Catholic Schools: A Place to Wonder and to Worry

The headline above — “A place to wonder and to worry” — might seem an odd way of describing a Catholic school but it is a phrase which caught the imagination of participants at two recent seminars on education.

2024 marks the 20th anniversary of the death of Archbishop Denis Hurley, and so at the Denis Hurley Centre (DHC) in Durban, we are coordinating various activities to reflect on his legacy. In each case we are looking back to be inspired by the past, but also looking forward to ask what we are called to do now.

The three watchwords of the DHC, which is also celebrating its 10th anniversary, are Care, Education and Community. So it was important that we should spend some time exploring the middle theme.

Archbishop Hurley devoted much time to promoting education in his archdiocese. As a young priest he was chaplain to St Henry’s Marist College — he himself had been educated by the Marist Brothers at St Charles in Pietermaritzburg. He was a regular visitor to his schools — the distinguished Jewish leader Mary Kluk, one of the DHC’s patrons, remembers fondly meeting Archbishop Hurley when she was a young girl at Maris Stella.

He founded at least two schools: Fatima Convent in Durban North (because of his own positive memories of having attended the Dominican school in Newcastle) and KwaThintwa School for the Deaf, when he discovered that there was no dedicated school for black deaf children. Hurley was actively involved in various student movements and he promoted the ongoing education of priests, religious and laity whenever he could.

But Hurley’s influence in education went beyond his region. When the Church was resisting the attempt by the National Party government to force Catholic schools to submit to their notorious Bantu Education policies, his role was key in raising substantial funds overseas to save the schools. That is why, to this day, there are more Catholic schools in South Africa than of any other mainline denomination.

Later, in the democratic South Africa, Hurley was actively involved in ensuring that Catholic schools would have their place with the model of “public schools on private property” — schools funded by the state but retaining their Catholic ethos and independence.

In less visible ways, Hurley’s influence extended beyond South Africa. At the Second Vatican Council, he was elected to the Commission on Education which produced the document about the formation of priests, and also the wider “Declaration on Christian Education”. From its very first paragraph, it stresses the importance of education not just for children but also for adults.

Maintenance to mission

I list these achievements because of the comment made by one principal — drawing on the motto that is used by parishes in the Divine Renovation movement. “Our schools have to move from maintenance to mission.” Faced with the pressures he was under, Hurley could have viewed his schools purely as being in “survival” mode. Instead he saw that he not only had to maintain them but also prepare them for mission.

Today our schools also face pressures — different ones, but equally intense. Can we see beyond survival and even just maintenance, and prepare our schools for mission? When we have a wonderfully diverse network of 350 schools — the largest outside government — what is their leadership role in South Africa today?

At the two seminars, held in Durban and Johannesburg and organised in partnership with the respective local Catholic Schools Office, participants were considering just this. Present were principals, teachers, parents, governors, priests and religious.

In Johannesburg, we heard from Sr Biddy-Rose Tiernan, who has been involved with schools and the Catholic Institute for Education (CIE) for 50 years (Sr Biddy-Rose was featured in the June issue of The Southern Cross). Dr Tony Akal, the first lay principal of St Henry’s from 1984 and a close associate of Hurley’s, spoke in Durban. Both talked about the pressures to conform to government models — whether under apartheid or after liberation — and how important it is for our leaders to have the courage and the conviction to stand up for the special contribution of Catholic schools.

Both seminars were also addressed by people who during the time of apartheid had benefited from being educated in a Catholic school. In Johannesburg we heard from Sim Tshabalala, who as CEO of Standard Bank is one of the most significant business leaders on the African continent. He spoke very fondly of his time at Sacred Heart College (which was also the seminar’s venue), where he was part of the very first year of boys from Soweto who attended the school in 1978, thanks to the courage of the then-headmaster, Marist Brother Neil McGurk.

In Durban, the speaker was the highly distinguished Prof Paulus Zulu, who has not only been a professor at the University of KwaZulu-Natal and chair of the Human Sciences Research Council but also a member of the Pontifical Academy of Social Sciences. He attended a two-room Catholic farm school in Ixopo, but 80 years later his memories of the nuns are still very vivid.

Imbued with leadership

In different contexts, and 30 years apart, they both had the same experience: that a Catholic school had taught them how to understand and to hold on to key values. They talked about the pressures they had faced in business or with government and the unions, and how they constantly drew on the strong model of leadership that their education had imbued in them.

The fact that neither of them was Catholic shows the value of Hurley’s view that Catholic schools — and indeed the whole Catholic Church in Southern Africa — should be “Community Serving Humanity”.

All four speakers had wonderful and inspiring “war stories” which were a reminder of the importance of learning from history: “Those who forget the past are condemned to repeat it.” This line from George Santayana was quoted by the third speaker in both cities’ seminars, Prof Al Gini of Loyola University Chicago.

Al Gini, an author and retired professor of business ethics, is a regular visitor to South Africa and has addressed audiences of priests, bishops, lay people and government officials on the subject of leadership.

Drawing from the same Vatican document mentioned earlier, coupled with his own experience of working for a Jesuit university for 51 years, he stressed that the importance of a Catholic education is in its breadth of interest in all issues. He quoted Terence, the Roman writer originally brought to Rome as a slave from North Africa: “I am human and nothing human is alien to me.”

Al was the source of the phrase cited in the headline. Catholic schools should be places where young people can learn about and wonder at all that God has created. Paulus Zulu had shared how grateful he was to his teacher, Sr Theophila Mngoma: “Though my schooling was physically parochial, it was intellectually international. I never left Ixopo, but I knew about Rome and Tokyo and Los Angeles.” But as well as being a place for wonder, schools should also be a place of worry: we need to train young people to ask questions, and never to be satisfied with easy answers.

Paulus pointed out that unless Catholic schools have a vision of what they want society to be, they will simply conform to the vision (or lack of vision) of others. The participants spent time imagining what that vision should be, but much more thought is needed on that.

However in closing, Al Gini gave us a good catchphrase which can steer us in the right direction. It is from a poster advertising De Paul University in Chicago: “Join us — do well! Leave us — do good!”