By BRIAN CLOWES
The Devil was smoking again today.
People who live in Cape Town, South Africa only have to look at Devil’s Peak, looming over the city next to Table Mountain, to see if it is going to rain that day. If the Peak has a “cloud cap,” they say that the Devil is smoking and there will be rain. Sure enough, it rained all week.
But the weather has never been an obstacle to Human Life International’s pro-life missionary corps. HLI President Fr. Shenan Boquet and I had just endured 18 hours of flying from Washington, D.C., to Cape Town, to be joined by Emil Hagamu, our regional director for Anglophone Africa, and our host Colette Thomas.
Our objective was to encourage beleaguered local pro-lifers, try to organize them, help them define their missions and goals, and provide them with materials to fight the battle. During our stay, we would participate in a wide range of activities, from picketing a Marie Stopes International abortion mill to doing interviews for the Eternal Word Television Network.
HLI has visited South Africa many times. Fr. Paul Marx, OSB, our founder, visited the nation five times, the first time in 1982. Local pro-lifers credited HLI with delaying the legalization of abortion in South Africa for at least three years, until Nelson Mandela’s African National Congress (ANC) approved the February 1, 1997 Choice on Termination of Pregnancy Act.
Since that time, a total of about 1.9 million abortions have been performed in South Africa.
Currently, 83,000 legal abortions and about 40,000 illegal abortions are performed every year, and women are still dying from both. There are obvious signs of the corruption that always accompanies abortion here. Illegal abortion mills seeking to undercut the prices set by legal abortion clinics plaster hundreds of ads on telephone poles and on walls. But when a local pro-lifer recently covered some of them with his own life-promoting signs, he was immediately arrested and then sued by the city. Officials here schizophrenically defend the illegal abortion mills while simultaneously decrying their butchery of women.
We don’t hear as much as we used to about the AIDS epidemic in the USA, but in South Africa it remains a stark reality. Eighteen percent of all people over the age of 15 are infected with HIV. Try to imagine a large urban area where one in every five people has HIV/AIDS. In South Africa, a staggering six million people are living with HIV/AIDS, the highest number in the world, and in 2012, 235,000 South Africans died of the disease.
These numbers will probably climb over the next several years at least, and the government still believes, after two decades of futility, that condoms — not behavior change — are the solution to the disaster. The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results; by this definition, the South African medical profession is truly out of its mind.
The killing of people at both ends of life is having predictable results. South Africa is aging very rapidly; the current median age is 26.7 years, and by the end of the century, the average South African will be 52 years old (the oldest in Africa). The population of the country has almost peaked at about 55 million and will soon begin to plunge. By the end of this century, South Africa will have lost a third of its population.
The life expectancy has actually decreased to 55 years for male South African babies born today and 59 years for female babies. Only 14 nations in the world have shorter expected lifespans, and most of them are in war zones.
South African society is very strange. Everything that is not nailed down is immediately stolen. Thieves even swipe the brass numbers on houses to recycle their metal, and tear apart any outside appliances to steal their metal. Gravestones and the graves themselves are pilfered and reused. Many a family member has visited a gravesite only to find that the remains of their loved one have been removed and replaced by someone else.
I read the newspapers every morning while staying at my hosts Maureen and Mervin Hartogh’s beautiful home. The papers were full of news about gang murders, ghastly sex crimes, and corruption at every level. This week’s scandal focused on international soccer governing body FIFA. All of the politicians seem completely baffled by this “culture of corruption,” but moral formation of children is forbidden in South Africa because it is an alleged violation of the separation of church and state.
I was reminded of C.S. Lewis’ observation in his great book The Abolition of Man: “We make men without chests and expect from them virtue and enterprise. We laugh at honor and are shocked to find traitors in our midst.”
Where to start? It is difficult to know where to begin in a society where everyone does whatever he pleases as long as he thinks he can get away with it. But our HLI team was determined to give it our best shot.
We began our business by meeting the archbishop of Cape Town, Stephen Brislin, who kindly gave us an hour of his time. He was very friendly and receptive to our message as we communicated our assessment of the problems in South Africa, their root causes, and what could be done about them. He invited us back to Cape Town for more activities, to include speaking to his seminarians, an offer we eagerly accepted.
