“Lead the people of God to a genuine worship and encounter with the true God”.

Episcopal Ordination of Mgr Joseph Kizito
Aliwal North, 15 February 2020
Homily by Bishop Sithembele Sipuka, Bishop of Mthatha and SACBC President. 15th February 2020.

Mgr Kizito, today as you get ordained one theme that suggests itself from today’s readings is worship, which is very close to the life of a bishop, because leading people in worship is one of the major duties of a bishop, and inspired by today’s readings I wish to share on this theme of worship. From the first reading we heard about King Jeroboam telling the people “You have been going up to Jerusalem long enough, here are your gods Israel”. Then he made two golden calves and the people stopped worshipping God and worshipped these calves as the gods who brought them out of Egypt. The second verse of today’s psalm reports this abomination when it states that “they fashioned a calf at Horeb and worshipped an image of metal, exchanging the God who was their glory for the image of a bull that eats grass.

Dear Mgr Kizito, having taken the commitment yesterday to teach, sanctify and govern the people of God and to guard against erroneous ways of worshiping in Aliwal North Diocese we are sure that you will not be setting up golden calves in Aliwal North and seduce people to worship them as Jeroboam did in Northern Israel.

But you can be sure that you will find existing erroneous ways of worship, which as a bishop you will have to correct. First of all you will find that the worship of God is weak, and in some situations nonexistent because the worship of God today competes with the worship of selling and buying.

People are not satisfied to buy and sell from Monday to Saturday morning, they also want to do the buying and selling on Sundays as well, so that Sundays in terms of business are just like any day. Many people, even though they would deny it, are gradually believing that their worth lies in what they eat and in things that they have. It is funny how human beings have always been attracted by metallic things. We like shiny products. If the Israelites were fascinated by the metallic golden calf, today we are also fascinated by metallic things, cars, cell phones, computers, tablets, glittering houses, and we measure our worth with these things, and we do our best to obtain the latest of them and in abundance. Perhaps what could redeem us is that some of us pray from these shiny products.

And yet, true to the nature of a golden calf, these things have no life. The more we have of them the more we want of them and they leave us empty, contrary to the hope that we would be fulfilled in having an abundance of them. And so every day of the week including Sunday, we buy and sell. “I buy, therefore I am” seems to be the defining principle of our identity. And so the command to keep the Sabbath day holy has been largely ignored. In this context, you and the Catholics that you will be leading in this diocese, have to find ways of remaining true to this commandment of keeping the Sabbath Holy for the worship of God.

You will notice other practices that diminish the worship of God on Sunday like learners who have to go school on Sundays, and young people who choose to have soccer competition games on Sundays instead of going to Church. You will find in fact that sport has dethroned God. People are more in stadiums on Sundays and spending many hours in front of DSTV Supersport flipping between channels for the latest game than being with God. And so you will find yourself having to go back to this basic commandment of reminding the people entrusted to you today to keep the Sabbath Holy.

You will also find a syncretism or a confused merging of traditions of worship from all the other ecclesial communities that exist within Aliwal North. The painful truth about Christianity is that we are a divided religion. While it is true that there is a lot that is common among Christian denominations, and there is a lot on which we can co-operate, yet there is also still a lot where we differ, and with respect and love we must work out these differences until we become one as Jesus desired us to be one. And until we have worked out these differences, we have to live with this painful reality of being different.

Catholics are not Lutherans, Anglicans are not Methodist, Presbyterians are not Zionist, and so on. Yet sometimes during worship in the Catholic Church you wonder if you are in the Catholic Church or in any of the other ecclesial communities that I have mentioned. While we can learn a lot from other ecclesial communities, and they from the Catholic Church in matters related to worship and doctrine, we each have a particular identity, and the reason why you took an oath yesterday is to ensure that this identity which is Catholic is retained, otherwise there remains nothing Catholic if we merge in a confused and syncretic manner the traditions of worship.

