Priest’s works are Monuments to Love

by Letters Editor · March 12, 2015

From Winnie Graham, Cape Town

The recent death of Fr Charles Kuppelwieser brought to mind an unusual sight for a priest�s home: The lawn was strewn with hundreds of pairs of old shoes with as many women trying them for size.

Fr Charles Kuppelwieser

Nearby a huge container of old clothes, newly arrived from Germany, was being unpacked with hundreds of excited people rummaging through the shirts, dresses, trousers, children�s clothes.

With the passage of time, the dates have blurred, but it must have been 30 or more years ago that Fr Kuppelwieser, then the parish priest at a township near Carolina in what is now Mpumalanga, started receiving the container loads of used clothes from Catholics in Germany.

The arrival of these huge boxes was a major event as thousands of poor people turned up to try on the �new� clothes in the priest�s house. What wasn�t given to the local poor, Fr Kuppelwieser sold off to the more affluent and used the money to build a home for orphaned children, a schools and a clinic.

As a journalist, I visited his mission when I heard of this priest who was having such an impact on the local poor. I was there for Sunday Mass the next day.

His church was packed. But, said the priest, �I doubt if we collect 20 cents on any Sunday. My people just don�t have the money.�

This colourful priest was becoming something of a thorn in the flesh of the National Party government. They wanted him to stop distributing the contents of those container loads.� When he refused, the government imposed import duty on them.

The priest was told he was damaging South Africa�s textile industry. People would stop buying South African made clothes if they got it free from overseas. The tax was there, he was told, to protect jobs.

What the authorities did not mention was that their apartheid policies, not the containers, were hampering job creation. And so the container loads from generous Germans dried up.

Fr Kuppelwieser was ever the fighter. He turned to the Church in Germany and found other ways of raising money.

The facilities he built for the local people in Sizanani in Bronkhorstspruit are monuments to his love.