The Southern Cross (South Africa)

Last updated

The Southern Cross
Southern Africa's Catholic Monthly
Southern Cross Jan2021.jpg
January 2021 cover
TypeMonthly magazine
Format A3 magazine
Owner(s)Catholic Newspaper & Publishing Ltd.
Editor-in-chiefGünther Simmermacher
Launched16 October 1920 (1920-10-16)
HeadquartersBouquet Street
Cape Town, 8001
CountrySouth Africa
Website SouthernCross

The Southern Cross is a South African monthly Catholic magazine, which from 1920 to 2020 was the only Catholic weekly in the country. It is published independently but with the support of the Southern African Catholic Bishops Conference. First published on 16 October 1920, it appeared uninterrupted every week until 23 September 2020, after which the publication transitioned into a monthly magazine. [1] The current editor-in-chief is Günther Simmermacher.

Contents

Ownership

The Southern Cross is published by the Catholic Newspaper & Publishing Company Ltd., which is based in Cape Town. The publication is financed by sales and advertising, as well as revenue from sales of books published under The Southern Cross Books imprint, international pilgrimages, and financial support from its Associates’ Campaign. It receives no funding from the bishops conference.

Publication and circulation

Most issues are sold in churches at weekend Masses, with subscriptions in print and digital format available. The Southern Cross is also available by postal subscription and as a digital edition. It is not sold in retail outlets other than Catholic bookshops.

Editorial

The editor of The Southern Cross has full editorial independence, confirmed in 2009 by the then-President of the Southern African Catholic Bishops' Conference, Archbishop Buti Tlhagale of the Archdiocese of Johannesburg.

Global reception

The Southern Cross editorials have frequently made worldwide news. In 2001 an editorial that argued that the Catholic Church should allow the use of condoms in marriages in which only one spouse is infected with HIV was picked up by the BBC World News, [2] Voice of America, Time, [3] and other publications.

In 2011, an editorial that criticised the presence of Zimbabwean President Robert Mugabe at the beatification of Pope John Paul II in the Vatican [4] was reported on widely, especially in the international Catholic press. [5] [6]

In 2014, an editorial calling on the Catholic Church to condemn controversial anti-gay laws in Nigeria and the Uganda Anti-Homosexuality Act, 2014 [7] was picked up by the news service [8] of the Vatican's missionary dicastery, the Congregation for the Evangelization of Peoples. A Vatican analyst for the Italian newspaper La Stampa suggested that by picking up The Southern Cross’ critical editorial but not a congratulatory statement by the president of the Nigerian bishop's conference, the Vatican had voiced its disapproval of the draconian policies which are tantamount to persecution, and called on African bishops to "speak out ... against the discriminatory legislation and violence directed at homosexuals, many of whom are fellow Catholics." [9]

History

The Southern Cross first published 16 October 1920 Southern-Cross-first-issuecover.jpg
The Southern Cross first published 16 October 1920

The idea for a national Catholic newspaper was first raised by two priests, Fr James Kelly of Cape Town and Fr Leo Sormany OMI of Durban. [10] When the bishops of South Africa met in Durban in 1919, they decided to establish such a newspaper under the name The Crusader. Fr Kelly was appointed its first editor, and he proposed the name "The Southern Cross", after a defunct Anglican newspaper.

The Catholic Newspaper & Publishing Company Ltd was floated in June 1920, with the bishops, as founders, holding 51% of the shares. The Southern Cross hit the churches on Sunday, 17 October 1920 (a day after the cover date), with a circulation of 3,500 and cover price of 3 pence. Within a few weeks, circulation had risen to 6,000. In the 1930s circulation had grown in excess of 10,000, but World War II brought circulation down again. Between 1953 and 1963, circulation increased by 57%. In 1956 it stood at 15,000, in 1964 at 18,500. That was in the midst of the Second Vatican Council. After that circulation started to drop, as it did at many other newspapers. In 1970 it was still around 16,000, two years later 14,000, and in 1974 it had decreased to 12,600. By the mid-1990s, circulation dipped to below 10,000 for the first time since the war. During the 2000s it stood steadily at above 11,000.

During Vatican II, Archbishop Denis Hurley of Durban, a leading participant in the council, regularly wrote anonymous but well-informed articles for The Southern Cross. In 2001 he wrote a 17-part series of the council which formed the basis for a book of memoirs by Archbishop Hurley.