Modifications of worship and doctrine between the Catholic Church and other ecclesial communities, if they are to be meaningful, must be based on well thought out engagements, as is the case with the doctrine of justification for example, between the Lutheran and Catholics and not on emotional and superficial grounds.

I have heard it being said by well-educated Catholics that the Anglican and Catholic Church are the same. The Catholic and the Anglican Church get on very well together, and in areas of commonality they work very well together, but they are not the same. This painful reality of not being the same manifests in our inability to share the Eucharist. Catholics do not receive communion in the Anglican Church, and vice versa. We have not reached this level of communion, and we must not pretend that we have reached it for the sake of being nice to each other, but we must work hard towards it so that one day we can fully share the Eucharist and know what we are doing when receiving communion from each other. Bishop Kizito this is a matter of worship that as bishop you will need to attend to.

Another matter of worship Bishop Kizito that you will need to attend to is the balance between an intellectual and sentimental approach to worship. Many people leave the Catholic Church because it is cold, individualistic, mechanistic, and intellectual and does not respond to the human and spiritual needs of its members. As a Catholic Church we have a lot to learn from other ecclesial communities in terms of creating a sense of communion and belonging and in terms of making the faith respond to the concerns and existential needs of sickness and material poverty of our people.

Yet on the other hand, it would be careless and irresponsible of us to let go of the strength of our liturgy and doctrine that puts emphasis on the cross and sacrifice.

While we need to learn from other ecclesial communities that God wants us to be happy, to be successful and to be well, we need to share with them also from our Catholic tradition our appreciation of Jesus’ call to enter by the narrow gate, to take up our cross and follow Jesus daily. As the coming Lenten period reminds us and that resurrection is preceded by the passion, that man does not live on bread alone and that happiness on this earth does not constitute the fullness of our happiness because our complete happiness lies in the future with God for which we must prepare ourselves. And so the worship of wealth and money leads to doom because the more you get of it, the more you realize how poor you are.

The other point of consideration about worship is to consider its true nature, namely that it is an act directed to God and not to ourselves. It is good to feel happy when we worship God and to dance as David did, but we must guard against making worship or the liturgy an opportunity to entertain ourselves. Often one hears a comment from people when they come from Church, “it was nice”, but the question is “was it worship?” After worship, the question is, “have I worshiped God, am I transformed by the worship, am I more detached from my sins through worship, am I more eager in my missionary work because of worship or have I focused more on the consideration is that was nice?” Does worship minimize or eliminate my sin of pride, envy, meanness, indifference, injustice and anything else that blinds me from the divine truth and mercy that Christ calls us to have? There is an expression in Xhosa, which goes, “ukhohlakele ngathi akathandazi”, which means, he prays but he is cruel.

Again here, the temptation of uncritical imitation of other ecclesial ways of worshipping can make us lose our own understanding of worship as Catholics. And so your task as bishop, Mgr Kizito, is to give guidance about the Catholic understanding of worship, which includes dignity, silence, proper spiritual preparation, appropriate postures and gestures, fitting signs and symbols, conversion, and of course joyful songs occasionally as well.

Finally, the other aspect about worship is to conduct it in a culturally meaningfully way without making it a cultural entertainment gathering, where the end result will be only that “it was nice”. When we were still with our predecessors, Bishops Lenhof, Lobinger, Oswald, Brook, and Napier we often met as the Xhosa regional pastoral conference to consider how to make liturgy or worship culturally meaningful without losing its universal Catholic character.

In our time, and here as chairperson of the Xhosa Regional Conference, I have to say (mea culpa), we have stopped that and we wonder why people are leaving the Catholic Church. The most we do is to leave it to the creativity of individual priests who end up doing their own thing, which confuses the people. Bishop Joe, as a new and young bishop you must get us back to the task of relating worship to culture in a well thought out way instead of us just copying what other ecclesial communities are doing.

