And where was my Church?

Hangberg in Hout Bay, Cape Town was in the news lately because of police brutality that was visited on that community under the apparent direction of the city of Cape Town and the premier of the Western Cape.

Eviction forces, accompanied by the Metro Police and the South African Police Services invaded the little fishermen community on September 21 to demolish poor people’s homes. The official line was that these shacks, built on the mountain firebreak, had to be torn down to prevent fires.

The irony is that in the area and those that adjoin it firebreaks are extended all the time when developers buy the land on the mountain. In fact, the controversy of this particular mountain, the Sentinel (Hangberg lies at its foot), started because the mountain was privatized – it has been sold to the SANParks since.

What we saw on that fateful Tuesday morning was reminiscent of the apartheid years: a well orchestrated violence against poor people, some of whom lost their sight because police fired rubber bullets at their faces. Women were humiliated in their homes, Muslim women made to go out without their headscarves, and so on. The boot of the security forces was literally on the neck of the community.

Subsequent to that many organizations especially faith-based, came to bandage the community and cry with it. An Anglican priest pertinently pointed out that “the church is the bone of the suffering flesh of the people, especially the poor”. With those words he reminded me of the late Salvadoran Archbishop Oscar Romero.

Naturally I was concerned that there was no official representative from my Catholic Church, even though the incidents of that day happened at the threshold of the Catholic Church in the area, Our Lady of the Sea.

The Church teaches that defending the poor is the necessary consequence of incarnating the Church in the world; that the preference for the poor is the most fundamental characteristic of our faith and God’s idea of bringing good news to the world.

Yet we see it growing slowly and timidly, not always showing signs of concretely confronting the idols of wealth and power, not just in the words, bit in action – to dirty its hands and be found standing in courage with the plight of the poor.

Archbishop Romero once wrote that “the world of the poor teaches us what the nature of Christian love is, a love that certainly seeks peace, but also unmasks false pacifism – the pacifism of resignation and inactivity”.

These thoughts came back to me again as on the Sunday morning of October 3 I thought it to be my duty to join the “March for Peace” in Hout Bay to lament what had happened that Tuesday. Again, among the faith-based representatives mine were not present.

Many people I was with questioned our Church’s commitment to the poor. Even though I know of many instances when the Catholic Church does show its preference for the poor, on that Sunday I was unable to defend its absence, except by saying the parish was currently without a priest.

Sometimes our faith, words and teaching are tested against our actions. In those times it is not possible to be neutral, lest by our silence we find ourselves on the wrong side.