Pope thanks Napier for staying on as archbishop
Cardinal worried country losing direction, reverting to apartheid culture of 1980s
CARDINAL Wilfrid Napier will remain Archbishop of Durban’s Catholic Archdiocese for two more years. He tendered his resignation – in line with canon law which required him to submit a letter of resignation on his 75th birthday – in March.
Napier who has been cardinal for 15 years, said he received a letter from the Congregation for Evangelisation of Peoples informing him of the Pope’s decision.
He told the Sunday Tribune this week that he was excited to continue serving until 2018.
“I expected something of this kind. I was never going to just abandon the church because I handed in my resignation letter. I did so because it was part of the church’s law.
“When I was in Rome a few weeks ago, I met with Pope Francis. He asked me if I’d received the letter, then went on to say: ‘It’s hard to find someone as strong as you at your age.’ He thanked me for staying another two years.
“I will continue to follow and implement the policies and instructions that come from Pope Francis. One of the key agendas is to get the financial administration in line with best practice in the world, so the church, as it becomes self-reliant, will also showcase accountability and transparency, as well as make Christ the centre of its life and ministry.”
He called the problems in South Africa “disruptive” and likened some events, like protests and politically-linked killings, to the 1980s when apartheid was at its peak. “It is costing lives. It is worrying that people are using the strategy of the liberation movement in the 1980s, namely mak- ing the country ungovernable.
“Another similarity is the politically-motivated assassinations, carried out by people so determined to get power that they will kill for it.”
To counter this, Napier said the KwaZulu-Natal Church Leaders Group was doing its best to make a difference by mediating where possible, one act at a time.
It met on Tuesday to discuss the hostel situation. He said people needed to “sit down and talk rather than engage in violence. Instead of just focusing on the negative, we should look at how working together we can create something positive.
“It goes back to Nelson Mandela and his concept of the rainbow nation.
“We lost the ideal when we started emphasising the racial divide.
“A popular politician set this dividing process under way when he described South Africa as ‘a country of two nations, one that is white and rich, the other black and poor’. That’s when we started to lose direction.”
He said during Mandela’s leadership South Africans had held the ideal of a country where political allegiance, race or sex did not determine how people would exercise their human rights.
“When you introduce poli- cies like BEE and affirmative action which box people into races, it brings back another form of apartheid. The irony is the Race Classification Act was the first law to be removed from the statute books as democracy was being born.”