Southern African Catholic Bishops’ Conference Pastoral Statement on Violence Against Migrants in South Africa

Dear Sisters and Brothers, grace and peace to you.
We, the Catholic Bishops of Southern Africa, speak at this critical moment with a deep sense of urgency and moral responsibility regarding the escalating tensions and violence involving migrants and non-nationals in South Africa.

We unequivocally and without ambiguity condemn the acts of violence, intimidation, and displacement directed at migrants and refugees. Such actions constitute a grave assault on human dignity and a betrayal of the values that should define our society. Violence against migrants can never be justified, tolerated, or accepted.
At the same time, we must also state clearly that these protests and outbreaks of violence do not arise in a vacuum. They are symptoms of deeper and longstanding failures and broken promises that can no longer be ignored. Unless these underlying causes are honestly confronted, the cycle of anger, resentment, and violence will continue to deepen.

We wish to speak plainly: failures in governance, accountability, and leadership lie at the heart of the current crisis. For too long, the cries of the poor have gone unheard. The promises of dignity, inclusion, and opportunity remain unfulfilled for many South Africans. Persistent failures in service delivery, widening inequality, and the scandal of mass unemployment have created conditions of despair and frustration.

Competition for scarce resources such as jobs, housing, and public services has further intensified tensions between locals and migrants, particularly in economically disadvantaged communities. Porous borders, corruption within the Department of Home Affairs, and irregular immigration processes have weakened public confidence in the State’s ability to manage migration effectively.
Some businesses exploit migrant labour and pit locals against migrants, while there is also a perceived monopoly enjoyed by some foreigners over the retail trade sector in townships and rural areas.

Regrettably, the involvement of a few migrants in criminal activities, such as hijacking of buildings, human trafficking, drug trafficking, and faith leaders who exploit the poor, has exacerbated tensions. Furthermore, social tensions have also been deepened by the absence of meaningful integration between some migrant communities and local communities. Greater participation in community life, respect for local customs, and efforts to learn local languages can contribute significantly to social cohesion, fraternity, and peaceful coexistence.

While these concerns and frustrations are real and must be addressed honestly, they can never justify violence against another human being. Violent attacks on migrants­ documented or undocumented, remain morally unacceptable and undermine social cohesion, justice, and peace.
As people of faith, we return to the foundational truth that every person is created in the image and likeness of God. This conviction imposes upon us a non-negotiable obligation to uphold and protect the dignity of all people, especially the most vulnerable members of our communities, including migrants and refugees.
As Pope Francis reminds us in Fratelli Tutti, we are called to a fraternity that transcends borders, fear, and exclusion. We cannot build a peaceful society through hatred, scapegoating, or violence.

In light of the upcoming local government elections, we offer a particular and urgent appeal to political parties and all those seeking public office: do not exploit the migration situation or the suffering of communities for political gain. The instrumentalisation of fear, division, and human vulnerability for electoral advantage is morally unacceptable and risks further destabilising an already fragile social context. Leadership demands responsibility, restraint, honesty, and a commitment to the truth.
This is a decisive moment for our nation. The future of our society depends on whether we choose the path of justice, accountability, solidarity, and social renewal, or whether we allow injustice, fear, and division to deepen.

We therefore call for a renewed commitment to the common good, rooted in justice, human dignity, solidarity, and peace. Without justice, ethical leadership, and social responsibility, there can be no lasting peace.
May the Lord grant us the courage to confront what is wrong, the wisdom to discern what is right, and the strength to act with justice, compassion, and truth.

Stephen Cardinal Brislin

President of the Southern African Catholic Bishops’ Conference

20 May 2026

The first APC meeting with our new Archbishop was held at Immaculate Conception, Parow from 09.00-14.00. Below are some pics of the event.

 

 

A Reflection on the First Year of Pope Leo XIV

Stability, Mission, and the Church We Are Being Called to Be

By Sithembele Sipuka, Archbishop of Cape Town

As I write this short reflection on the first year of Pope Leo’s service as the universal pastor of the Church, I cannot help think of how providence has personally connected me to him.

