Chris Chatteris looks at the life of a rare, genuinely big man who could admit when he erred
Guardian of the Light: Denis Hurley Renewing the Church, Opposing Apartheid by Paddy Kearney (UKZN Press and The Continuum International Publishing Group)
I was fortunate enough to be in Durban in 1985 when Alan Paton dubbed Denis Hurley “guardian of the light” in an address at Hurley’s 70th birthday celebration.
Having mentioned Hurley’s lighthouse-keeper father, Paton said that his son was a “guardian of the light that warns sailors of dangers and guides them away from destruction”, adding that: “Our Archbishop has been doing this work of warning and guiding for the greater part of his life.”
Then Paton sonorously declaimed: “And he has done it with great faithfulness!”
Paddy Kearney throws a clear, illuminating beam on the life and person of Hurley the faithful guardian, first taking us back to Hurley’s Irish Catholic forebears who were naturally on the side of the underdog after centuries of English colonisation. Then, in a chronological biography, structured as a series of minor and major dramas, he explains how family background, historical circumstances, religious formation and the man’s core of character and talent contributed to what he became.
Hurley was born in 1915 in Cape Town of a pious and resourceful mother and a dutiful, disciplined father who brooked no disrespect towards anyone. These were solid family foundations for his religious faith and political activism. He became an Oblate missionary, the youngest archbishop in the world, and a prophet. He died a happy death in Durban in 2004.
Guardian of the Light is a work of pietas, but Hurley himself would have been embarrassed by an uncritical reckoning. So Kearney does not spare us the shock of Hurley’s juvenile racial attitudes, but Hurley admitted that he was also a product of white South Africa. At one time he believed in a qualified franchise for blacks. But his uncompromising intellectual honesty and a growing prophetic urgency always moved him on. He was the rare, genuinely big man who could admit that he has erred.
Kearney deftly keys the non-specialist reader into the background history of South Africa’s turbulent transition and the Catholic Church’s astonishing Vatican II transformation. Hurley strode these twin stages and was a magisterial actor upon them. Kearney controls an impressive mass of material — a veritable who’s who of the struggle and the Catholic Church — with a steady hand, marshalling it into a memorable and perhaps definitive portrait. AMehlowemamba (“mamba eyes”) as the Zulu people called Hurley for his sharp, intelligent look, comes to life on these engaging pages. Those who knew him will recognise him there immediately and find their understanding of his character deepened.
Many “Hurley stories” are well known. When he and two other Catholic bishops had their patriotic credentials questioned by Verwoerd, Hurley reminded the minister that he, Verwoerd, was the only man in the room born outside South Africa. Others may be unfamiliar, but all are telling — upholding the right of a young Afrikaner at a school debate in Natal to speak in his mother tongue or Donald Woods declaring that if it had not been for Hurley he would have quit the Catholic Church.
“When you’re in the hurly-burly, it’s good to have the burly Hurley,” quipped a young lawyer named Chris Nicholson. He was right. I remember how reassuring Hurley’s presence was in my parish of Elandskop during a tense standoff between Inkatha and the United Democratic Front in 1989.
A serious leitmotif in Kearney’s work is that prophecy has its price. Bruising personal attacks came from the apartheid regime, particularly when he touched sacred institutions such as conscription. For the Catholic Church as a whole an enormous price of dissent was the eventual loss of its mission schools, the traditional engine of Catholic evangelisation.
Ironically, his church wounded Hurley deeply, but prophets are also called to criticise their own. White Catholics and clergy opposed him. He struggled with the Church’s teaching on clerical celibacy, woman’s ordination and contraception. Liturgical language occasioned a particularly sad episode. Under his guidance the International Commission for English in the Liturgy (ICEL) — and perhaps the English language itself — were becoming too powerful for some conservative Catholic Latinists, even though — perhaps because! — ICEL exercised the soft, collaborative power of collegiality. ICEL and Hurley had to go; the prophet was pilloried and his monument to collegiality vandalised.
Hence this book is also an act of hope in “keeping the dream alive” at a time when dreams are fading and unfashionable. The rainbow nation has been declared dead and is pragmatised by politics as usual. Centralising, bureaucratic forces have eroded the collegial vision of Vatican II. Since the exhilarating days of 1963 and Pope John XXIII, and 1994 and Nelson Mandela, the reform arrestors — the career apparatchiks always found in the machinery of church and state — have been at work. Denis Hurley endured all this with great dignity and the optimism of his Jesuit hero Teilhard de Chardin.
Kearney’s portrait depicts a gentleman-prophet, not an abrasive Baptist. Though shy and not naturally endowed with the common touch, Hurley was immensely charming, magnanimous with enemies (who often respected him) and ever ready to put human foibles into humorous perspective.
But, despite these sweeter traits, he was no less of a courageous champion of the light of truth. And he sought and found this truth and courage in unremitting intellectual endeavour and a deep, prayerful spirituality. He was a guardian of the light of truth because he was also an unceasing seeker of it.