Special Hearings — Faith Community Hearings — 1997-11-17

BISHOP MICHAEL NUTALL: [inaudible] in their different and often exceedingly   painful way in the policy of apartheid. It is with all of them in mind that   this submission is being made. We need to be concerned about healing, reconciliation,   reconstruction, not only within South Africa itself, but also in neighbouring   countries where South Africa fought its wars, created serious destabilisation   and drew on migrant labour. Many of the millions of landmines lying in the soil   of Angola and Mozambique are a telling and terrible reminder of that process   in the apartheid period. It seems to me that the churches, which straddle these   national frontiers in the Southern African region, can play their part in promoting   healing, reconciliation and reconstruction, in partnership with governments   and others in this sub continent. Chairperson, it is well known, I think, that   the church I represent was clear in its official and public condemnation of   apartheid, eventually joining those who declared it to be a hierarchy and a   sin. These pronouncements came from a synodical structure of church government   in which black and white Anglicans participated together, providing and alternative   model in our race ridden society, which helped to point the way to the model   of true democracy which our country has at last embraced. During the last eight   years of the apartheid regime, from 1986 to 1994, our church was presided over   in its life and synodical government by a black Archbishop, who by sheer example   demonstrated once and for all how crazy, let alone immoral the alternative apartheid   model was for our society. Yet, this same Archbishop, I hardly need to remind   you, Chairperson, did not have a vote in the land of his birth. But the picture   I have just painted of our church, though true, is far too rosy. The whole truth   contains compromise, complacency, and complicity, alongside examples on the   part of some individuals of great courage and compassion. The fact of the matter   as our written submission makes clear, is that the membership of the CPSA, is   varied and complex. Within the perspective of the TRC, it includes a clear majority   - some 2 million people - who were victims of apartheid, and a minority were   its beneficiaries, including some who were even its perpetrators. I well remember   a synod resolution in which it was decided that any Anglican who was in the   security police could not be elected to serve on a parish council. The opposition   to this decision in some quarters of our church was immediate. Yet we did allow   for the appointment of Anglican priests as military chaplains to minister to   the pastoral needs of white conscripts and professionals in the South African   Defence Force. This came to be a deeply divisive issue in our church, with parents   of conscripts complaining bitterly that we did not have enough chaplains to   minister to their sons and black Anglicans bitterly opposed to having any chaplains   at all. In our diocese of Namibia, there was the particular embarrassment where   the bishop there could not possibly approve of South African military chaplains   coming to support what he and his people perceived to be an army of occupation.   The liberation movements were also supported[TAPE ENDS] [inaudible]   between the pastoral and the prophetic in the life and witness of the church.   How does the church achieve a balance between these two? In the closing years   of apartheid rule, the bishops of the CPSA resolved to appoint no more military   chaplains. At about the same time, the call for economic sanctions which you,   Chairperson, had issued much earlier in a single handed act of moral courage,   was supported corporately by the bishops of the CPSA and indeed by its highest   synod, in the year 1989. It could be said, and I would include myself in this   stricture, that we took too long to come to this place of a clearer uncompromising   witness. We allowed others to proceed us and take the flack. Too late, conceded   that they were right and we owe them an apology for our compromising and often   complacent half-heartedness and sometimes, for a hardness of heart that could   be extremely damaging and hurtful. Archbishop, you yourself bore the brunt of   this critique not only in the nation at large, but even from the membership   of your own church. May I, on behalf of the CPSA, offer to you a profound apology,   ask for your forgiveness and thank you for your extraordinary graciousness and   magnanimity. May I also, through you, extend a similar message to all our other   prophets, both within the Anglican Church and beyond it, thanking them for their   courageous witness in the name of Christ to the truth? Chairperson, paragraph   ten of the CPSA's written submission says, and I quote "That the CPSA   acknowledges that there were occasions when, through the silence of its leadership   or its parishes or their actions in acquiescing with apartheid laws, where they   believed it to be in the interest of the church, deep wrong was done to those   who bore the brunt of the onslaught of apartheid. What aided and abetted this   kind of moral lethargy and acquiescence was the fact that in many respects,   our church had developed, over many years, its own pattern of racial inequality   and discrimination. It was all too easy to pass resolutions or make lofty pronouncements   condemning apartheid. It was all too easy to point a morally superior finger   at Afrikaner nationalist, prejudice and pride. English pride and prejudice was   no less real and it was never very far below the surface of our high sounding   moral pronouncements. The Anglican Lord Milner must be as problematic to Afrikaner   Christians as D.F. Malan, the dominee, is to us. In a strange way, I think many   white Anglicans in the CPSA owe an apology to the Afrikaner community for their   attitude of moral superiority. I became aware of this need when as bishop of   Pretoria from 1976 to 1981; I got to know such fine Afrikaner Christians as   David Bosch and Piet Meiring. Perhaps, Chairperson, I could ask Professor Piet   Meiring in his capacity as a member of the TRC kindly to receive this expression   of apology from an Archbishop of "die Engelse Kerk". APPLAUSE.