He was appointed bishop in Peru while Archbishop Green was the Apostolic Nuncio there, the same Archbishop Green who had previously served as Apostolic Nuncio to the Southern African Catholic Bishops’ Conference, during whose time I was appointed bishop in 2008. He was named and made a Cardinal together with our own Cardinal Stephen Brislin. Last July, he appointed me to the Dicastery for Interreligious Dialogue, and early this year he appointed me as Archbishop of Cape Town, making me his first appointment in the SACBC territory. So, when I ask what kind of pope he is proving to be, I am not asking from a distance.

Even before these coincidences that personally link me to him, something about him touched me from the moment of his election. When he emerged at the window of the Papal Palace as the new Pope, I felt for him; he appeared so overwhelmed by what had just happened. He did and said nothing dramatic, as Pope Francis had done when he let go of the Mozzetta and asked the people to bless him before he blessed them.

Visibly overcome by emotion, and perhaps to the point of tears, he said “Peace be with you” – the very words the Risen Christ spoke when he first appeared to his disciples gathered together.

After those words, he kept a low profile, making few public statements, which made some wonder whether he was sufficiently in touch with a world that seemed to demand an immediate papal response. Reflecting on him a year later, one phrase comes to mind: “a firm but steady pope.” I think he personally felt the need to find his footing after an election he had not expected, to understand and come to terms inwardly with what had just happened to him. As he is gradually coming to terms with the reality of his election, he appears to be settling into the papacy. As he does, several priorities are emerging that I find deeply relevant to Africa and the broader southern hemisphere.

Much was made of the historical novelty of the first American-born pope in the Church’s two-thousand-year history. But what struck me, watching from Mthatha, was less the nationality than the name he chose. Leo.

The deliberate choice of the name after Leo XIII, whose 1891 encyclical Rerum Novarum positioned the Church as a moral actor amid the upheavals of industrial capitalism, indicated that this papacy would not be a papacy of institutional self-absorption. It would instead be a papacy that invites the church to engage with the world in its hopes and dreams and its struggles and failures, finding expression in its inequalities, conflicts, and displacements. The choice of the name appeared to be an invitation to recover and practice Catholic social teaching, rather than to adopt nationalistic, profit-making and geopolitical interests.

In choosing this name, he placed himself in deliberate continuity with Pope Francis, who in Fratelli Tutti pointedly asked why the death of a homeless person on the street barely registers in public consciousness, while a drop in the stock market makes front-page headlines across the world.

Then there were his first words – “Peace be with you” – which he has been gradually proving were not uttered merely as a conventional greeting but as something thoughtfully prioritised. In the months since his election, he has been consistent in calling for peace over and against war, again in continuity with Pope Francis, who called war “a defeat for humanity” and “a failure that condemns us all.”

In his appeals against armed conflict, Pope Leo has consistently highlighted the human suffering that results from wars driven by strategic interests, placing the Church firmly on the side of protecting human dignity rather than choosing sides in geopolitics. In a world where religious leaders are increasingly pressured to provide moral justification for nationalism, Pope Leo has acted for the common good of all humanity, in the spirit of Fratelli Tutti.

This same concern for human dignity has been a guiding principle in his engagement with artificial intelligence. In a world rapidly reshaped by AI-driven systems, Pope Leo has insisted that technological development must serve the human person rather than reduce or replace human dignity, agency, and relationships. He has raised particular concern about AI systems that entrench inequality, concentrate economic power in fewer hands, automate away livelihoods in already vulnerable economies, and enable forms of surveillance and social control that threaten the freedom and privacy of ordinary people.

For communities in Africa and the Global South, these are not abstract concerns. When poorly regulated AI-driven platforms displace workers in informal economies, or when algorithmic systems make decisions about credit, healthcare or justice without transparency or accountability, the consequences fall heaviest on those who are already marginalised.