We were based at St. John’s Catholic Church in Maitland, an inner-city zone of Cape Town. Crime has hit close to home here. Security measures at the church are daunting, and for good reason. We had to lock ourselves into and out of the St. John’s parish center because the pastor here has been mugged twice, and another priest was kidnapped.
Fr. Zane Godwin and his cat “Catsandra” gave us a warm and purry welcome, and Fr. Zane introduced us to the pro-life activists we would be speaking to.
We talked about a wide range of topics during our four-day conference. Since the society here has disintegrated to such an advanced degree, Fr. Boquet began with a talk on the sources of evil and of good, and the root of moral decay in both the human person and thus the society as a whole.
I gave several talks on topics of general interest, to include the failure of condoms to prevent HIV, abortion and demographics, and the population control agenda.
Activist Philip Rosenthal gave several presentations on the latest menace to threaten the people of South Africa — euthanasia.
As usual, Emil Hagamu provided us with his valuable insights regarding problems in Africa as a whole, gleaned from his many visits to half the countries on the continent.
The battle over euthanasia in South Africa began in 1991 and escalated rapidly. By 1997, it was plain that the pro-euthanasia activists were getting nowhere. Even the most liberal churches and the medical profession opposed it. In 2004, a euthanasia bill was introduced before the parliament and was voted down.
After a decade of relative quiet after that defeat, the pro-euthanasia group Dignity SA is pushing it again. They claim that Nelson Mandela supported it, a clever tactic since Mandela is considered a great secular saint here.
Fortunately, the two most critical members of Parliament, the ministers of Health and Justice, adamantly oppose it. So now the fight has morphed from the question of when an unborn baby becomes a person to the question of when an elderly or disabled person loses his personhood.
Secularism In
A Glorious Land
Our days were long, sometimes concluding past 10:00 p.m., but our discomfort was greatly relieved by the fantastic cooking of chef and tour guide Paul Patric Aspeling, who makes the best lasagna I have ever tasted. Most evenings, we cooled off at the home of Colette’s parents, and had a relaxing time there (except for breaking their coffeemaker, which caused a bit of a panic among us caffeine addicts — I mean, aficionados).
On Saturday, we walked a short distance to the Marie Stopes International abortion mill through the beauty of downtown Cape Town after Fr. Boquet said Mass in Sacred Heart Catholic Church. We stood praying the rosary for about an hour on the median of the road and saw only two people enter the building, one of whom was an employee.
One young guy was very upset and yelled: “If He existed, Jesus would be ashamed of you.” My reply was, “If He doesn’t exist, what’s your problem?”
One afternoon, I was invited to speak to the Muslims at the mosque which is literally right next door to my host’s house. When the imam heard I was pro-life, he was immediately interested. It seems that we have a lot in common. There are such good people here, but the secular culture is almost crushing. Yet it seems that South Africans enjoy more freedom in some ways than we do in the United States, despite many pointless rules and regulations.
Finally, on the last day, we learned that our scheduled talks had fallen through, so Paul Aspeling took us on a tour of the Cape. We began by visiting the tiny and beautiful Schoenstatt Chapel, which seats only 30 people.
As we drove south along the rugged coast, I learned that South Africa has its own species of penguins, cute little creatures with unique patterns of spots on their chests. They waddle up to you within touching distance, but you risk a nasty bite if you yield to the almost irresistible temptation to pet them. We admired the enormous Cape Fur Seals lolling next to fishing boats awaiting handouts, and gave the many baboons and wild ostriches a wide berth.
Finally, we took photos at the Cape of Good Hope, the most southwestern point of the African continent (dodging the obligatory busload of Chinese businessmen as we did so), and headed back to Cape Town.
It was an unexpected and relaxing end to a rather stressful trip.
It is difficult for us to see such beautiful people in such a glorious land so oppressed by sin of every kind. The only people who seemed to smile were our fellow activist Catholics and small children. The nation as a whole seems to have decided to disregard both the laws of God and man, and the results are sadly obvious: A crippled economy, bloated corruption and crime rates, and rampant disease.
Human Life International has been to South Africa many times, and we will undoubtedly return many times more. We intend to help this great land return to the only two things that will make its people happy: faith and family.
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