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Religion: Bitter Tour in Africa

2 minute read
TIME

While Pope Paul VI journeyed through Asia to considerable welcome, Britain’s Archbishop of Canterbury made a quieter, less congenial trip through the white towns and black “homelands” of the Republic of South Africa. After a 16-day, 3,000-mile journey in the apartheid state, the head of the Anglican Communion was scarcely optimistic. “It would be premature to say that I believe that wrong was going to prevail,” said the Most Rev. and Rt. Hon. Arthur Michael Ramsey in Johannesburg last week. But he saw only two alternatives: “Either violent revolution or a real change in which Christian people can play a part.”

Ramsey had hoped, perhaps naively, to soften apartheid attitudes on his visit, but a 40-minute meeting with South African Prime Minister B.J. Vorster to discuss the subject was openly “frosty,” witnesses reported. Ramsey made no secret of his own opinion. Apartheid, he told one multiracial audience, is “a hindrance to the church’s task of preaching the Gospel.”

Ramsey ruled out “any form of violence” as an acceptable solution to the nation’s race problems. “Christians are not called to violence, and indeed violent revolution in this country might have the most ghastly and tragic results. But time is short. When all civilized channels are closed, men become violent.”

Ramsey’s warning was not likely to stir South Africa’s three Dutch Reformed churches, whose theology is often cited as a justification for apartheid. But Anglicans, who form the third largest Protestant group in the nation (after the Dutch Reformed churches and Methodists), were not likely to disagree with him. The Church of the Province of South Africa, an autonomous church within the Canterbury Communion, counts some 1,000,000 members, of whom 75% are not white by official South African definition.

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