Pope Leo has called for AI governance frameworks anchored in ethics rather than profit, and for a global conversation that includes the voices of the poor and vulnerable, not merely the technologically powerful. Like his predecessor, he has reminded us that technology without conscience is not progress; it is a new form of the same old indifference.

In light of fierce anti-immigration rhetoric and restrictive legislation emanating from the North, including from his own country of birth, Pope Leo has continued Pope Francis’ call to see migrants not as statistics but as people with dreams and with families. His assertion that “in every rejected migrant, it is Christ who knocks at the door of the community” (Dilexi Te) carries particular resonance here in South Africa, where immigrants are too readily made scapegoats and told to “go back” for failures of governance, for the inability of the state to deliver essential services, and for the consequences of corruption that predates any migrant’s arrival.

His language about development, inequality, and the responsibilities of wealthier societies toward vulnerable populations reflects a sensitivity drawn not from theory but from personal experience, born of years of living alongside the poor in Peru. In confronting this inequality, in his Apostolic Exhortation Dilexi Te, he repeats the words of his predecessor Pope Francis, “the dictatorship of an economy that kills, where the wealth of a few grows exponentially while the majority are left behind.”

This concern for the marginalised should find a ready echo across Africa, where, even as we rejoice in the growth of the Church, we carry the weight of unemployment, inequality, food insecurity and the social consequences of political instability. It is consoling, as we agonise over these realities in the south, to know that the universal pastor is awake to them and speaks to them.

Within the Church, Pope Leo appears to be leading with deliberate restraint. He has resisted the labels of progressive and conservative, choosing instead to be what the Gospel of Matthew calls the wise scribe of the Kingdom – one “who brings out of his treasure nova et antiqua, what is new and what is old” (Mt 13:52). He is continuing the synodal process inherited from Pope Francis while remaining cautious about developments that could fracture ecclesial unity, and in this way, he is working to keep the whole Church together.

His Augustinian formation is quietly present throughout. The spirituality of the Order of Saint Augustine, marked by interiority, communal discernment, humility before truth and restlessness before God, shapes both the texture of his public addresses and the measured quality of his governance.

Whether his approach is fully adequate to the depth of the challenges the Church faces, one year is too short a time to conclude. What can be said is that Pope Leo XIV appears to be a man for this moment, enabling the Church to engage meaningfully with the urgent questions of our time while holding it together in unity. For those of us facing our own local versions of the very same challenges, he is a source of both encouragement and direction.

Attached below is the Bishops’ Foundation newsletter for May 2026.

[pdf-embedder url=”https://adct.org.za/wp-content/uploads/May-2026-1.pdf” title=”May 2026 (1)”]

Homily for the Funeral of Father Brian Gelant

Thursday, 7 May 2026

Archbishop Sipuka

Readings:

Acts 15:7-21 | Psalm 96 | John 15:9-11

The issue on the surface in today’s first reading is circumcision, with the question of whether Gentile converts must observe the Mosaic law or not. But the real issue beneath the surface is whether belonging to the Church is determined by the cultural practice of the majority who were there first to believe in Christ, or by the gift of the Holy Spirit poured out to all, including those who came later. Using today’s language, you could say the issue is about traditionalists who maintain circumcision as a condition for belonging to the Church, and reformers who take the outpouring of the Spirit to all as the determining factor for belonging. 

What is remarkable about Acts 15 is not that the dispute was resolved, but how it was resolved. It was resolved not by the majoritarian rule or by the loudest voice winning and the soft-spoken losing. Nor was it resolved by the institution simply asserting its authority or the reformers pressing their agenda until the other side gave in. 

What happens in Jerusalem is something far more demanding than any of those options. It is not the stubborn maintenance of each side’s position but an openness to what God is doing. Paul and Barnabas bear witness to what the Spirit has been up to in places the institution had not yet mapped out or decided.

