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   XPost: soc.culture.south-africa, soc.history   
   From: hayesstw@telkomsa.net   
      
   Race and Catholicism in South Africa   
      
       ANTHONY EGAN South Africa 30 Oct 2017 01:36 (South Africa)   
      
   Framed by the important 1957 Statement on Apartheid of the Southern   
   African Catholic Bishops Conference, this article examines race and   
   racism in the church. Having teased out the meaning of race and   
   racism, I document the struggle of the Catholic church to deal with   
   conscious and unconscious racism in its 19th and 20th Century history.   
   By ANTHONY EGAN.   
      
   The 1957 Statement on Apartheid of the then 10-year-old Southern   
   African Catholic Bishops Conference (SACBC) has been hailed – by   
   Catholic and non-Catholic scholars alike – as the first statement by   
   any church institution in South Africa to theologically condemn racism   
   and apartheid. The emphasis on theological is important: it dived into   
   Christian tradition for its justification and applied theology to the   
   political crises of South Africa in the 1950s. It did not simply   
   condemn an action of the state but the ideological foundations of   
   apartheid itself.   
      
   On apartheid:   
      
   “White supremacy is an absolute. It overrides justice. It transcends   
   the teaching of Christ. It is a purpose dwarfing every other purpose,   
   an end justifying any means… [The logic of separate development in the   
   name of people pursuing their own distinctive social and cultural   
   evolution] sounds plausible as long as we overlook an important   
   qualification, namely, that separate development is subordinate to   
   white supremacy. The white man [sic] makes himself the agent of God’s   
   will and the interpreter of His providence in assigning the range and   
   determining the bounds of non-white development.”   
      
   This, the SACBC concludes, is blasphemy because there is “in each   
   human person, a dignity inseparably connected with his quality of   
   rational and free being”. The fundamental insight distilled from   
   centuries of thought is that humanity as a species, not just Christian   
   humanity or Catholic humanity but all humanity, is imago Dei:   
   literally the image and likeness of God. To discriminate on the   
   grounds of race is to deny this inherent imago Dei. Thus apartheid is   
   a fundamental evil, an intrinsic evil.   
      
   However flawed parts of it are (as we shall see below), this   
   proclamation of the SACBC set the church as institution firmly in   
   opposition to apartheid. It was not (as a future article in this   
   series will show) the first expression of official opposition, but it   
   was for its time the strongest and a pointer to what would be a   
   consistent and systematic challenge to the state until 1994.   
      
   Having said that, I must warn readers in advance. This essay will   
   present a less than pretty picture of the Catholic church and race in   
   South Africa. Despite the clear and courageous 1957 statement and   
   similar texts before and after it by the SACBC, there existed – and   
   arguably still exists – a mindset that lends itself unconsciously to   
   racism in different forms in the South African church. I have already   
   alluded to the ways in which the church was both pragmatically and   
   practically wedded to the colonial system of 19th and 20th Century   
   South Africa. Despite the church’s theological objections to   
   segregation, apartheid and racism, it did not escape from the culture   
   in which it grew and flourished. Like other European-originated   
   churches it was, to coin a phrase of theologian Charles   
   Villa-Vicencio, “trapped in apartheid”. More controversially, I shall   
   suggest that part of this can be ascribed to the church’s own theology   
   and practice, a theology and practice with which it continues to   
   struggle.   
      
   Defining racism in church and society   
      
   Defining racism briefly (a necessity in an already long article) is a   
   daunting task. Sociologist David Wellman, writing from a North   
   American context, sums it up as:   
      
   “... not simply about prejudice… Racism can mean culturally sanctioned   
   beliefs which, regardless of the intentions involved, defend the   
   advantages whites have because of the subordinated positions of racial   
   minorities [or majorities in colonial societies like South Africa, I   
   must add]… Thus racism is analysed as culturally acceptable beliefs   
   that defend social advantages that are based on race… a defence of   
   racial privilege.”   
      
   To this I would add James Blaut’s theory of diffusionism: that   
   Europeans had (possibly still have) the assumption that they are the   
   centre of history and culture and that this culture should be spread   
   (diffused) to the non-European Other. “Europe” (including North   
   America) is normative, the template against which other cultures are   
   judged – and usually found wanting.   
      
   The advantage of this definition is that it includes not simply   
   prejudice (sometimes based on 19th and 20th centuries racial   
   pseudoscience) but also power, notably economic power. “Europe” (which   
   is shorthand for the Global North) held – and arguably still holds –   
   economic, political and cultural power throughout the period. The   
   underlying values (including Christianity, liberalism and Marxism)   
   that judge, defend or critique the colonial project are,   
   paradoxically, part of the values of “Europe” itself.   
      
   Steve Biko observed in 1972 that though Christianity had gone through   
   cultural adaptations in its early history, by the time it got to South   
   Africa “it was made to look fairly rigid”. It helped define the norms   
   of the colonial order and expected indigenous people to “cast away   
   their indigenous clothing, their customs, their beliefs which were all   
   described as being pagan and barbaric”. Knowingly or not it served the   
   colonial project, even when it critiqued its excesses. Though not   
   always overtly racist in practice, its assumptions – built into the   
   very fibre of its theology, even dare I say the positive theology of   
   the 1957 Statement – by privileging the European and “Othering” the   
   African made it an ambiguous discourse that could both support and   
   critique a racist society.   
      
   Institutional ambiguity and institutional ‘racism’   
      
   For most of its history in South Africa, and to some degree still, the   
   Catholic church’s understanding of race in its own institutions is   
   formed by this ambiguity. It accounts for its complex relationship   
   with racism. The racism of a colonial, then segregated, then apartheid   
   state – and arguably that of living in the present day “post colony”   
   (to use Mbembe’s intentionally ambiguous term) was part of the social   
      
   [continued in next message]   
      
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