Who was Denis Hurley

A Transformative Leader

Denis Eugene Hurley was undoubtedly the most significant Catholic leader in South Africa during the twentieth century. Appointed bishop one year before the National Party formed a government in 1948, he retired as archbishop in 1992, two years before the Nationalists ceased to be the ruling party, when the country’s first democratically elected government came to power. Hurley had a profound effect upon the Church’s struggle against apartheid and played a major role in the process of renewing the Catholic Church through the Second Vatican Council (1962-1965).

Tall and impressive, he was an eloquent speaker, years ahead of his time not only in his views on South Africa’s racial problems, but also on the reforms needed in the Catholic Church. His outspoken views on taboo subjects such as birth control, married priests and the ordination of women are thought to have prevented his being chosen as a cardinal, though many thought him eminently qualified.

Early Life and Formation

As a young matriculant in the early 1930s, Hurley shared the typical racial prejudices of white people of the day. He was a solid supporter of the British Empire and thought Mahatma Gandhi was spoiling things by his opposition to British rule in India. Gradually his attitudes changed as he opened himself to new ideas and admitted the inadequacies of his earlier thinking. He was always a keen learner, even in old age.

While studying for the priesthood in Rome, he was strongly attracted to the Church’s social teaching, though initially only in an academic and cerebral way. The official Church was nervous of anything that smacked of activism or revolution; Hurley seemed to reflect that nervousness. In his first assignment as a curate at Durban’s Emmanuel Cathedral in the early 1940s, immediately after his priestly studies and return to South Africa, he was a cautious young man. Though excited by attending a meeting about the establishment of black trade unions, he accepted the advice of older priests that this was not the sort of thing in which a priest should involve himself.

A few years later, however, as superior of St Joseph’s Scholasticate, he played an active role in the Pietermaritzburg Parliamentary Debating Society and enjoyed discussions with its wide range of members. His fellow staff members at St Joseph’s were young South African priests becoming concerned about the country’s racial policy. Hurley enjoyed discussions with them about the changes that would have to take place in South Africa; he introduced a course on social justice into the scholasticate curriculum so that priests in training would also confront these questions. But, by his own admission, the discussion and the training were still only theoretical. The staff were all white and, with one exception, so were the students, and there was little, if any, exposure to educated black opinion.

Rise to Leadership

Appointed a bishop at the extraordinarily young age of 31, he continued the discussions he began at St Joseph’s by organising a three-day conference for all the priests of the Natal Vicariate in 1948. This was the year the National Party came to power and began to implement hard-line racial segregation. The conference discussed these issues, though still in a remote and theoretical way.

When Hurley was appointed archbishop in 1951and president of the Bishops’ Conference in June 1952 (a position he held until early 1961), he persuaded the bishops to make their first-ever joint statement on human rights and race relations, despite the strong opposition of the papal representative, Archbishop Martin Lucas, and the latter’s confidential plea to him not to publicly criticise the government. The 1952 statement was important because it broke a long-standing episcopal silence on key racial issues, yet Hurley later acknowledged that it was “horribly patronising” towards black people. In that statement, and for many years after, the bishops favoured the idea of a qualified franchise. Such limited access to voting rights was not acceptable in progressive black circles.

In their desire for gradual evolution, the Catholic bishops were not in sympathy with the African National Congress (ANC), which wanted to force the pace of change through civil disobedience to apartheid legislation. The bishops regarded this campaign and its ANC sponsors, as Marxist and Communist-inspired. The Catholic Church was still cut off from ecumenical contacts, another potential source of more enlightened ideas. Other churches had their synods and assemblies, where black clergy and laity made known their views about the South African situation. There were no equivalent opportunities for Catholics.

Challenging Apartheid

The Catholic bishops’ eyes began to be opened by the Bantu Education Act of 1953, which directly threatened the mission schools – the Church’s main instrument of evangelisation. In a test of strength with the formidable Dr Hendrik Verwoerd, Minister of Bantu Education, Hurley and his colleagues decided not to hand over their schools to government, but to embark on an ambitious fundraising drive that would finance the schools for at least a few years after the withdrawal of government subsidies. Hurley led the Church through these difficult years, his confidence increased not only by high office but by the successful Marian Congress in South Africa. Its large outdoor rallies, services and processions were a dramatic change for a Church that had previously kept a low profile to avoid stirring up anxiety about the Roomse gevaar (‘Roman danger’).

In the 1950s and early 1960s Hurley remained, however, under the influence of the moderate approach of the South African Institute of Race Relations (SAIRR). This assumed that whites would act more justly towards blacks if they had the facts at their disposal. Little thought was apparently given to how blacks could achieve their own liberation.

Vatican II and Church Reform

The Second Vatican Council (1962 – 1965) was a major landmark in Hurley’s life. He was a significant participant from the beginning, having been chosen by Pope John XXIII as one of the 100-member Central Preparatory Commission that paved the way for this assembly of the world’s 2,500 Catholic bishops, the first in nearly a hundred years. Hurley revelled in the debates and discussions, but above all in the open and positive atmosphere, in which leading theologians updated the bishops through informal lectures and seminars. Despite coming from a remote and little-known diocese, Hurley came to be regarded as one of a small group who were responsible for the success of the Council. Its major documents gave new impetus to his views on Church reform and social justice, making him both a father and a son of Vatican II.

Hurley devoted the immediate post-Vatican II years to implementing the Council decrees in his own diocese, and in South Africa generally. Through the International Commission on English in the Liturgy (ICEL), the Interterritorial Meeting of Bishops in Southern Africa (IMBISA which linked all the Catholic bishops of eight Southern African countries), and the worldwide Synod of Bishops, he promoted the Council’s emphases on collegiality, lay participation, liturgy, catechetics, ecumenism and justice and peace.

Justice and Social Action

As a result of the Council, Hurley became more determined than ever in his opposition to apartheid, despite the South African government’s attempts to market their policy as an acceptable form of partition. There were in fact no black people in South Africa, they claimed: instead all blacks were citizens of one or other homeland, the only places where they would have political rights. Behind this sleight of hand was the stark reality: the majority of black people had never lived in the homelands, nor had any desire to do so. They would have starved were it not for their employment in South Africa’s urban areas. Moreover, their labour was key to the South African economy.