From Our Vaults, 66 Years Ago: February 26, 1958

by Admin · February 26, 2024

100 years of Lourdes

At least 80000 pilgrims from around the world attended the 100th anniversary celebrations of the Blessed Virgin’s first apparition to St Bernadette in Lourdes, France. The oldest pilgrim was a man from Nice who was celebrating his 100th birthday that day, having been born on the very day of that first apparition.

Africa’s only chance

In a pastoral letter, Archbishop John Garner of Pretoria writes that the only solution to Africa’s “immense problems” is the foundation of “a strong and undivided Christendom”, which, however, the archbishop notes does not exist.

Choirmaster stands in tests

Vincent Costello, choirmaster of Sea Point parish in Cape Town, has been appointed to umpire the fifth cricket test between South Africa and Australia in Port Elizabeth, having already umpired the second and third tests.

Editorial: ‘Suicidal betrayal’

In his editorial, Fr Louis Stubbs writes that South Africa could show the world “how friendly co-operation could replace the old, now resented, and in fact outdated, master-and-servant relationship between races”. However, as apartheid and France’s bombing of the Tunisian village of Sakiet Sidi Youssef (which killed 68 people, 12 of them were children) show, “Western civilisation here appears to the world as something essentially exclusive”, which is a “suicidal betrayal” of Christ’s prayer that “they all may be one”.