In the light of today’s readings, which were not specially chosen but taken from the given readings of today, maybe the first things you will want to do in your diocese is to set up a liturgy commission so that unlike Jeroboam you can lead your people to true worship of God, because as you may recall the maxim Lex Orandi, Lex Credendi, Lex Vivendi. (As we Worship, So we Believe, So we Live).

I do not want to frighten you, but today’s first reading finishes by saying that because Jeroboam conducted himself in such a careless way about worship, this caused the ruin of his house and extinction from face of the earth. It is not our wish that your episcopacy here should be ruined and collapse. And so as you lead the people being entrusted to you today as their bishop, may worship in this diocese be genuine and lead to an encounter with the true God and not an encounter with God made in our own image.

Homily by Bishop Sithembele Sipuka, Bishop of Mthatha and SACBC President. 15th February 2020.

Attached please see the first edition of the Archdiocese of Cape Town’s Justice + Peace Newsletter

Attached please find this booklet from the Southern African Catholic Bishops’ Conference titled Choose Life Lenten Reflections 2020, which are Lenten reflections and prayers on non-violence. They have been prepared to reflect South African situations and the experience of many in the country. They are available from the Chancery @ R10 each. Contact 021 462 2417 – Coral or Simone.

Attached please find this interesting newsletter from the Pontifical Society of the Holy Childhood in Rome

HOT OFF THE PRESS: A new Pastoral Plan for Southern Africa; Catholic Bishops meet with President Ramaphosa; Archbishop establishes CARITAS CAPE TOWN; Meet our Seminarians; Climate Change awareness raising; CWD Update & Buckets of Love 2019; Men Making a Difference; Peace in our Schools.

The Catholic Parliamentary Liaison Office (CPLO) has released its reading of President Cyril Ramaphosa’s 2020 State of the Nation Address (SONA) on 13 February. The CPLO describes the address as a “sombre note” about South Africa’s “dire” public finances. It highlights Ramaphosa’s recognition that consensus by means of social compacts “is a means of achieving progress, but expressed disappointment that failure to address corruption and tackle “the haunting spectre of xenophobia” was an “opportunity lost.”

After the now to be expected political antics of the third largest party resulted in a 90-minute delay in proceedings and a 10-minute suspension of the business of the House, President Ramaphosa was at last able to deliver a much-anticipated State of the Nation speech. It was long, about 7500 words, it took about 50 minutes to deliver, and was often quite heavy on detail.

The President delivered this SONA against the background of widely reported surveys which showed that only 28% of South Africans had confidence in the direction the country was moving in, while the surveys also showed that the he himself enjoyed a high degree of personal support at 61%. The level of national confidence was 10 percentage points less than in May 2019; hence there was an expectation that the President would leverage his personal support levels in order to push back against the dropping levels of confidence in the country’s future.

But he sounded a sombre note, referring to the dire state of our public finances, minimal economic growth for over a decade, power insecurity and its consequences, and – several times – state capture and corruption. Even the other aspects of our reality, the numbers of children in school, the demographics of the improved matric results, and the Springbok World Cup victory, came across as a respectful reminder rather than an excuse to underplay the ‘stark reality.’

Minister Ebrahim Patel commented afterwards that while the previous SONA was about putting down foundations, this one was about building on them. The President’s preferred theory of change, that of creating bridgeheads of consensus as a means of achieving progress, was very much in evidence: “Achieving consensus and building social compacts is not a demonstration of weakness. It is the very essence of who we are.” He framed several of the successes of recent times in this language, from the recovery of broken municipalities to the putative social compact on electricity. In one of two moments of cross-party consensus, the President’s affirmation of municipalities’ right to tap into non-Eskom electricity, and the permission for various groups to generate limited amounts of electricity, was warmly welcomed across the benches. The other agreement across parties was the anger they all felt at the behaviour of the EFF, and their shared commitment to have this behaviour referred to the powers and privileges committee.

