Chai Brady
Chai Brady speaks to an Irish missionary about the Church in South Africa, and what the Irish Church can learn from it
After celebrating Mass in a church high in the South African mountains, an Irish missionary saw a man approaching him in a way that spelled danger; he had not seen him at the service.
While working as a priest the now Archbishop Emeritus Liam Slattery OFM was stabbed just after Mass. He fortunately managed to avoid a fatal wound by dodging the knife aimed straight at his chest.
Speaking to The Irish Catholic about his 1993 ordeal, Archbishop Slattery says of his attacker: “He wasn’t at Mass or anything like that, he was just walking past and he came around, next thing I saw was a big white handkerchief with a knife in it.
“So I got out of the way the first time, being accustomed to hurling in Tipperary, but I fell over my bag which was on the floor and he got me across the back. When I got up I was able to take him on, then he ran away.
“It was a weekday Mass, it was all women and children and older people. So no-one helped me. I could feel blood all over my body, I drove myself to the hospital about 40km on a bad road and I fainted when I got in there.”
Wound
He described the wound as looking like a cross down the middle of his back. After being in the hospital for an hour the whole congregation arrived in the back of the lorry – about 120 people – “all roaring and crying and lifting up my jacket and my bloodstained vest”.
Shortly after he returned home he was approached by the Papal Nuncio of South Africa who informed him the Pope wanted to appoint him a bishop. He refused.
“I said no, I came out her to be a missionary, I’m a Franciscan, I came out to serve the people and do the work of the poor really,” Dr Slattery says.
“So they went off, I gave them other names, but they came back three months later and… they insisted.” He was appointed Bishop of Kokstad.
At the time, 87% of land was reserved for ownership by white people, despite black people making up a vast majority of the population”
Born in Portlaoise, Archbishop Slattery spent most of his childhood in Killenaule, Co. Tipperary – near Thurles and Cashel. He has two brothers and two sisters, one of whom is a Sister of Charity.
Going to school in Franciscan-founded Gormanstown College in Meath helped him learn about the order and their charism, coupled with reading missionary magazines delivered to his house Archbishop Slattery’s vocation became clearer – he wanted to be a priest and work on the missions. This is what he pursued after completing his Leaving Cert in 1962.
He studied in UCG and Rome until eventually he was ordained in 1970 in Rome, he described joining the priesthood as a “wonderful decision, I would make it again”. Archbishop Slattery spent a few months waiting for his visa in Ireland before arriving in South Africa in 1971, where he would spend almost 50 years strengthening the Church by a plethora of means, all in the context of complex politics, severe violence and protests, apartheid and many more challenges.
Archbishop Slattery described the country at the time of his arrival as the “land of apartheid” in which he experienced first-hand the systemic racism black people faced.
Two weeks after his arrival he was asked to do a funeral, so he went to get the coffin and the remains of the deceased. The morgue had two sections, whites and non-whites, so “even in death they were separated”, he recollects.
“You felt terrible about it, because you were working in African parishes and you were always meeting your people in town and when you stop to greet them some of the white people would look at you and things like that,” he says.
“For example if my fellow priest, an African, wanted to go in to get fast food or anything like that, they couldn’t go in.”
In one of the roadhouses which are dotted along the vast country where people would stop to get food, he recollects a story that really brought home the unjust treatment of black people when he was travelling with a fellow priest.
He says: “They would serve me with a plate and they would give him a paper plate, sitting beside me. It was everywhere apartheid. It was absolutely unbelievable.
“As well as that you’d feel terrible, you’d walk in and there’d be a whole line of people in a shop, African people, and you’d walk in at the end of the line of course and the shopkeeper would say ‘yes, can I help you?’ over the heads of all those old African people. It was an awful situation, gosh it was a blood curdling situation.”
Archbishop Slattery says he would endeavour to stay out of a situation in which he would be advantaged because of his colour, but it was difficult because of segregation in almost everything, beaches, transport etc.
