The bishops of Southern Africa have noted a legacy of colonial and apartheid racism, such as a recent incident at a holiday resort in Bloemfontein where a group of white people forcibly prevented black teenagers from using a pool.
“We find it disconcerting that, after almost 30 years of the new dispensation, we still witness incidents of this nature,” the bishops said in a statement issued after their January plenary session.
The Catholic Church in South Africa also still has to work to address the “effects of racist social conditioning in our own members”.
Racism, they said, “is deeply entrenched in our society and cannot be ended simply by pretending that it does not exist or by wishing it away. In this regard, we recalled with a sense of remorse that while in the past the hierarchy of the Church issued statements condemning apartheid and racism, in its internal daily life and practice, the Church colluded with discrimination and segregation in its parishes, seminaries, and religious congregations.
“This racially informed way of being Church has, unfortunately, continued well into our own times and is proving difficult to transcend,” the bishops said.
In 2016 the SACBC issued a pastoral statement which called for a “candid conversation on racism and its manifestation in order to adequately and seriously address racism and racial divisions”.
“As we celebrate the 75th jubilee of the SACBC, we renew this call to make the fight against racism a personal mission by remaining awake to unconscious racial tendencies and to convert. Furthermore, we encourage the use of programmes and workshops in our parishes which facilitate awareness-raising regarding the deeply entrenched effects of the long history of racist social conditioning and provide adequate and appropriate ways of helping people to break free from such, largely unconscious, effects.
Read our interview with Bishop Sithembele Sipuka on the occasion of the SACBC’s 75th anniversary
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