A close reading of the speech suggests that the President sought to offer some confidence through a commitment to strengthening safety. There were references to gender-based violence, to tightening bail conditions, to stricter sentencing and to amendments to the Domestic Violence Act and the Sexual Offences Act to better protect victims. He also spoke about an increased intake of people joining the police force, deployment of officers to protect tourists, and stronger anti-gang unitsin three provinces. The safety motif also found its way, expressed differently, into making the environment for investment and business more conducive. Everything from turnabout times for water use licenses, to easier registration, to meeting investment targets, spoke to the idea of safer business environments. There is however a long road ahead.

As was expected, Eskom, SAA, and the other SOEs came in for scrutiny. On Eskom, the President spoke of divisionalising the structure (the language favoured by the new CEO). He confirmed that load-shedding will remain part of the immediate future. Some commentators have read into the speech the first moves towards privatization. The announcement of the creation of a national bank and a sovereign wealth fund came as a bit of a surprise, not least because such creations need good seed funding, and it is difficult to see how this could happen in the present economic climate. Both have been part of the ANC’s policy. On the other hand there was no mention of the nationalization of the Reserve Bank, which has also of late featured in the ANC policy. Both the expropriation of land legislation and the NHI were progressing through Parliament after an extensive listening process. Sadly, the speech was short on hope or even recognition of the dire situation of migrants, refugees and asylum seekers, and the haunting spectre of xenophobia.

As he has done before, the President was able to tick off some areas of progress on previous promises: the new science and innovation university in Ekhuruleni; the long-awaited dam on the Umzimvubu river; the new high-tech city near Lanseria, etc. Some small measure of confidence is ignited when progress can be noted. If the last SONA was big on dreams but short on specifics and low on progress reports, this SONA returned to the tradition of reporting back to the country. The focus on youth and the commitment to skilling young people struck an important note. The President was thick on detail in this regard: a new college, five new prototype sites to support young people, short courses to skill them for jobs and job readiness, will all offer some hope. We will need to wait for the Budget Speech in just under two weeks to get answers about how these initiatives are to be funded.

Many had hoped for a sign in this year’s SONA that the country was moving closer to a point where we might see action against those responsible for corruption, state capture and the theft of public money. While most people agree that one cannot push the pace of the commissions of enquiry, or take cases to court that are ill prepared, and while we cannot succumb to populist type voices baying for revenge, nonetheless the country needs a sign that the wheels of justice are indeed turning. It was interesting to note that, the day before the SONA, a wide variety of responsible civil society organizations, led by the Ahmed Kathrada Foundation and Anglican Archbishop Thabo Makgoba, mounted a public call to make 2020 the ‘Year of the Orange Overalls.’ It might well be said that this campaign, coming from people and groups who have no party political points to score, is an important reading of the political temperature on the ground. The SONA would have been a good moment to reassure the country that this government is making good on its promises to clean up the mess it inherited. In this respect, it was an opportunity lost.

Fr Peter-John Pearson
Director of the Catholic Parliamentary Liaison Office

You can read the full State of the Nation Address for 2020 by President Cyril Ramaphosa here.

Source: CPLO (https://www.cplo.org.za/response-the-2020-sona/)

This article has been re-published with the kind permission of Spotlight Africa

Photo Credit: President Cyril Ramaphosa delivering the 2020 State of the Nation Address on the occasion of a Joint Setting of Parliament. (Photos: GCIS, Flickr // GovernmentZA)

Homily by Archbishop Stephen Brislin at the Centre for Pastoral Development Ministries Day at Our Lady Help of Christians, Lansdowne on 18 January 2020

Archbishop thanks each person in ministry in the Archdiocese – Service to the Church.

Many gifts have been given to us. St Paul 1 Cor 12
“There are different kinds of gifts,but always the same Spirit”
“To each is given the manifestation of the Spirit for the common good”. (v7)
Gifts are given to us for others …to build the Church, for unity, to help people focus on Christ and not on ourselves.

