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

BISHOP KEVIN DOWLING: Thank you your Grace, Chairperson. Permit me to introduce   on my left Father Buti Thlagale, who is the Secretary General of the Southern   African Bishops' Conference, representing South Africa, Botswana and Swaziland.   And I am Bishop Kevin Dowling. I come from a little place in the North West   Province, that you might know of, Rustenberg, and we are the two devils here   and we are thankful that our angels are in the audience praying for us. 
Chairperson, your Grace, we in our submission today have decided to follow   the three questions which we received from the Johannesburg TRC office last   week and I will be dealing with the first two and then Father Buti will be dealing   with the last one concerning the future and recommendations. 
We are here in the name of the Catholic Church and speaking to our document   which we submitted on August the 15th to certain issues in that document. But   when we look at ourselves as the Catholic Church in Southern Africa, in South   Africa in particular, we have to recognise that as the people of God, the Catholic   Church is peopled and will always be peopled by the full spectrum of the South   African society. And so you will find in our community in terms of political   stance, the right, even extreme right, and the left, even extreme left and everything   in between, and therefore we have to admit that we haven't had one single vision   or understanding of our society, be it political, economic or social, and we   haven't had a single unifying perspective on the issues which we have grappled   with in the struggle in the apartheid era. And this perhaps one of the crosses   we have to admit, we have to bear from the past. However, at the level of leadership,   that is the Bishop's Conference, there has been one voice, although we have   to ask, having said that, how effective that one voice has been in terms of   expressing a unified stance of the whole church community and the effect it   has had on the whole church community in terms of the development of the apartheid   struggle. 
So to come to the first question we were asked to deal with To what extent   has your denomination suffered from apartheid in the past? We have to say in   the first instance that the Catholic Church reflected indeed the divisions of   the society in which it found itself. Just as apartheid divided people according   to colour, so did it divide the church, our church, into a black community and   a white community. There was in effect a black church and a white church. And   therefore seeing the issues of the day from that reality and perspective, it   was very much a black community affected by the discrimination, a suffering   black community and for the most part, a white more affluent community that   was to a great extent, marginalised or not aware of the reality of the apartheid   system as it was affecting the great majority of our people in this country. 
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[inaudible] comprised in excess of 80% membership black and the rest   white and therefore to a very great extent our church mirrored the fact that   this community was, to a great extent, a suffering community. The divisions   therefore of parishes according to black and white communities compromised in   our church the gospel message of reconciliation, it also compromised a witness   of being a united community, responding to the issues of the day. There is a   saying that in terms of our relationship with the Nationalist Government, which   came to power in 1948, they targeted three main enemies of the so-called "Volk"   and people smile at the Afrikaans way this was expressed. There was the "swart   gevaar" there was the "room se gevaar" and there was the "rooi   gevaar". And in 1948 the Catholic Church was guilty on two counts, but   as time developed, we became guilty on three counts and we had to bear the brunt   of many accusations about being wolves in sheep's clothing, with the apartheid   state questioning which kingdom was being served by this church community.
Another effect of the apartheid system on our church community has to do with   education. Today the whole nation is reaping the very bitter fruit of the National   Party's policy of segregated education. In 1953 the hated Bantu education was   introduced and the government removed all subsidies from the Catholic Church   Mission Schools, so as to exercise a form of social control. At that time, the   church was deeply involved in education and was to pay a very high price for   its opposition to this act. In 1953 the Catholic Church ran 688 state aided   schools, and 130 unaided schools and that represented roughly 15% of all schools   for black learners. Twenty years later in 1973, after many confrontations and   struggles there were only 367 schools left. The Bishops in response to the withdrawal   of the subsidy mounted a campaign to try and provide for financial support to   these schools from our own resources. It was a very difficult and painful struggle   and in the end we had to admit we failed because it was too great a task and   the whole quality of education began to fail. So this affected not only our   church but also the advancement of black people through education in which we   were involved. The same picture is mirrored in terms of our Catholic hospitals   and clinics and the other institutions and associations which followed the same   path. 
The growing commitment to justice within the church demanded a high price.   I'll come back to this. But just to cite a couple of things. Archbishop Hurley,   as President of the Southern African Catholics Bishops' Conference and Father   Smangaliso Mkatshwa had to appear in court. The Conference headquarters, Khanya   House, was fire bombed some six weeks after Khotso House by the security police.   Many priests were imprisoned and exiled or deported. Many of our church workers   were detained for long periods. Religious communities were targeted, Bishops   and leaders harassed, houses searched, documents seized and so on. We were part   of the suffering community. But when we move now to what did the church as a   community do in the struggle against or how did it support apartheid in the   past. 