But our chief expression of apology must be to our own black membership, and   I am using the word "black" inclusively. Here we are speaking of the   overwhelming majority of the CPSA, both in Southern Africa as a whole and in   South Africa particularly. Interestingly, our black membership increased significantly   in the early apartheid years, especially on the reef where the witness against   the new ideology was strong. Ours is primarily a black church; it has been and   still is in many ways, a suffering church. Suffering at the hands of the church   itself. Chairperson, our so-called white parishes like white businesses, and   I am thinking of last week's TRC hearings, have unquestionably benefited from   apartheid and its political predecessors, in that church facilities, including   housing and transport for their priests, they have been bastions of relative   privilege. So-called black parishes by contrast, like black businesses, have   been decidedly disadvantaged in these respects. Within the black Anglican community,   there has been a further disparity in that very often, as in the secular apartheid   scenario, the African church has been worse off than the coloured, and the coloured   church worse off than the Indian. We have simply reflected in so many ways the   economic and social disparities at large. There was a time, as you pointed out   earlier this morning yourself, your Grace, there was a time when even clergy   stipends were paid on a racially different basis, with all kinds of clever justifications   produced for what was essentially and ethically unacceptable practice. 
Attempts are now being made to rectify these long-standing inequities within   the life of our church. Black advancement into leadership roles has been significant,   but still within our church structures, we are significantly dependant on white   skill and expertise which can easily look and feel like white power blocking   the aspirations of black people. A transformation process is underway, spearheaded   by a recently created black Anglican forum. This will promote and facilitate   an adjustment process for the CPSA, as it moves into the new millennium, seeming   to provide a new authenticity for our life together as a church, setting us   free to be more truly African in the broadest sense, to engage in our mission   and ministry in a more authentic incarnational way. Chairperson, this is one   of the ways in which our denomination sees its commitment to the future of this   country and this sub-continent. To be a transformed church under God, serving   a transformed society. Central to that task will be our desire to contribute   to a continuing process of healing and costly, not cheap, reconciliation. I   speak as a church leader now in a province which has seen well over 15 000 politically   motivated killings in a decade of traumatic transition. The healing of the resultant   wounds, let alone the other wounds, which are the legacy of apartheid, will   engage the faith communities and others for a long time to come. One of the   things which the Kwa Zulu Natal Leaders Group is planning for 1998, is a series   of pastoral visits to places of pain, where in the company of local communities,   liturgies of healing and cleansing will occur and symbolic actions will take   place to facilitate reconciliation. Similarly, trauma workshops and workshops   of repentance and restitution are available in our province to enable people   bruised by a divided past to come together in a wholesome healing atmosphere   in the presence of skilled facilitators which seem so essential to find new   hope for their lives. 
I end with a final reflection or meditation on facets of the life of the CPSA,   which I represent here today, which I dearly love and for whose failings and   frailties I repent before God and this commission. I think of the Mother church,   St. George's Cathedral in Cape Town. Site of faithful witness and struggle over   many years, beacon of hope to the people alongside the parliament where so many   draconian laws were passed. I think by contrast of the faithful Nsekekuni Land,   going on annual pilgrimage to the gravesite at the top of a hill of Masemola,   their Martyr and ours. I think of the elderly member of the great mothers' union,   coming forward slowly and painstakingly to receive a certificate in honour of   her fifty years membership and I hear her responding in grateful thanksgiving   by singing in shaky voice, a hymn from the depths of her being. I think of a   small child coming forward to be confirmed " Defend O Lord, this they   child", and how I am struck by the innocence of her eyes and her folded   hands. I think of a colleague as a teenager, taking his critically ill father   to hospital, unaware that he would be refused admission because it was the white   man's hospital and going to another "acceptable" hospital where there   was only room for his father to lie on the floor, there to die, a short while   later. I think of this colleague, carrying this pain into adult life, into the   black consciousness movement, where he found his dignity was affirmed, and finally   finding full healing when as a priest, he was asked to be Rector of a white   congregation. I think of our present Archbishop, incarcerated as a young man   for three years a political prisoner on Robin Island, and there mysteriously   finding his vocation to be a priest. I think of Zeph Motokeng, standing as a   brave young layman in synod in the early apartheid years and challenging unsuccessfully   the unequal stipends paid to the clergy. I think of Trevor Huddlestone's naught   for your comfort and the costly intercessory prayer of the monks and nuns, fighting   apartheid on their knees, and yearning for a new freedom to dawn. I think of   those who understood none of these things, who were lost in their own limitations,   trapped in their own small world. I think and I think, and as I do so, I say   Lord have mercy. Nkosi siya ukele. Morene ragaukele. And then I say also "Thank   God for your faithful ones, those who were clear sighted, those who endured   against all the odds to the end".