Cardinal Owen McCann, Angola and Mozambique: Greater Ireland Meets Greater Portugal

Abstract

Cardinal Owen McCann, Angola and Mozambique:Greater Ireland Meets Greater Portugal Alexandra Maclennan (bio) The first Mass in Southern Africa was celebrated by the Portuguese at Algoa Bay near Port Elizabeth, shortly after they arrived with Bartholomeu Dias in 1487. That there was a Catholic faith for the Dutch settlers to outlaw when they arrived in the Cape Peninsula in 1652 is indicative of its survival long after the Portuguese had left at the turn of the sixteenth century, and that in spite of the lack of continuity of pastoral presence and access to the sacraments. And again, in the nineteenth century, when the Irish but Lisbon-educated Dominican Patrick Griffith was sent to the Cape Colony to become the first Irish vicar apostolic in Southern Africa in 1838, and he set out to travel the length and breadth of the territory, and he found scattered Catholic families across the territory. More Irish religious (Dominicans and Marist Brothers) were brought in to staff the new Eastern Vicariate (Port Elizabeth, Grahamstown), and thus began a long succession of Irish bishops in South Africa that lasted well into the twentieth century. In the history of South African Catholicism, Owen McCann is remembered as the first archbishop of Cape Town, when the hierarchy was established in 1951, and especially as the first South African cardinal. He was second-generation Irish, being born in Cape Town in 1907 to an Irish father and Australian mother. McCann is less well known than the other giant of Greater Irish South African Catholicism, Archbishop of Durban Denis Hurley, because he was less vocal in his activism, he was not seen in the streets, and was more cautious and conciliatory with the apartheid governments – with good reason and in the hope of securing goodwill and advances in justice. However, at a spiritual, pastoral, and political level, his engagement with Portugal and Greater Portugal, and in particular here with Angola and Mozambique, gives new meaning to his stance and sheds light on his leadership through superimposed situations of racial segregation in South Africa and destabilising military interference in neighbouring countries. [End Page 383] Owen McCann and the 'Portuguese experiment' During World War Two, Fr Owen McCann was secretary to Bishop Francis Hennemann, Vicar Apostolic of Cape Town. His ministry involved saying Mass for the Italian prisoners of war (POW) working in farms across the Cape Province. He conveyed messages between families in South Africa and soldiers in Europe, and he also edited the Southern Cross, South Africa's weekly Catholic newspaper, and the official voice of the Catholic Church in the country. In his editorials, he wrote about his concerns and hopes for postwar South Africa. On 22 December 1943, his editorial was titled 'Salazar of Portugal'. In it, he observes with admiration that in the 1920s a society for the study of the encyclicals of Leo XIII, called the Academic Centre for Christian Democracy, was formed at the University of Coimbra, and that one of its most active members was a professor of economics and former seminarian called Antonio de Oliveira Salazar. 'What is Salazar's basis of government?', asks McCann. 'It is the Papal encyclicals without reservation. He bases all his social action on them and will not sacrifice them to considerations of expediency, political or otherwise. He is a Christian, not in the vague sense so common and popular today, but completely, in an uncompromising way. Salazar's Portugal is a state that is being built up on Christian principles. It solemnly asserts the supremacy of the law of God above all human law and institutions, and insists that the object and aim of organised society is the object and aim for which God has created man. It sees in man not an isolated individual with a vote, but a person, a personality with a soul to save, and with spiritual aspirations that require satisfaction just as much as economic needs.' McCann watched with fascination the official commitment in Portugal to the corporative organisation of society purportedly in application of Catholic social doctrine. He ends by saying, 'South Africa has many ties with Portugal, historical and economic. South Africa would do well to study this Portuguese...