SACBC: Our Ministry is Always Adapting

In the third and final part of a wide-ranging interview, SACBC president Bishop Sithembele Sipuka tells Günther Simmermacher about the youth, evangelisation, the effects of the pandemic, and the SACBC’s challenges.

In the August 2022 issue, Bishop Sithembele Sipuka of Mthatha, president of the Southern African Catholic Bishops’ Conference (SACBC) looked back at the history of the structure after its founding in 1947, and some of the SACBC’s present endeavours. In the second part of the interview, which ran in September, the bishop looked at the SACBC’s finances, its response to the abuse scandal, Church and media, ecumenism, empowerment of the laity, and relations with President Cyril Ramaphosa. This is the final part of the interview.

Günther Simmermacher: How has the Covid pandemic affected the SACBC?

Bishop Sipuka: As everywhere else, the pandemic brought devastation, material deprivation and existential anxiety as it negatively affected the livelihoods of many and threatened lives. Priests and religious were also not spared the wrath of the coronavirus, and a number of them succumbed to its sting and died.

The Church in the SACBC responded to this situation by writing pastoral letters issuing directives for safe Church attendance, creating pamphlets for prayer and worship at homes, encouraging livestreamed liturgical celebrations for people to watch and participate in from home, and mobilising parishes to collect food and money to assist those who had lost their means of survival from Covid-19 restrictions. If local ecumenical structures were effective, more could have been done to respond to the needs emanating from the pandemic.

One special providence of the Covid-19 pandemic was the provision of the opportunity to learn and to use electronic media communication tools. While the inconvenience of the inability to be present physically imposed a lot of frustrations on the life and work of the Church, it encouraged many who had never done it before to use the available communication gadgets and software applications for virtual meetings.

Though it’s not the same as meeting physically, these have proven helpful in getting us in touch within the diocese and at the Conference level to meet, discuss and deliberate on various matters related to our life and work as Church. They have certainly provided alternative ways of communicating and meeting even beyond the Covid-19 era.

The keyword in the new pastoral plan is evangelisation. What is the SACBC doing to implement that mandate?

The SACBC is fulfilling the mandate of evangelisation primarily by launching the pastoral plan for the whole region. On the day of the launch, all bishops committed to implementing the pastoral plan in their respective dioceses. Even within the restrictions of the Covid-19 lockdown, many dioceses found a means of engaging the faithful in responding to the needs of their local church, which on its own is evangelisation. Everything we discuss and do as SACBC is within the call to evangelise, so we must continually evaluate what we are doing in terms of this call in Christ Jesus. It is a work in progress.

Currently, many dioceses are involved in the Synod on Synodality, which requires journeying together between the clergy, the religious and the faithful. At the core of this broad-based dialogue is evangelisation. The Church realises the importance of being missionary disciples of the Gospel so that it may indeed become the evangelising community, serving God, humanity, and all creation.

Is the youth served well enough in the local Church, or can more be done?

The youth within our Churches has been very well supported by the SACBC. They are supported and given tools. The Conference tries to serve the youth. But experience has shown that national efforts will always fail unless things are also well-established at the parish and diocesan levels.

More emphasis should be on the local level and strengthening the capacity of the youth. We must have suitable youth chaplains interested in young people. Many priests do not appear to have a liking for this ministry and do it only because the bishop has asked them. One needs to have the passion and love of young people to work with them, because they are not an easy group. They are unstable and seek to do what pleases them, which sometimes is not really of much value. Worse still is to appoint a priest who himself is humanly immature and becomes a source of scandal.

The challenges at the level of the faithful include the lack of interest by adults in the affairs of young people. They are not curious about the youths’ spiritual growth. In parish pastoral council meetings, for example, at times, the issues and challenges of young people are not attended to that much, unless the priest himself pushes such matters. Yet once these young people make mistakes, they are condemned by the faithful, especially their parents.

What, in your view, would be the solution?

The solution that would bring full and complete service to young people is the involvement of the faithful, especially the parents. Parents’ support is most needed.

Then secondly, the young themselves are a problem, because most do not appreciate the means the Church makes available for their development. My opinion is that the Church in homes is not prioritised much. It is not set as a development of the family’s growth. By Church at home I mean making sure that the family prays together, that the Word of God is read and shared, traditional devotions like the rosary, novenas, Divine Mercy, and so on are practised, and that Small Christian Community meetings are held at homes.

It would be much easier if the Church was greatly valued at home for young people to appreciate the programmes that cater for them in the parish and the diocese. The first church for a young person is their home. If God is not the centre of the family’s life, it can be seen in the level of involvement of the young.

The SACBC Youth Office is trying its best to provide directions, programmes and conferences for the youth ministry.  Like everything else, however, youth participation in the Church at the parish and diocesan level has been negatively affected by the long period of Covid. Now that we have some respite from Covid, we need to revive the youth apostolate first at the diocesan and parish levels, because much of the youth activity died during the pandemic’s last two and a half years.

Apart from these mentioned challenges, the youth has a general fluidity problem. It is difficult to minister to them continuously as they are very mobile due to schooling and jobs.

What are the great challenges facing the Church in Southern Africa at present and going into the future?

The challenges faced at the moment can be categorised as pastoral, economic and cultural. As far as pastoral challenges are concerned, there are several.

– Some of the challenges we face today are the lack of personnel, the laity to work in the SACBC’s headquarters, Khanya House, and the lack of priests.  We need more pastoral workers who are committed and ready to transmit the faith and the teaching.

– We do not have enough finances and investments to run our pastoral projects.

– We are not going to be able to manage our old institutions due to the economic challenges.

– Disintegration of family structures.

– People leaving the Church for “Prosperity Gospel” mushroom churches.

– Then there is the removal of God from society. For example, children go to school all week and don’t come to church, which makes it hard to prepare young people for sacraments and their ongoing formation in their faith.

– Recovery from the impact of Covid-19. Things will not be the same again. The Church must think of better and new ways of dealing with the aftermath of Covid-19 because they are likely to be part of life from now onwards. The formation of future priests should now be aligned to problems of this nature.

– Regarding social and economic challenges, we cannot isolate the Church in Southern Africa from the actual context affecting all in Southern Africa. There is no doubt that the biggest difficulty facing South Africans, in general, is the dire economic situation going forward. Unemployment and poverty are growing, and this is quite frightening, especially because it leads to more and more violence, trauma and mental breakdown, as we can see in the police’s quarterly crime statistics.

In this context, we realise that more and more Catholics are unemployed and poorer than before. Therefore, our present model and way of being Church is becoming challenged quite radically. More and more of our ministry will need to deal with this dire economic situation and its negative consequences. The Church needs to engage in economic matters and not leave it to the politicians alone.

– The synodal consciousness presented by Pope Francis confronts some cultural practices of superiority and patriarchy, where some regard themselves as having the exclusive duty of talking and pontificating while others must listen. Even in the Church, there is still a tendency for those who are leaders to see their work as that of instructing instead of listening and discerning together.

Bishop Sipuka, thank you very much for your time and frankness.

Read part 1
Read part 2

Published in the October 2022 issue of The Southern Cross magazine