Easter. The holiest of Christian holidays. In keeping with tradition, the faithful gathered for the midnight Easter Vigil at a Soweto church. There were women in blue-and-white robes, some in sangoma-like sarongs daubed red and white with faces of lions. A faith healer clad in white takes to the pulpit and speaks about the message she had from God and the ancestors to pass on to the priest.
During her homily, the Bible-punching faithful punctuate every sentence they deem profound with cries of “Amen-Alleluia”. They beat drums and other percussion instruments, singing traditional and non-denominational choruses.
Some fall into trances and have to be taken outside the packed church, where they can get some fresh air.
All of this would have been run of the mill in any township or black rural church, but is remarkable because it takes place in the mainstream Catholic church, St Angela’s in Dobsonville, Soweto. The songs are a far cry from the hymns inspired by the Gregorian chants of the Benedictine monks.
Things are changing at this church and other Catholic parishes. A hierarchy of worship is being challenged as these congregants return to their African roots, eschewing the connection to Rome and the conduct of service in Latin, previously elements they held close to their hearts.
It is around Easter that Christianity sets itself apart from other religions and when the three tenets of Catholicism’s Apostle’s Creed take form. It is also the time when the changes are particularly evident.
“He suffered under Pontius Pilate; was crucified, dead and buried; He descended into hell; On the third day he rose again from the dead; He ascended into heaven, and sits at the right hand of God the Father Almighty,” reads the creed that Catholics believe was handed down from Jesus’s original disciples to the current faithful.
But the clapping and beating of drums that now mark Easter services are a symbol of a trend towards a distinctively African Catholicism.
At St Angela’s the seeds of such deviancy were sown in the mid-1980s when the youth were influenced as much by the defiant spirits of Sister Bernard Ncube, Father S’mangaliso Mkhatshwa, the Black Consciousness Movement, and the re-emerging of the pan-Africanist movement as they were by the Barorisi ba Morena-type choirs.
Barorisi were the flag-bearers of the gospel music genre that did not follow notations and music scores. All songs were played to hand-clapping and slight movement of feet to the left and to the right while the baritone section hummed a “bo-bo-bom” sound for much of the song.
These music groups represented an alternative to the world-touring outfits such as Imilonji kaNtu and the various “teachers choirs”, whose style was influenced by a Western brand of choral music. Radio stations were awash with the Barorisis and so the Catholic youth found an exclusively hymn book-based mass incongruous with the gospel music taste they were continuously acquiring.
It was therefore inevitable that the youngsters would clash with traditionalists, who disapproved of the “sacrilegious” descent to Protestant traditions by clapping at Holy Mass.
Traditionalists were soon termed the Vatican One, named after the church conference held in the 15th Century, which laid down the basic tenets of faith such as that mass would be celebrated only in Latin and that only ordained clergy would be responsible for the liturgy. Vatican One policies lasted about 400 years before they were replaced by the Vatican Two council held between 1962 and 1965. The conference ushered in a new, some would say enlightened, era on broad Church policy, such as doing away with Latin as the language for mass and the liturgy.
“I want to throw open the windows of the Church so that we can see out and the people can see in,” Pope John XXIII said at the conference in 1962 to 1965.
Nobody is saying it, but with the popularity of radio evangelists such as Lesedi FM’s Thuso Motaung, priests have also started delivering homilies that speak to the reality of urban black life: unemployment, Aids, frail family structures and — most heretical for the Vatican One lobby — witchcraft.
With the ordination of Father Buti Tlhagale as the first black Archbishop of the Diocese of Johannesburg, the process of reminding worshippers that although the name of the Church is prefixed with the word “Roman”, the term “Catholic” (meaning “universal”), is being completed.
Tlhagale champions the Church’s inculturation movement to incorporate animist and traditional forms of worship into mainstream Catholicism.
It means that the Church now speaks in a language its members understand instinctively.
Those who looked at the concept of amadlozi/badimo (ancestors) with disdain are now converting to accept that the saints they mention when they utter the Apostle’s Creed’s “I believe in the Holy Catholic Church; the communion of saints” are themselves ancestors of the Church and that their intercession responsibilities are the same.
But as the orthodox hymn goes, all over the world the spirit is moving. And in the church that spirit is one of renewal and redefinition. The statues and art works still portray a European-looking Jesus and his disciples. The faithful still genuflect before the sanctuary where the Eucharist resides. At Easter, the priest and altar servers still prostrate themselves. But it is not the same Church it used to be — Catholic now really means universal as was meant in the beginning.