Alexandra Maclennan (Caen): Cardinal Owen McCann (1907-94): die Roomse gevaar in apartheid South Africa

This seminar will share insights on diplomatic relations between the Vatican and the apartheid regime in South Africa following the recent opening of the archives of Pope Pius XII (1939-58). The correspondence for those years between the Apostolic Delegate in South Africa and the Secretary of State at the Vatican refines our understanding of the societal and theological underpinnings of the social engineering project that was apartheid (1948-90). After the Catholic hierarchy was established in South Africa in 1950, the Church had to find its voice in the Protestant-led state as the apartheid regime was being institutionalized with increasing force. The shy, aloof, dour Owen McCann, archbishop of Cape Town, and soon to be his country’s first cardinal, coming from an industrial suburb of Cape Town where his Irish father had immigrated in 1898, became the incarnation of die Roomse gevaar (‘the Roman threat’). His biography sheds a new light on diplomacy and on the conflicting theologies of apartheid and challenges to them.

Dr Alexandra Maclennan is Associate Professor at the University of Caen Normandy, where she teaches British, Irish and South African civilization. She is author of L'Etat et la culture en Irlande (2010), Histoire de l'Irlande de 1912 à nos jours (2021) and editor of The Irish Catholic diaspora: five centuries of global presence (2022)

27 University Square 01/003 & online

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Image: Archbishop McCann leaving Cape Town for the 2nd Vatican Council, 28 Sep. 1962 (Southern Cross Archive)