Pallottine Priests and Brothers 100 years in South Africa

This year marks the centenary of the first Pallottine priests and Brothers arriving in South Africa, and next year it will 100 years since the first Pallottine Sisters came. We look back at the early days of the Pallottines in South Africa.

One-Hundred years ago, on September 14, 1922, the ship Wangani arrived in Cape Town harbour. Among the enlivened passengers on the ship’s deck beholding the sight of the imposing Table Mountain that day was the German Bishop Franziskus Xaver Hennemann and eight of his confreres — five priests and three Brothers — of the Society of the Catholic Apostolate (SAC).

This was the birth of the South African Pallottines, as the congregation is popularly known, after founder St Vincent Pallotti (1795-1850).

Bishop Hennemann, six weeks shy of his 40th birthday that day, had been the bishop of Cameroon since 1913. Back then, Cameroon was a German colony, but after World War I, the German colonies were reallocated to France and Britain. By then, the German missionaries, including the bishop, had been expelled from Cameroon. That is how Hennemann and his eight fellow Pallottines ended up in South Africa. The bishop came to serve as the prefect of the Cape of Good Hope vicariate, which covers today’s Oudtshoorn diocese. In 1933 he’d become the bishop of Cape Town, serving in that position until his retirement in 1949.

Within four days of landing in Cape Town, the missionaries arrived in Oudtshoorn. There were few Catholics in the region, and almost all were white: 400 in Oudtshoorn, 150 each in George, Mossel Bay and Beaufort West, and 60 in Knysna. The Pallottines set to work, with Br Johannes Tenhaf becoming known as a builder of structures, in Oudtshoorn and in Cape Town.

Meanwhile, in 1932, Br Michael Busam, like Br Tenhaf one of the original Pallottines in South Africa, set up a printing press for the production of material used in the Afrikaans apostolate. Chief among these was the journal Die Katolieke Wereld, long edited by Fr Wilhelm Fell SAC, another German, who also translated the first Afrikaans children’s catechism and taught the language to many missionaries. The printing press closed in 1960, and the journal — after 1965 published by the bishops’ conference — folded in 1974.

Bishop Hennemann’s first priority was to build mission stations for coloured people, and to that effect called Pallottine Sisters to come to South Africa, to work in nursing and education. The first Pallottine Sisters arrived on June 1, 1923. Six weeks later, the first school for coloured children opened at North End in Oudtshoorn, followed two weeks later by the first church there.

Going to Queenstown

The Pallottines’ early work in that remote part of the country impressed the apostolic delegate, Archbishop Bernard Gijlswijk, who asked the congregation to work in the Eastern Cape. So Fr Francis Vogel, the superior, and Fr Rackle went to Port Elizabeth in 1925. But they were less than welcome there. Bishop Hugh MacSherry, the formidable head of the local vicariate, was not keen to have a bunch of Germans muscle into his territory (and the money its people had). As a compromise he allowed them to do mission work among the Xhosa and coloured communities in the Queenstown area. In 1927, they finally began their apostolate, based at Woodlands mission near Stutterheim.

Without income from Europe, the Pallottine missionaries toiled hard to maintain their mission, which soon became independent, by Vatican decree. Mgr Vogel, overworked and stressed-out, died of a stroke on May 11, 1935. For his burial, the missionaries had to take out a loan.

His successor, German-born Mgr John Baptist Rosenthal, was barely in his thirties, but he had a clear vision of what he wanted: a well-run ecclesiastical territory with beautiful churches and an efficient health, education and evangelising infrastructure. He built one mission after another, as well as schools and clinics.

In February 1940, Queenstown was elevated to the status of apostolic prefecture, and Mgr Rosenthal became its first prefect, and thus Queenstown diocese’s first bishop. He remained in that position until he retired in 1972, three years before his death.

Bishop Rosenthal was succeeded by two more German-born Pallottines, Bishops John Rosner (1972-84, a former editor of Die Katolieke Wereld) and Herbert Lenhof (1984-2009). After the eight-year stint of Bishop Dabula Mpako, a diocesan priest who is now archbishop of Pretoria, in 2019 Pope Francis appointed a locally-born Pallottine in Bishop Siphiwe Paul Vanqa.

By the time Mgr Rosenthal was appointed prefect of Queenstown, Oudtshoorn already had its second Pallottine bishop, Mgr Theodore Koenig (1934-47). He had arrived with Bishop Hennemann in 1922 (as the only one of the group not to have served in Cameroon) and succeeded Hennemann upon his appointment to Cape Town. Bishop Koenig would be succeeded by two confreres, Bishops Bruno Hippel (1948-68) and Manfred Gottschalk (1969-82, who died at the absurdly young age of 50).

Cattle-farming Brother

By 1948, the Oudtshoorn and Queenstown Pallottines merged into one province, with its headquarters in Queenstown. There Br Charles Stamm, who had come from Germany as a male nurse, started breeding award-winning Ayrshire cattle to provide additional sources of income for the missions through a dairy and a butchery. Tragically, Br Stamm was murdered on February 24, 1985.

Other initiatives followed the ever-extending farm, including a retreat house and youth centre. Meanwhile, a Schoenstatt shrine was built in Queenstown in 1957.

The local headquarter for the Pallottines in South Africa remains at Pallotti Farm at Queenstown.

In the late 1980s, the Pallottines extended to KwaZulu-Natal, with the purchase of the Dominican premises at Merrivale, near Pietermaritzburg, to serve as a home for Pallottine students at St Joseph’s Theological Institute at Cedara, with Fr Barry Reabow serving as rector, followed by Fr Vanqa. The house turned out to be a disappointment: none of the students there progressed to the priesthood, and two of its priests, Frs Rudolph Koeble and Dominic Nxala, died in car accidents, in 1993 and 1997 respectively.

Things improved after the Pallottines called Fr Peter Hillen, another German of the order, from his appointment in Cameroon to assist with vocation promotion and formation in South Africa. His appointment was a success. It saw the purchase of the Redemptorist Sisters premises, later to be known as St Vincent Pallotti Formation House, in Merrivale. It has flourished, with vocations from South African and also from Malawi, Nigeria, and Lesotho.

Local vocations always were a concern for the congregation. It was not so much a problem when there was a regular flow of missionaries from Germany (most of whom eventually returned home), but even then, in the 1930s the Pallottines established a minor seminary at Swellendam. It closed when German priests were interned during World War II.

Sisters and laity

The Pallottine spirituality has found its way into the locally-formed congregation of Sisters and a group of lay faithful. The Sisters of Our Lady Mother of Divine Love (or Ntaba Maria Sisters, as they are popularly known) in the diocese of Queenstown, are one example. The lay Sodality of St Vincent Pallotti is active in Queenstown and Oudtshoorn.

Bishop Hennemann brought the first Pallottine Sisters to South Africa within a few months of his arrival here. When he became bishop of Cape Town in 1933, he brought yet more Sisters over. They started a hospital and a home for orphans and handicapped children, both dedicated to St Joseph and both still in existence. Currently, 11 Pallottine Sisters work in the Cape Town archdiocese.

Although the congregation never had a strong profile in the Mother City, the name of its founder is better known there than anywhere else in South Africa, even outside Catholic circles. That is thanks to the St Joseph’s Sanatorium which the Pallottines built in Pinelands in 1938. Over the years, it developed into a world-class hospital.

Today the well-known hospital is no longer Catholic-owned, but it retains the name which replaced that of St Joseph: Vincent Pallotti.

This article was published in the November 2022 issue of The Southern Cross