“When they began to run out of whites, for example if you went to a cinema, since Africans and coloured people were not allowed into cinemas they had to use these young girls to show you your seat with a torch. They had to reverse to the screen because they were not supposed to look at the screen, it was an unbelievable country,” he says.
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At the time, 87% of land was reserved for ownership by white people, despite black people making up a vast majority of the population.
“So left right and centre you were hit with it. The way you responded to it: first of all you worked really hard, extremely hard above all to provide services for our African people, Church services.”
The vast majority of his work was among black people, he says, but he also met some “fine white people as well”.
“I found fine people among all groups but certainly racism was prevalent in South Africa at that time.”
The first five months he spent after he arrived were in the mountains, in a region called Lesotho, an enclaved country within South Africa. The mission was only accessible by plane. Working in the nearby townships, the then priest would travel by horse and cart to 24 chapels below the mission.
He says: “You’d be away for a week and sleep on the floor of the schoolhouse and in the morning then you’d have baptisms, confession, confirmation, Mass, funerals, blessing tombstones, the whole day with the people in that particular place.
“Then in the afternoon you’d head off to the next place, over the mountains. Fantastic mountains, 9,000 feet above sea level, then you’d go on, same process again, 10-12 hours.”
Sleeping on a cow dung floor in a sleeping bag, he learned to take his tea without milk or sugar. After that he went to work in Johannesburg after learning the local language, Sesotho – one of the 11 official languages in South Africa. Nowadays he speaks all of them.
The policy was to allow in one Catholic for every 15 Protestants, which was the admission that they applied to Catholics coming into the country”
Catholic churches did not segregate people by colour, he says, but because there were black and white areas most people stuck to their local church.
Regarding the Church response to apartheid, Archbishop Slattery says the government terminated the visas of 11 Franciscans because of their work with black communities, and that there would be people listening during church sermons who would report to government officials what was being said.
“I had to wait nine years before I got a permanent visa to be in South Africa, I had to renew it every six months, temporary visa. Whereas other people, the people that they wanted in South Africa, those people would get a visa before they leave their home country,” he says.
“The white government in South Africa said there were two great dangers for the future of South Africa, the black danger and the Roman Catholic danger.
“And in fact the policy of the department of interior was to allow in one Catholic for every 15 Protestants, which was the admission that they applied to Catholics coming into the country.”
This was done in order to maintain the proportions of various churches as they were, according to Dr Slattery. The number of Catholics currently in South Africa number around 9%, between 3-4 million people.
Tragic situation
During his time in South Africa the archbishop also worked with miners who were in a “tragic situation because a lot of them were dying young and I mean once a week you’d nearly be called up to wheel out a wheelbarrow and bury someone”. A meagre sum was sent to their family after their death.
Later becoming a novice master, training parish priests in Kwazulu-Natal, he spent 10 years there.
“I used to visit houses all the time, so I had a tremendous knowledge of people, and individuals and languages and culture and things like that,” he says.
“There you were very conscience again of apartheid, because that area, we had a farm there, but all the other farms were white farms.” They were trying to create white areas and black areas to “consolidate” them.
“Now in Kwazulu-Natal there were 27 spots, they called them black spots were the majority were Africans, and they were trying to move the people out of those spots. We were fighting against that as well and trying to help the people.”
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Continuing his teaching role he became the rector of St John Vianney Seminary in Pretoria for seven years, which he described as “tough”. They had about 80-90 students, black and white people, which the government said was illegal. Archbishop Slattery says they received many letters and threats of closure.
“It was also different interiorly because 75% of the students were African and it was the time of the struggle, Steve Biko and all those years in the 1980s, ANC (Africa National Congress), liberation of Mandela was on the cards but it didn’t happen for years – all that was going on.
“So 75% of your students are totally in favour of that, and then you have 25% of students who are white and they saw the liberation of Mandela as the introduction of communism to South Africa.