And James, the leader of the Church in Jerusalem, does not say the Pharisee party was simply wrong to care about continuity. He also does not say the Gentiles may come in and bring everything unchanged. They are to abstain from idols, from blood and from fornication. Freedom in the Spirit is not the same as the absence of all boundaries. What is released is what was never essential. What is retained is what belongs to the integrity of the Gospel itself. James finds the ground on which both concerns can stand, holding firmly to what is essential and releasing what is not. The temptation of each party to believe that the solution is the disappearance of the other is avoided.

Jesus himself addressed this temptation in a verse from Matthew that is easy to overlook. After teaching his disciples through a series of parables, he says: “Every scribe who has been trained for the Kingdom of Heaven is like the master of a house, who brings out of his treasure what is new and what is old.”(Matthew 13:52) The Kingdom-trained teacher does not bring out only the old, defending it simply because it has survived the ages. Neither does he bring out only the new, as though newness were itself a virtue just because it’s new. He brings out both, because both belong to the same treasury.

For a Christian, the ultimate question is never simply whether something is old or new. The question is always whether it fits the Kingdom of God. There are old things that cannot fit, and the Church has known this, often painfully and too late. Slavery. The burning of heretics. The silencing of women. These were old and wrong. But there are also new things that cannot fit, because novelty is not the same as truth, and freshness is not the same as the Gospel. The disposal of the unborn. The dictatorship of relativism, the prioritisation of profit over human solidarity and technological development that undermines human dignity and diminish relationships. These are new, and they are wrong. And so, the criterion is neither antiquity nor innovation. The criterion is always the living Christ.” 

We can be snobs in both directions, dismissing the new because we are comfortable with the old or dismissing the old because we are excited by what is coming. Neither posture is discipleship. Both, if we are honest, are forms of pride — the pride of the one who says we have always done it this way, and the pride of the one who says we have finally moved beyond all that, labelling others as old-fashioned. It is not about fashion. It is about what leads to Christ, whether new or old.

To quote the classical saying that has guided the Church in moments of division: “in essentials, unity; in doubtful matters, liberty; in all things, charity”. The truth of this saying demands that we do the honest, sometimes painful work of discerning what is truly essential and what is merely our preference dressed up as principle. What it refuses to allow is what both sides are always tempted to do: to expand the list of non-negotiables until it includes everything that agrees with our view and then call that faithfulness or to discard principles in the name progress and development. 

This is, in fact, what Pope Francis recovered from the Second Vatican Council under the name of synodality, not as a novelty, but as a retrieval. The synodal Church, in Pope Francis’s words, is a Church that listens. A Church in which everyone has something to learn. Not a Church in which the outcome is pre-determined by whoever speaks loudest. A synodal process is not a debate to be won. It is a conversation in which the Spirit is trusted to be present, including in the voices we find inconvenient.

And this brings me to Fr Brian.

Fr Brian Gelant was not always perceived as an easy person; he could be perceived as unconventional, as not going along with what is considered normal. He focused more on the Spirit than on circumcision and other conventional practises represented by circumcision. Engaging with him, he could come across as impatient with the institutional aspect of the Church, and maybe even with the Church’s authority. 

He was passionately committed to the cause of the workers and the marginalised, a cause the Church sometimes notices only in its official documents, and not always in its daily life. Fr Brian died not in an institution but in a home, cared for by friends, whom I had the opportunity to meet a week before he died. On behalf of the Archdiocese and his family, I would like to thank these friends sincerely for taking care of Fr Brian. Thank you, Mavis, and the circle of friends who took care of Fr Brian, and Fr Francesco, with whom he stayed for most of the time, as well as Fr Christian, who, from the moment of the news of Fr Brian’s passing away, worked hard to consult all people related to Fr Brian to prepare this dignified send off. Thanks Fr Christian.  