This demandshumility, respect, and faith. We must avoid anything that may distract people from God, or cause scandal.

Whatever our ministry is, we must try to do it as best as we possibly can,according to the mind of the Church: it is not my ministry, it belongs to the Church and is for the Church.

We are privileged to be able to exercise a ministry. It is a privilege, not aright. It is a responsibility entrusted to me by God to lead others to God. It is not about me!

We must never lose sight of the fact that it is a tremendous privilege to serve.

We do not exercise our ministry in isolation, but in co-operation, collaboration and unity with other ministries. St Paul in 1 Cor 12 after talking about the variety of gifts, talks about the ONE body with many members.

Each has its roles and functions; we must not intrude on each other, (the eye is not the foot). We are called to respect each other’s roles and functions as given by the Church. The sense of belonging together is essential…the ear does not say “Because I am not an eye, I do not belong to the body” (v 16.)

We all belong. The key to unity in ministry is:
-to ensure that our ministry is an expression of our faith in God
– to ensure that our ministry is an expression of our love for the Church
– to ensure that our ministry is rooted in integrating the Word, Scripture into our lives, (not just a human endeavour).
-to respect the ministries of others and not to interfere or transgress boundaries.

For the gifts to flourish and for ministry to work for the “common good”, for unity- there needs to be order.Not just a free for all. Part of the role of the priest is to ensure order.He is to oversee the community to ensure there is give and take, part of which is to ensure that ministry is understood in it’s correct context ofserviceto God and the community, respectfulof other ministries, Christfocussed and instruments of unity. That is why he is appointed to a Parish, not only to celebrate Mass and Sacraments, attend meetings and visit the sick. Everyminister should work in co-operation withthe Parish Priest.

In talking of integrating the Word into our lives as a foundation for ministry we face a particular and dangerous tendency to allow all inhibitions to go out of the window on Social Media- criticizing Pope Francis and others. We must be very careful of what we say on social media.

We need to show honour to each other in what we say.
We can be candid but do so with respect and love
We must watch our words and don’t be too quick to send out messages on social media.
Beware of accusing anyone. Even Jesus was accused in his time – of blasphemy, subverting tradition, transgressing the law & demonic possession.

DO WE CHRISTIANS HAVE THE COURAGE TO PUT THE WORD OF GOD INTO PRACTICE WHEN IT COMES TO HOW WE USE WORDS.

This is what the Archbishop expects of those in ministry

– please do not scandalize
-don’t use words quickly, don’t accuse, watch how you use social media.
-understand your ministry as a privilege,respectthe role of other ministers 
-do the best you can to exercise your ministry well to strengthen the faith of others, to work in unity.
-be prayerful, examine yourself, consciously make the effort to integrate the Word into your life
-love God and love the Church. 

Volunteers were hard at work to make sure that those less fortunate had something to celebrate over the Christmas Season. Here are some pictures of the CWD campaign in motion.

On Sunday 24th November 2019, the Feast of Christ the King, the Dicastery for Laity, Family and Life established an International Youth Advisory Body. 20 young people from around the globe were chosen to be part of the body. 

Ms Dominique Yon, the assistant to the Youth Chaplain in the Archdiocese of Cape Town, is one of the appointed youth members forming the special body. 

Southern Africa Catholic Bishops’ Conference (SACBC) would like to congratulate Dominique for her appointment. We also would like to congratulate her for her unreserved commitment in bringing the Gospel to the the youth of Southern Africa, especially in the Archdiocese of Cape Town. 

Let us remember in our prayers, Dominique and other young people who will resume their responsibilities in the new role they to which they have been entrusted by the Church. 

For more about Dominique Yon kindly contact her on Domyon@yahoo.com or Fr Paul Tatu CSS

By Fr Paul Tatu CSS (SACBC Communication and Media) – 012 323 6458, E-mail: ptatu@sacbc.org.za