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The Catholic Church, with 1.8 million followers (1.4 million of them black), has gained the support of other major churches in its campaign for integration. Leaders of the Anglican Church (1.7 million) met last week with government officials and announced plans to integrate their 20 schools. Said one: "It is our Christian duty." The Methodists (2.1 million) have also announced plans to integrate their four schools. The powerful Dutch Reformed Church (3.5 million) remains strongly segregationist, however. The churches that are moving toward integration have won voluble backing in the more liberal newspapers. "For God's sake leave them alone!" trumpeted one, Johannesburg's Sunday Express.
Officially the national government remained adamantly opposed to any integration. In a statement last week it warned: "Continual disregard for the law will have serious consequences. The government cannot allow organizations, whoever they are, to take the law into their own hands." Unofficially, however, the government is leery of taking on the Catholic Church, particularly after the international uproar about the Soweto rioting. Said one government official: "We're a pariah as it is. We don't want a quarrel with the Pope as well."
As they edged forward, Catholic officials could point to one odd justification for integration provided by the government itself. At the same time that Cape Administrator Louis Munnik was threatening to close two integrated Catholic schools last week, he ordered two white state schools to accept six black students. Reason: the six happened to be children of the consul from Transkei, one of the black "homelands" to which South Africa granted independence but which no other nation recognizes. Foreign black diplomats are exempted from South Africa's racial system, and in view of such exemptions, argues Father Scholten, "we should now allow our own black people in."