Fr Brian represented what I would call the prophetic dimension of the Church, the dimension that follows the Spirit into places the institution has not yet drawn on its map. This dimension is not comfortable. It was not comfortable in Peter’s time, when the Spirit was already at work among Gentiles before the Jerusalem Council had finished its deliberations. It is not comfortable now.

In the light of today’s first reading, in the light of Fr Brian’s life and in the light of the synodality of Pope Francis, I would like to say that the institutional Church is wrong when it tries to eliminate the prophetic dimension of the church. And the prophetic voice is wrong when it imagines it can do without the institution. Both are necessary because both carry something of the truth. Both are in the treasury for our salvation and the building up of God’s kingdom.

The error on either side is to mistake one’s own partiality for the whole. The conservative who guards the tradition but forgets the poor has misread the tradition. The prophet who follows the Spirit but breaks with the community has forgotten that the Spirit was given to the Body, not only to the individual. Avery Dulles, in his landmark work Models of the Church, reminds us that the Church is never fully captured by any single image or emphasis; she is too rich, too deep, too alive for that. 

And theology has long insisted that the institutional and the prophetic are not rivals but partners, they are both gifts of the same Spirit, given to the same Body. Without the institution, prophecy scatters and creates confusion as we see in the communities that keep splitting and dividing. Yet without prophecy, the institution fossilises and becomes a museum, to borrow a descriptive from Pope Francis. The one Spirit breathes through both, and the wisdom is to hold them both in a balance, as today’s first reading suggests. 

Today’s responsorial psalm tells us that God will judge the peoples in fairness. That judgment is God’s, not ours, and this is not a reason for complacency but for humility. We are not required to resolve the tension between conservation and prophecy, between institution and reform. We are required to remain in the love of which Jesus speaks in today’s Gospel, the love that holds things together, even as they appear contradictory to us.

“Remain in my love,” Jesus says, “that my joy may be in you and that your joy may be complete.”

Though he was more of a prophetic character, Fr Brian Gelant remained in the institutional Church. Yes, sometimes impatiently, sometimes loudly, sometimes wrongly, sometimes uncharitably, and occasionally to the annoyance of some of us. But he remained.

There may have been times when he was uncharitable in his prophetic utterances, but those who knew him know that in all he did and said, he meant well. He meant well for the poor, for the workers, for the marginalised. It is precisely for this reason that we now commend him to the God who is both fair and compassionate – the God who does not weigh only our failures but also searches the intention of the heart. We come to entrust him to the One whose mercy is larger than our understanding, and whose fairness, as the psalm reminds us, is not our fairness.

May Brian rest in that fairness of God. And may we, who remain, learn from his life and from these readings the art of holding together what God has not put asunder, the institutional and the prophetic. 

Amen.

For those unable to attend the funeral of Fr Brian Gelant, here is a link to the livestream broadcast.

RE-COMMITMENT MASS WITH THE PERMANENT DEACONS

OF THE ARCHDIOCESE OF CAPE TOWN

03 May 2026

Archbishop Sipuka

Readings:

Acts 6:1-7 | 1 Peter 2:4-9 | John 14:1-12

Today’s first reading was not chosen because I was going to celebrate this Mass with you. The liturgical calendar simply placed Acts 6:1-7 for this day. In my view, this is not a coincidence but providence because this passage is nothing less than the founding moment of the order of Deacons.

On the very first occasion that I celebrate the Eucharist with the permanent deacons of this Archdiocese, the Church places before us the story of how the diaconate began, the crisis that occasioned it, the qualities sought in its first members, and the mission it was created to serve. I did not arrange this. But I receive it as a gift, and I take it seriously because I believe in providence.

Let me narrate the situation. The early Church is growing, and with growth comes complexity. The Hellenist widows are being overlooked in the daily food distribution. They are a minority. They are vulnerable. The apostles face a genuine dilemma where the community needs the ministry of service, but they cannot abandon the ministry of the Word and prayer to provide it. Their solution is inspired: “Select from among yourselves seven men of good standing, full of the Spirit and of wisdom.” Seven men are chosen, hands are laid on them, and the result is immediate: “The word of God continued to spread; the number of disciples increased greatly.” That is where you come from.