Firstly, we came (our church community) out of a context of a struggle to survival   in what was basically a hostile context. This from last century. And we viewed   with great alarm the rise to power of the nationalist government in 1948. Our   conference, the Bishops' Conference was established in 1947 but even before   then some of the bishops began to see the danger lurking in the apartheid system   which was coming in. For example in 1939, Bishop Henneman of Cape Town said   "In accordance with the spirit of solicitude which the Catholic Church   has always shown for the moral and material welfare of the people, I feel it   incumbent upon me to condemn any segregation on the grounds of race or colour.   Any attempt therefore to introduce legislation based purely on race or colour   must be opposed and condemned unjust". That was in 1939. But from 1947   when the Conference was established, the Bishops sought to speak as a Conference   on the issues of the day and they began to attach the false theological base   on which the ideology of apartheid was based. In 1951 one of the first Conference   statements condemned racial discrimination but didn't use the word apartheid,   but here we see the fact that we were a church community of the day. We reflected   the way issues were looked at in that day. For example, it reflected a paternalistic   spirit, the statement in 1952, maintaining that most non-Europeans (was the   word commonly used at the time) were not yet ready for full participation in   the social, political and economic life of the country, but must be allowed   and encouraged to evolve towards such participation. That was an early statement,   but by 1957, the Conference had begun to focus much more critically and it in   1957 called apartheid what it really is intrinsically evil.
Statement after statement followed which focused on abuses by the state, on   current issues and it also took on an increasingly prophetic stance by the Conference   in terms of the evolving situation. Also it revealed an evolving more democratic   process in the way these statements were arrived at. We developed new ways of   listening to our suffering majority through consultations, study days, draft   documents which invited comments, and then the Bishops made the statement. But   we must ask All these many statements over the years - what was their effect?   They were directed primarily as pastoral statements at the people within the   church community. As the Bishops tried to help the ordinary people, especially   the white community to understand what was happening in the country and how   to cope with this in the context of their faith. But even there we had to cope   with conservative and right wing groups in our own Catholic Church community,   for example the Catholic Defence League and the group called Tradition, Family   and Property, which not only fiercely contested the Bishop's statements but   in every way objected to them and were not part of them. 
However, the Catholic Church, we would say, failed to live up to the principles   of its gospel faith. Not so much by failing to proclaim them, but by proving   inadequate in communicating them successfully to its church community and to   encourage and empower them to live by those gospel values, particularly the   white community. It was a difficult task because really it required a conversion   process in the full theological and spiritual meaning of that term and the average   white church member in particular needed quite a degree of heroism and experience   of the black reality to live up to the demands of the gospel in the face of   the apartheid juggernaught. People considered their families, jobs and so forth.   It needed courage. The critical and condemnatory statements which were issued   against the government were not spoken directly to the electorate in terms of   trying to produce change (the white electorate) but to the government. And of   course the government took no notice of them at all. And so looking at our long   list of statements, we could say that our pastoral statements came from a minority   church and reached only a minority in South Africa. There are also expressions   of solidarity, especially during the years of extreme repression during the   eighties during the ...[inaudible] sessions each year. We went as a body to   celebrate eucharist with communities that had suffered gravely. For example   Sebokeng, Mamelodi, Soweto and Sosangule. We also paid a visit to that infamous   electric fence to expose its horrors and to celebrate eucharist with the Mozambican   refugees in their camp. We used vigils, processions and other services to help   people pray through their distress and also as a means of ...[indistinct] people.   And our church buildings took on new meanings as places of refuge, sanctuary   and truth for suffering people, for example Regina Mundi Church. Through our   YCW movement, we promoted and tried to help young black workers to reflect on   the interaction between their lives as workers and their lives as christian   believers using the "See, judge, act" method.
Other ways we tried to struggle We involved ourselves in investigations and   exposing the role of the South African Defence Force in human rights violations   in Namibia, in particular the Koevoet Battalion. We started and sponsored the   New Nation Newspaper, as a means of allowing the voice of the oppressed people   to be heard. The Bishops endorsed and supported the standing for the truth campaign.   Our church halls and other institutions were made available to the people's   organisations in resistance to apartheid. We tried to give those on the run   from the security forces sanctuary, refuge. We used also our international Catholic   structures to expose world-wide what was going on in South Africa. International   funding for development projects and anti-apartheid activities was channelled   through our Bishops' Conference. But then we also began to reflect upon our   own internal structures. For example, we ran segregated seminaries for the training   of our priests and pastors. We saw the need for radical change in order to be   effective witnesses in society. So in 1976, we began the process in which we   opened in the face of tremendous opposition, our Catholic Schools to all races.   Perhaps one of the moves of our church, maybe bold at that time, was to openly   support the Black Consciousness Movement. But however much we tried to do, we   have to recognise with humility and sorrow that we could have done a lot more   and in conclusion to this section, I would just like to basically sum up the   stance of our church in terms of what this hearing is all about.
There were times when, as a church, we were deaf to the cry of the poor. There   were times when we were blind to the limitations of our own practices. Times   when we were more concerned for ourselves as an institution rather than as servants   of God's people. Times when we turned a blind eye to evil, when we remained   silent. Times when we were more concerned with not having ex-patriots deported,   than with drawing attention to the wrongs done. And silence, in the face of   ongoing and systematically oppression at all levels, is perhaps our greatest   failure. And so in conclusion, I would just like to use the words our church   community and our Bishop's Conference issued after the Rustenberg Conference 
"The declaration issued by the Rustenberg Conference has led us with considerable   pain to examine our own history. We recognise that its message applies to our   church as a corporate body. We must admit with sorrow that although as a church   we have often spoken out against the sin of apartheid we are not innocent of   all complicity in supporting or going along with it. So we ask forgiveness from   all those, both within the church and beyond who have suffered from our actions,   blindness and negligence in the past. We reaffirm our commitment to remove all   vestiges of apartheid in our institutions and procedures"
And now as we move into where we go to in the future, I would ask Father Buti   Thalgale to continue.