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A new portrait of the Catholic church during apartheid, told through the life of Cardinal Owen McCann.
Drawing on newly opened Vatican archives and Owen McCann’s personal archives in Cape Town, Alexandra Maclennan offers the first full biography of Cardinal Owen McCann (1907–1994), a pivotal yet often overlooked figure in twentieth-century South African history. Born in a mixed-ethnicity, working-class neighborhood of Cape Town and educated by Irish religious orders, McCann rose to become South Africa’s first cardinal and a key moral voice during the long years of apartheid.
Maclennan traces how McCann’s formation in Catholic Social Teaching shaped his quiet but persistent engagement with South Africa’s racial crisis. As bishop, he lobbied government officials against apartheid laws, used the official Catholic newspaper The Southern Cross to challenge segregation, and defended non-European communities affected by discriminatory legislation. At the same time, newly revealed Vatican diplomatic correspondence shows how the Holy See responded to apartheid and what instructions they gave to the Apostolic Delegate, complicating assumptions about Catholic silence or complicity.
Spanning McCann’s life from the interwar years through Vatican II and the collapse of apartheid, Cardinal Owen McCann illuminates the Catholic Church’s evolving self-understanding amid decolonization, political authoritarianism, and moral crisis—and restores a forgotten cardinal to his place in history.
"This book is a superb biography of Owen McCann, the first South African Catholic cardinal. It is also an insightful picture of the complexities of church-state relations during the apartheid era, depicting both the perspectives of Vatican diplomats and South African prelates caught between the politics of survival in what was an often anti-Catholic environment and the demands of conscience." —Anthony Egan, SJ, author of God’s Universe, Our Responsibility
"Owen McCann is unquestionably one of the two most important Catholic figures in southern Africa in the second half of the twentieth century, not simply in ecclesiastical terms but on the wider political stage. There is no question in my mind that this book will make an important contribution not only to the history of South African Catholicism and the social history of South African Catholics, but to the history of South Africa." —Colin Barr, author of Ireland's Empire
"McCann’s life is described as it unfolded in the pre-Vatican II years, and those immediately following the council, and the implementation of Vatican II’s theology in South Africa, particularly in McCann’s archdiocese. The juxtaposition of these two ‘histories,’ national and ecclesiastical, as they shaped this man make the book something unique and significant in the increasing literature of this period of South Africa’s history." —Sr. Brigid Rose Tiernan, author of Journey under the Southern Cross
Alexandra Maclennan is an associate professor at the University of Caen Normandy, France, where she teaches on British, Irish, and South African civilization. She has published books and articles for the past twenty-five years on topics ranging from cultural to religious history, along with a French reference book on twentieth-century Irish history, Histoire de l’Irlande: De 1912 à nos jours.
Foreword by Philippe Denis
Acknowledgments
Introduction
1. St. Patrick on Table Mountain
2. “Very promising lad” from Woodstock Goes to Rome
3. World War II and Its Aftermath: Test Cases for the Catholic Church in South Africa
4. Archbishop McCann, the Hierarchy, and the Roomse Gevaar
5. From Playground to Battleground: The Schools, the Bishops, and the Government
6. Coraggio e prudenza
7. McCann and the Spirit of Renewal: Vatican II and Beyond
8. Calls to Conscience
9. Trying Times
10. Signs of Change
11. Nisi Dominus in vanum
12. Departing in Peace
Afterthoughts
Appendix
Notes
Bibliography
Index