Profile A crusader who helped change S. Africa
By CARMEL RICKARD
Special to the National Catholic Reporter Durban, South
Africa
When he became a bishop here, on March 19, 1947, Archbishop Denis
Hurley chose a crest, as all new bishops must. Below the heraldic design of his
coat of arms run these scriptural words: "Where the Spirit is, there is
freedom." Few bishops have so well lived out their motto.
Interviewed shortly before the 50th anniversary of his ordination
as a bishop, he explained his choice. "It was 1947, and when I thought about
what was happening in South Africa at the time and the lack of freedom among
its black people, these words were an inspiration for what I hoped I could do
about the situation."
For the last 50 years Hurley has lived by the words of his motto.
Now 81, he works as a simple parish priest, throwing himself into his pastoral
work among the poor, still concerned about how to bring them true freedom.
During the decades of racial oppression here he became a stalwart
of antiapartheid action: protests, marches, court cases, symbolic visits to
individuals and communities under particular threat from government
policies.
As one human rights activist used to quip, with reference to the
reassuring presence of the archbishop in protest marches: "When you're in the
hurly-burly, there's no one like the burly Hurley."
A book of selected writings and speeches by the archbishop,
Facing the Crisis, was published to coincide with his anniversary. It
shows that his passion for justice in South Africa began to express itself
almost as soon as the miter was symbolically placed on his head.
Early activism
At just 31 years old, the youngest Catholic bishop in the world at
the time, he immediately began to challenge the racial segregation in which he
had been brought up as an unquestioning white South African -- and, perhaps
even more extraordinary -- to challenge the lack of action by the Catholic
church to oppose apartheid.
As he freely acknowledges, the Catholic church in South Africa was
politically and theologically conservative in those years: inward-looking and
threatened by the feeling that it led a precarious existence in a hostile
society whose leadership still regarded the Catholic church as the Roomse
Gevaar (Roman peril). The Catholic church of the era had almost no sense of
ecumenism and its relationship with other Christian denominations Hurley now
describes as one of "ongoing, simmering animosity."
The year he was appointed bishop, the Southern African Catholic
Bishops' Conference was established, providing the Catholic church with an
official mouthpiece.
Hurley became the first elected president of the conference in
1951 and served as its leader during the critical years until 1961 and again
during a second crucial period, 1981-87. Through his influence, the conference
became increasingly outspoken and active against apartheid and other forms of
injustice.
The bishops issued their first official statement on race
relations in 1952 and in 1957 declared apartheid "intrinsically evil" --
decades before it was declared a heresy by the World Alliance of Reformed
Churches. But as well as criticizing the government for its policies, the
bishops were frankly critical of church institutions that were also riddled
with the practice of segregation.
This had to change, they said.
In May 1957, Hurley's criticism took on a prophetic note. "Woe
betide our country," he warned, "when the full consequences of its present
policies rise up to plague it, when our country finds itself the pariah state
of the world -- excluded from football federations and Olympic games, debarred
from international conferences for fear of boycotts by other nations, banned
from certain harbors and airports, refused diplomatic representation and
suffering from economic disinvestment."
Decades later, his predictions were fulfilled. But he is far from
a wild-eyed prophet: Mild, almost shy at times, he is an excellent raconteur
who loves a good joke. A keen follower of cricket and rugby, he felt as
deprived as the most avid sports fan when his predictions proved true and an
international sports boycott kept South Africa isolated.
Flabby Christians
His view on the controversial matter of the church's role in
political questions, his deep concern about apartheid and its consequences for
South Africa, and his proposed solutions were spelled out most fully in the
influential Hoernle Memorial Lecture he delivered in 1964.
His remarks must have astonished many with its frank criticism of
church leadership. At one point he noted that communists, then seen as the
mortal enemy of the Catholic church, had taken a leading role to counter
apartheid:
"Can we really reproach the communists, misguided though we judge
them to be, when they enter the field of social reform left wide open for them
by Christians, with a crusading zeal and sense of conquest that make Christians
look like flabby and ineffectual windbags if not downright supporters of an
evil system? Let us make no mistake about it -- only crusaders succeed in the
field of social reform.
"If Christianity wants to have any say in the alteration of South
Africa's social pattern, its representatives will have to become crusaders
fully possessed of the flame of conviction, a fire of zeal."
Hurley possesses an abundance of crusading zeal. He may have
inherited it from his staunchly Catholic Irish parents. His father, a
lighthouse keeper, tended the light on Robben Island (later to become the
prison where prominent antiapartheid activists, including Nelson Mandela, were
held) among other locations.
They were always poor but proud of their Irish ancestry and their
Catholic faith. Hurley recalls that as a child he found the combination a
little confusing, and once, asked what his religion was, he answered,
"Irish."
