Was William Shakespeare a Catholic?
Question: A friend claims that William Shakespeare was a Catholic? I had not heard that before. Is it true? Answer: We cannot prove that Shakespeare was a...
Category: History
The Peace I Found at Ngome
On a brightly-lit Tuesday morning, a cautiously optimistic city dweller left the potholed roads that wind through urban life for the meadows of rural KwaZulu-Natal. There, upon...
From Our Vaults 44 Years Ago: July 24, 1977
Priest on political trial Fr Dominic Scholten OP, secretary-general of the Southern African Catholic Bishops’ Conference, has pleaded not guilty to three charges of having owned and/or...
Historical statues: Who’ll be the fall guys?
Your faithful columnist popped over from Durban to Cape Town in April and shared a round of coffee with your (and my) editor, Günther Simmermacher, and...
The SA Bishops in 1976
The January edition of The Southern Cross features an article on the 70th anniversary of Pope Pius XII establishing the Catholic Hierarchy of Southern Africa. It is...
Why We Need to Revisit the Past
Holidays are a great time to chill, relax and have a chance to allow your mind to wonder. I am not a New Year’s resolution type of...
Author: Why I Reopened Old Wounds
A memoir by a Catholic author about growing up under apartheid has been a surprise bestseller in South Africa this year. Günther Simmermacher interviewed Beryl Crosher-Segers. What...
A Jesuit at the Cape in the 1680s
Jesuit Father Guy Tachard, an astronomer and something of a secret agent, visited the Cape of Good Hope in 1685 and again two years later. While he...
An Ordinary Life In An Extraordinary Time
A DARKER SHADE OF PALE, by Beryl Crosher-Segers. Torchflame Books, Durham NC, 2018. 243pp Reviewed by Günther Simmermacher The rich body of literature on the subject of...
Still Seeking the Mountaintop: 50 years after Martin Luther King’s Assassination
Father Pat Connor was on his way from a graduate class at the University of Memphis to St. Joseph Hospital to visit a priest friend the evening of April 4, 1968.
King Williams’s Town Dominicans – 140 Years in South Africa
King William’s Town Dominicans celebrated their 140th anniversary in South Africa with a jubilee Mass in Johannesburg led by Auxiliary Bishop Duncan Tsoke.
How My Father’s Death Led to a Book
My father’s death, after almost a lifetime of absence, seems to close the yawning chasm between us. I feel him closer in death than when he was alive. The seed of an “inclination to look back on history” was planted the day I heard he had died.
