God doesn’t turn away from us

Pretoria in the 1950s, and a young Catholic boy is tied up in a Jacaranda tree by none other than the future apartheid foreign minister, Pik Botha.

Let us call the young student Don, as this is his real name. A year earlier he had matriculated from CBC at the age of 15. On his first day at the University of Pretoria, as part of his initiation, he was stuck up in the Jacaranda tree.

That was the day he became an anti-apartheid activist, and by the time he had graduated from university with a BA and MA cum laude, he had raised the ire of the government to such an extent that he and his fiancée had to hurriedly leave the country.

All of which has absolutely nothing to do with the story I want to tell about dauntless Don.

While at university, his friends were also Catholics, not least of whom some who were ordained priests or were at least students at the St John Vianney Seminary.

He was about as good a Catholic lad as you can get, and was married in Strasbourg in France while in his early 20s. The marriage didn’t work out, and Don and his wife divorced. It being the late 1950s, the Church, particularly in France, did not take kindly to things like divorce, with the result that he was duly “excommunicated” by his friendly parish priest.

Don married several times more. He was by then the holder of several doctorates and one of the highest positions in the halls of learning in France.

The years went by, and Don remained bitter about the fact that his Church could forgive mass murderers and let them back into the swing of Catholic things after confession and a bit of penance, but was unable to forgive a divorced Catholic. He became critical of the Church, and often annoyed his family to the core by openly criticising and mocking the Catholic Church.

Ironically, whenever they visited him in France and toured Europe, especially Italy, with him, they found him to be not only a highly knowledgeable guide in terms of the detailed history of the many churches they visited and their artworks, but also extremely well versed on the affairs of the Church. However, Don remained cynical, critical and angry.

He is now in his 70s, and when I spoke to him a few weeks ago on the telephone, he told me a most remarkable story.

He and a friend were touring Italy by car, and before leaving France he specifically remembered to pack a spare set of car keys, given his penchant for losing  things.

After camping for a few days, they prepared to set off and found the car keys missing, with absolutely no sign of the spare set. The searched everywhere in the tent and in all their clothing too. They virtually took the car apart. Don went to the local car dealership and asked about having new set of keys cut. He was told it would take six weeks. He went to the police and to the local locksmiths, but such is the level of security in the modern motor car that neither could help.

On the way back from the locksmith and in a mood of utter desperation and frustration, Don popped in at a local church, and remembering all the miracle stories his mother had told him, he got on his knees and prayed to St Anthony of Padua. A bit of a cheek, I thought when Don told me this after five decades of his being nasty about Catholics and their Church.

Anyway, as he slept in his tent that night he woke to see none other than St Anthony standing over him. Don, who speaks fluent Italian, said it was quite remarkable because St Anthony who lived in a Portuguese monastery until the age of 26 when he became a Franciscan, spoke to him clearly and succinctly in Italian, but with a heavy Portuguese accent.

He told Don to look in the side pocket of his backpack, but to dig deep. Don did just that — and there were the car keys.

All of which just goes to show, in my opinion, that Almighty God and his saints don’t turn their backs on those who turn their backs on them but will answer any prayer from anybody, as long as it is asked with sincerely.

But what I found most interesting was that in spite of insisting for 50 years that he was everything from agnostic to atheist to communist and unbeliever, there was still that little spark of faith in Don that lit up just at the right time.