At a celebration of his anniversary on March 19, Natal University
sociology professor Fatima Meer, an antiapartheid activist who was banned and
put under house arrest for many years, paid tribute to Hurley's zeal.
She said his voice resonated with the victims of the Group Areas
Act (under which residential areas were officially segregated, and everyone of
the 'wrong' race-group forced out and their land confiscated or sold) when he
joined them in decrying the law as "daylight robbery." He campaigned
relentlessly both in South Africa and internationally against the policies of
migrant labor, which separated families, keeping wives and children in the
rural areas and permitting men to work in the cities only if they were on their
own; and forced removals, used by the government to uproot hundreds of
thousands of black people from their traditional homes and dump them in bare
rural veldt with not even the most basic facilities.
If the cause was right
Hurley protested vigorously against the laws that permitted
detention without trial, and he gave evidence on behalf of conscientious
objectors refusing to do military service and activists facing the death
sentence. He condemned the atrocities of the South African Defense Force in
Namibia and ended up in the dock facing criminal charges as a result.
"Where others looked over their shoulders and on either side
before joining a protest to ensure that the company was right, his only concern
was that the cause was right," Meer said.
As his status grew, he used it to "bear down on evil wherever he
found it -- whether a powerful and dangerous government or a powerful and
dangerous employer." His home was firebombed, and the government threatened to
ban him. He was labeled a political priest and an "ecclesiastical Che Guevara,"
Meer recalled.
On March 21, now a South African public holiday celebrating human
rights, all the bishops of southern Africa came to Durban to celebrate Hurley's
jubilee in Emmanuel Cathedral with him. They paid tribute to his role during
the worst days of apartheid, saying that his leadership had given them
courage.
His long term in office spanned exactly the years of apartheid.
The National Party government introduced this policy when it came to power in
1948, the year after Hurley was ordained as bishop; it ended when the first
democratic government was elected in 1994.
Vindicated in his constant opposition to apartheid and other forms
of injustice, he was among the specially invited guests watching the
culmination of democratic change at the inauguration of President Nelson
Mandela.
But while he is best known in South Africa for his contribution to
the fight against apartheid, he also has an international reputation as a
philosopher and theologian whose work has helped shape the direction of
Catholic thought -- and of the church itself.
"Facing the Crisis" includes an important new essay explaining the
key role played by the archbishop at crucial moments in the Second Vatican
Council.
As Vatican II began to get off the ground, it seemed unable to
jettison the church's traditional bureaucratic approach. There was growing
concern from progressive thinkers that Vatican II would refuse to deal with
burning issues on the minds of bishops from all parts of the world.
However, Hurley was one of a small group of influential prelates
who were able to turn the situation around, ensure that these issues were
presented and thus help shape the council into a gathering more responsive to
the real issues of the time.
His contribution to Vatican II and to the subsequent
implementation of its philosophy as well as his opposition to all forms of
injustice has been recognized by the growing list of honorary doctorates in
philosophy and theology awarded to him by foreign and South African
universities, culminating three years ago when he was appointed chancellor of
the University of Natal.
But his outspoken views have not always brought rewards, even from
his church. Just as his criticism of injustice in South African apartheid
society won him few friends in high places, so his views on some issues of
current Catholic teaching have also proved unpalatable to the more doctrinaire
in Rome.
While the Vatican recently ruled that the question of ordaining
women priests could not even be debated, the archbishop has long said he is not
"satisfied" by the theological grounds on which women's ordination has been
ruled out.
He has also expressed intellectual and pastoral questions about
the Catholic church's outright ban on contraception. And the tightening Vatican
clampdown on theological debate also clashes painfully with the open approach
to intellectual discussion encapsulated in his motto.
If he had any chance for a cardinal's red hat, these views appear
to have ensured it will not come his way.
Now retired, he works in a difficult and dangerous inner city
parish, based at Durban's Emmanuel Cathedral. In his house next to the
cathedral, the paint peels off the walls and hawkers outside his window shout
their wares to the block-long queues at the black bus stops. As a parish priest
he continues to wrestle with the problems of poverty in society, problems that
have troubled him since, as a young student in Rome, he was gripped by the
possibilities of Roosevelt's New Deal and explored the economic difficulties of
ordinary people in his 1938 licentiate thesis.
During the celebrations of his anniversary he took up this
recurring theme once again, some 58 years later.
He said that ecumenism had flourished in South Africa, in the face
of the joint enemy -- apartheid. Now the ecumenical Christian movement,
together with people of other faiths, had a new challenge -- the plight of the
poor.
"Otherwise it could so easily happen that millions of our people
find themselves excluded through poverty from the fruits of the victory over
apartheid and the establishment of democracy," he warned.
National Catholic Reporter, May 2, 1997
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