“You’d have in the church one student praying for the liberation of Mandela, Lord Hear Us, and then the next student would be praying for the suppression of the Communists and God bless our government in their struggle at the border – they were involved in the struggles in Angola, Namibia and Mozambique. You’re trying to keep those groups together.”
Despite the challenges the seminary managed, and now several of his former students are now bishops. One particular occasion some of the seminarians asked if they could join a protests outside South Africa’s parliament, which had to be discussed. “But I said we have to let them express themselves, so 37 of them put on their cassocks, which they generally didn’t wear, got rosary beads and headed off down the road and arrived in front of the union building when there was an international press conference taking place, and they were on the BBC news that afternoon.
“Giving them outlets like that, that they can show that they’re part of the struggle, that they shared their people’s struggle, in that way you allow them to feel that they’re involved.
“You have to acknowledge who they are. They were right, what they were protesting against was: asking for the release of Mandela, for free and democratic elections, for the abolishment of apartheid, for free education and things like that: that’s what they were looking for.”
It was in 1993 that he was appointed Bishop of Kokstad, after the stabbing incident, which he was embarrassed by because his ordination took place in 1994, and that year the first democratic election took place and Nelson Mandela was elected.
He says: “In other words it was the emergence of a black majority government – I felt I was going into a diocese which was rural, but I felt that it’s the time for black people.” The people were “fantastically receptive” however, he says, “even though it’s a 95% African diocese”.
The present South African government is much more favourable to the Church…”
“Between 1994 and 2003, those first nine years were when AIDS ravaged South Africa. I do know that up to 8% of the population of South Africa are HIV positive. Now it was only after 2003 that the government woke up to the fact, and now has given the ARVs but the people won’t take them and they won’t get tested, many of them, even to this day and they’ve a terrible job,” he says.
Speaking of the Church’s role in the country he says it “did a fantastic service in South Africa as regards schooling, getting people into schools, social services. All the first rural clinics in South Africa were built by the Church, all, the first rural clinics in the whole country”.
The present South African government is much more favourable to the Church, with Archbishop Slattery saying in a meeting in March of this year with President of South Africa Cyril Ramaphosa, the issue of marriage and family was broached.
“He was telling me that last year if you read the birth certificates of all the children born in South Africa, 62% have no father’s name on their birth certificate,” he says.
This is totally hitting at the very meaning of Christianity which is care, blessing, hope”
“It a huge problem then, so marriage and family are very insecure, and that’s all very well you know, living in with your companion or your partner, but ultimately when marriage weakens you know the lives of children weaken as well. Their formation, their security and all that is weakened.”
The Church in South Africa is very vocal regarding their stance on political issues, Archbishop Slattery says, but that you have to look at the local situation and what impact this could have on a country at a particular time.
“I think the Church in Ireland will have to be more forceful, more self-confident and also do what it does well, be close to the people. Maybe over the last number of years it’s shifted a bit – not close enough to the people. Offering the services it can offer, it’s limited now compared to in the past, in the past the Church did everything,” he says.
He says the abuses that have taken place in the Church are “absolutely devastating”. “It’s not extensive as here, it’s not so much child-centred in South Africa, here it was child-centred.”
“This is totally hitting at the very meaning of Christianity which is care, blessing, hope, a healing, I think the Church has to do that, it has to be courageous and imaginative responding to people, helping people to heal, go out there and talk to people even though you will get criticism.”
He adds that he doesn’t know if the Church in Ireland is communicating adequately “our living faith, that Christ is risen from the dead, he is alive”.
“There’s a tremendous enrichment in knowing Jesus Christ and we have to put people in contact with him, give them the confidence of that but that means living a life that’s simple, living a life that’s for the people, of service of the people that teaches and informs. If the priests do that they will hold a minority, a remnant, but the Bible is full of remnants, small groups who have remained faithful over the years.”
Dr Slattery’s resignation as Archbishop of Pretoria was accepted by Pope Francis in April, with Bishop Dabula Mpako taking the reigns – a former student of his. He is currently spending some time in Ireland before he returns to South Africa.