Our Church’s History

Dear Reader, Should the collage on this month’s cover look familiar, then you are not mistaken. We had a similar gallery on the front of the August 2022 issue, marking the 75th anniversary of the founding of the Southern African Catholic Bishops’ Conference (SACBC). See it reproduced at the bottom of this page.

This month we mark the 75th anniversary of the establishment of the Southern African Hierarchy by Pope Pius XII, a watershed point in our local Church’s history.

What’s the difference between the two? In brief, the founding of the SACBC in 1945 brought together the bishops of South Africa and some neighbouringterritories into one body. This facilitated greater cooperation and unified action among the region’s bishops.

At the time, the local Church was a “mission territory”, overseen by the Vatican through the apostolic delegate (what we now call the apostolic nuncio). The territory was divided into vicariates and prefectures. These were headed by vicars apostolic with the rank of bishop, but they governed in the name of the pope, not as ordinary diocesan bishops.

The turning point

With the establishment of the Hierarchy, the prefectures and vicariates became autonomous dioceses, and four of them archdioceses. In 1951, the Southern African Church grew up, officially recognised as a stable, mature Christian community with its own structures, clergy, and pastoral systems. The diocesan bishops now had full ordinary jurisdiction.

On our cover, we feature at least one bishop to represent every current SACBC diocese. Other than our three cardinals and Archbishops Denis Hurley and Frank Nubuasah, none are repeated from the 2022 cover. Of course, we still couldn’t feature every bishop who has served in the past 75 years. If one of your favourites missed inclusion on either cover collage, we apologise. Maybe next anniversary!

There is more local Church history in our pages, as we remember the pioneering Bishop Charles Constant Jolivet on his 200th birthday, and the great Mgr Frederick Kolbe on the 90th anniversary of his death. Both were remarkable men who deserve to be remembered.

The funding crisis

As we read on page 12, Catholic-run development projects in South Africa are experiencing difficulties because foreign funding agencies have been withdrawing their financial support. One major reason is that the donors believe South Africa is rich enough to look after itself; another is diminished support from these agencies’ own governments, which in turn face pressure from their citizens to reallocate development aid spending internally. All this is of scant comfort to South Africa’s poor, who receive little solidarity from our political parties nor, in many cases, from people with means.

The funding crisis is hardly news. The Church has been talking about it, and the need for self-sustainability, for more than two decades. On page 14 we meet an organisation which planned for the future with self-sustainability in mind. The Goedgedacht Trust has just lost its major funder; now it must secure new streams of revenue — and the foundations for this are in place.

Thank you for reading The Southern Cross, and please tell your friends about your monthly Catholic magazine.

God bless,
Günther Simmermacher, (Editor)