It is with this story in mind that I want to say thank you to you, dear Deacons.

You are established men with professions, responsibilities, and families who need you. You could easily have given the Church the minimum; you could have been privately devout and coasted along without serious public commitment. Nobody would have blamed you. But you did not do that. You chose to be publicly known as men dedicated to the service of God in the Church. The witness of a married man, a father, a husband and a professional who has freely chosen to be ordained and to serve, is a witness the Church needs desperately and cannot manufacture by any other means. Thank you for your example in your families. Thank you for your public commitment. Thank you for being here.

As I meet you today for the first time as your Archbishop, and inspired by today’s reading, I would like to share with you about your order of Deacons and what it means for us today. Before I speak about what the founding of your order means for us today, however, let me say one word about prayer, because without it, nothing else will take root, and this applies not only to you but all of us, me included.

When the apostles explain why they need others to take on the ministry of service, they say: “We will devote ourselves to prayer and to serving the word”. Note that prayer comes first. Everything we do in the Church, every act of service, every homily, every hour of Caritas work, every conversation with a struggling couple, flows from our relationship with God, or it flows from nothing. The deacon who has not prayed is the deacon who is merely busy. The deacon who prays is the deacon through whom Christ acts. Guard your prayer. Guard it as you would guard your health, because without it, everything else eventually runs dry.

With that as our foundation, let me explain what the founding narrative of your order suggests: namely, the three ministries that speak directly to our situation in Cape Town and South Africa today.

Ministry One: Social Cohesion

The crisis in Acts 6 is not merely logistical. It is a crisis of belonging. The Hellenists, a cultural and linguistic minority, feel overlooked within the community. The apostles listen, acknowledge the failure; they do not defend themselves or explain the need away. No, they act without delay and with great wisdom, appointing people from within the aggrieved community itself, because those people know the needs and sensitivities of their own people in ways that outsiders cannot.

So, what we see in the foundation of the order of Deacons is a social, cultural, linguistic dissonance and poverty of social cohesion, something I cannot read without thinking of our own country.

Twenty-seven years after the end of apartheid, South Africa remains profoundly divided, with no sense of patriotism, even as we are civil and polite to each other; we are a society deeply divided. The apartheid geographical boundaries continue to separate us, and centuries of our separation embedded in our DNA makes us unable to relate in a real way and to be comfortable and caring for each other. Suspicion and prejudice about each other continue to characterise us, and sometimes surface in ugly ways.

And this state of our being as South Africans manifests itself also inside the Church. When somehow, we are forced to come together, otherwise for the most part we choose not to come together, though we are all Catholics, we do not know how to be with each other because we carry guilt, anger, prejudice and ignorance about each other. In cosmopolitan dioceses like Cape Town, this lack of cohesion manifests in the conspicuous absence of some sections of the Catholic population from diocesan events and in an unwillingness to learn, speak, and sing in one another’s languages. For this reason, my episcopal motto is United and Sent, because unity is not merely a human aspiration but a direct wish of the Lord, “that they may all be one, (John 17:21). And as St Paul reminds us, in Christ, “There are no more distinctions between Jew and Greek, slave and free, male and female.” (Gal 3:28).

The founding moment of your order is a story about a community that faced cultural and political fracture and chose inclusion. You are embedded in families, workplaces, and neighbourhoods across this Archdiocese, crossing lines that clergy in presbyteries often cannot cross. The providence of this reading seems to be saying something about your particular calling to be ministers of the unity this country so desperately needs. There is no quick fix to this centuries-long challenge of division in our country but given that your order was founded amid this problem, I ask you to join me in helping resolve this lack of cohesion.

