuing reports about alleged police atrocities. The charges were dropped amid fear by some officials that further media attention would cause other stories about brutality to surface.

Hurley, a South African native, first made news at age 31, when he was ordained a bishop -- among the youngest in modern church history. Starting in the 1940s, he was outspoken in his opposition to the country’s racist policies. Because he was white and a church leader, he symbolized for many that the anti-apartheid movement was not limited to the marginalized black society.

Father Michael Perry, a policy advisor on African affairs for the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, said Wednesday that Hurley “was viewed as one of the more responsible and outspoken critics of the apartheid regime. He did not just say, ‘Take it apart.’ He was instrumental in proposing a new model for society in South Africa and was in continuous dialogue with Tutu as the churches worked together on projects to dismantle apartheid.”

The son of Irish immigrants, Denis Eugene Hurley was born in Cape Town. His father was the lighthouse keeper on Robben Island, whose prison housed many anti-apartheid activists. Hurley was said to have joked with Mandela that he had lived on Robben Island long before the future president.

The priest said he had held patronizing racial attitudes until studying in Rome in the late 1930s and meeting black students he grew to admire.

After being ordained in 1939 in the order of the Oblates of Mary Immaculate, he returned to South Africa with a new outlook on race that informed all his later activities.

In 1946, he was appointed bishop for what became the Archdiocese of Durban and assumed the post the next year. He was elevated to archbishop of Durban in 1951.

Perhaps his greatest moment in the world media came in the early 1980s as chairman of the Southern Africa Catholic Bishops’ Conference. He criticized a police counterinsurgency unit for terrorizing black civilians in South West Africa during that territory’s struggle for independence.

The government charged the archbishop with publishing “false matter” about the police. According to the law, the burden was on the accused to show that his information was correct.

“A kind of state of war is developing between the police and the people,” Hurley said at the time. He added that the police “seem to be in a mood which inspires them to say the people is their enemy, and we are out to impose our will on them by any means that we find effective.”

In February 1985, all charges were dropped after the prosecution said its case was based on “rumor and hearsay evidence.”

Hurley retired in 1992, shortly after apartheid-era laws were repealed. April will mark the 10th anniversary of Mandela’s election as the first black president of South Africa. “I could not see how [apartheid] could last for any great length,” Hurley told a Johannesburg newspaper in 2002. “In fact, I predicted an earlier ending than actually happened. I could not see how such a totally unjust system could survive.”

Unlike Mandela and Tutu, Hurley did not have a high profile in the United States. He worked relentlessly at home on a variety of social issues, saying he preferred to speak his mind and forgo the red hat and robes that came with the higher office.

In recent years, he had tried to draw attention to medical treatment for AIDS in a nation whose top political leaders have been reluctant to link the disease with HIV.

Hurley took controversial stands on condom use, supporting the contraceptive in households where one spouse had HIV and the other did not.

“I just can’t see how it fits in with true obedience to God’s will to endanger the other spouse when it can be easy to avoid such danger by use of a condom,” he told a reporter in 2001. “It’s a clash of moral values, and in such clashes people should be free to choose, especially to choose the more important value, in this case the life of a spouse.”