Ministry Two: Caritas

The diaconate was born at a table of distribution, in response to people who were hungry and overlooked. The word diakonos means servant, someone who ensures that those with nothing are not left with nothing. That is your foundation and the beating heart of what you are.

I have heard about Caritas of the Archdiocese. What I have not yet heard is how much the permanent deacons are involved in its work. I look forward to our conversation to better understand that, because your involvement in Caritas is not optional. It is the most natural expression of who you are and what you were ordained to be because your order was founded to respond to the needy.

And yet the diaconate is not confined to Caritas. Look at Stephen – one of those original seven appointed to serve at the table. He became so compelling a preacher that his opponents “could not withstand the wisdom and the Spirit with which he spoke”, and he became the first martyr of the Church. The Spirit in him could not be contained at the table.

So affirming that your foundation lies at the table of distribution, of charity and service, do not ever think that you are exempt from proclaiming the Word because your foundation is service. Stephen was appointed to serve tables, and yet the Spirit would not let him stay silent. The Word burst through the service, as it always does when a person is truly full of the Holy Spirit. It belongs to you, too.

I think of it as we think of the Trinity: creation is the particular work of the Father, redemption of the Son, sanctification of the Spirit, yet all three are involved in all three works. In the same way, Caritas is the defining and characteristic work of the deacon, while the proclamation of the Word belongs fully to you as well. Stephen shows us the two are never truly separate.

Ministry Three: Family

The seven were appointed because particular families were being overlooked – their most vulnerable members, the widows, were hungry and uncared for. And this connects directly to a third area where deacons have a particular and largely untapped calling: ministry to couples and families.

You are the married clergy of this Church. You know from the inside what marriage demands, what sustains it and what erodes it. There are couples in this Archdiocese struggling with communication, fidelity, the weight of raising children in this city, who would hear something from you that they might not quite hear from a celibate priest, because you speak from shared experience. You have lived the sacrament you are pointing them toward. I am keen to know how many of you are actively involved in family ministry, in marriage preparation, and in supporting struggling marriages. My instinct is that you should be more involved than you are right now, and I say that as an invitation, not a criticism.

I believe that our meeting this afternoon is designed by God, because through His Church, He has offered us a reading that speaks directly to the foundation of your order. Thank you for accepting this ministry that addresses the needs of our time: the need for social cohesion in a divided country, the need for organised and dedicated service to the poor through Caritas, and the need for accompaniment of couples and families, who are the bedrock of our society. The Church and this country need you. I am glad you said yes.

I come to you not with all the answers, but with a genuine conviction that your ministry is irreplaceable, and that in this Archdiocese, this city, and this country, the need for what you offer has never been greater.

The seven were chosen. Hands were laid on them. And the Church grew. May it be so again in our Archdiocese and our in country, through you.

Please see below the funeral arrangements for Fr Brian Gelant, from the Archbishop’s office.

[pdf-embedder url=”https://adct.org.za/wp-content/uploads/gelant_0001.pdf”]

Attached please find resources for Laudato Si’ week and the Week of Prayer for Christian Unity, provided by the Departments for Christian Formation, Ecumenism, Inter-Faith and Religious Dialogue, as well as the Commission for Justice and Peace and Marfam (SACBC).

DOWNLOADABLE FORMAT

[pdf-embedder url=”https://adct.org.za/wp-content/uploads/Laudato-Si-and-Christian-Unity-Reflections-17-24-May-2026.pdf” title=”Laudato Si and Christian Unity Reflections 17 – 24 May 2026″]

For Ministers of Marriage and Family preparation, enrichment and reparation.

Find attached three posters providing information regarding vital marriage ministry programmes coming up.
Please promote these among parishioners, and friends.
Each of these are significant resources to remedy the crises of marriage and family in our society and in the church.

Fr Francois Dufour
Salesian of Don Bosco

[pdf-embedder url=”https://adct.org.za/wp-content/uploads/CEE-CT-poster-2026-2.pdf” title=”CEE-CT poster 2026″]