Books

In the 1930s the Catholic Newspaper & Publishing Company opened a Catholic bookshop in Cape Town, in part to sell its own titles. The company sold the bookshop to the Schoenstatt Institute in 1982. Since then The Southern Cross has sporadically published, including I Call You Companions by Fr Nicholas King SJ (1995, in association with the Catholic Bookshop in Cape Town), The Holy Land Trek by Günther Simmermacher (2010), [11] a guide to the film The Passion of the Christ , two anthologies by long-standing columnists, Any Major Sunday by Owen Williams and Moerdyk Files by Chris Moerdyk, and Church Chuckles, [12] a collection of Catholic jokes compiled by Simmermacher with cartoons by Conrad Burke.

Editors

Until 1995 all editors were priests, assisted by lay editors (later named managing editors), who were professional journalists. With the two-stint editorship of Owen McCann, first in the 1940s and again between 1986 and 1991, The Southern Cross has been edited by a future and an existing cardinal. Michael Shackleton, a former priest who was appointed in 1995, was the first editor not to belong to the clergy. His successor, Günther Simmermacher, was the first lay editor of the newspaper, bringing to a full circle a discussion which had begun before the newspaper first appeared in 1920.

Related Research Articles

Jacques Gaillot French bishop

Jacques Jean Edmond Georges Gaillot ; pronunciation ; generally known in French as Monseigneur Gaillot) is a French Catholic clergyman and social activist. He was Bishop of Évreux in France from 1982 to 1995. In 1995, Pope John Paul II removed him as head of his diocese because he publicly expressed controversial and heterodox positions on religious, political and social matters.

<i>La Croix</i> French Roman Catholic newspaper

La Croix is a daily French general-interest Roman Catholic newspaper. It is published in Paris and distributed throughout France, with a circulation of 87,000 as of 2018. It is not explicitly left or right on major political issues; rather, the newspaper adopts the Church's position. However, La Croix ought not to be confused with a religious newspaper—its topics are of general interest: world news, the economy, religion and spirituality, parenting, culture and science.

Wilfrid Napier

Wilfrid Fox Napier OFM is a South African prelate of the Catholic Church. He served as Archbishop of Durban from 1992 to 2021 and has been a cardinal since 2001. He served as Bishop of Kokstad from 1981 to 1992.

The National Catholic Reporter (NCR) is a progressive national newspaper in the United States that reports on issues related to the Catholic Church. Based in Kansas City, Missouri, NCR was founded by Robert Hoyt in 1964. Hoyt wanted to bring the professional standards of secular news reporting to the press that covers Catholic news, saying that "if the mayor of a city owned its only newspaper, its citizens will not learn what they need and deserve to know about its affairs". The publication, which operates outside the authority of the Catholic Church, is independently owned and governed by a lay board of directors.

The Anglican Church of Southern Africa, known until 2006 as the Church of the Province of Southern Africa, is the province of the Anglican Communion in the southern part of Africa. The church has twenty-nine dioceses, of which twenty-one are located in South Africa, three in Mozambique, and one each in Angola, Lesotho, Namibia, Swaziland and Saint Helena. In South Africa, there are between 3 and 4 million Anglicans out of an estimated population of 45 million.

Catholic Church in South Africa

The Catholic Church in South Africa is part of the worldwide Catholic Church composed of the Latin Church and 23 Eastern Catholic Churches, of which the South African church is under the spiritual leadership of the Southern African Catholic Bishops Conference and the Pope in Rome. It is made up of 26 dioceses and archdioceses plus an apostolic vicariate.

Denis Eugene Hurley was the South African Roman Catholic Vicar Apostolic of Natal and Bishop, and later Archbishop of Durban, from 1946 until 1992. He was born in Cape Town and spent his early years on Robben Island, where his father was the lighthouse keeper. In 1951, Hurley was appointed Archbishop of Durban and the youngest archbishop in the world at that time.

Owen McCann, was a South African cardinal of the Roman Catholic Church and journalist. Archbishop of Cape Town from 1950 to 1984, he was elevated to the cardinalate in 1965.

<i>Nasz Dziennik</i>

Nasz Dziennik is a Polish-language Roman-Catholic daily newspaper published six times a week in Warsaw, Poland. It is connected to the Lux Veritatis Foundation. Its viewpoint has been described as right-wing to far-right, and is supportive of the Traditionalist Catholicism "closed church".

Geoffrey Nyarota is a Zimbabwean journalist and human rights activist. Born in colonial Southern Rhodesia, he trained as a teacher before beginning his career with a Zimbabwean state-owned newspaper, The Herald. As editor of the state-owned Bulawayo Chronicle in 1989, he helped to break the "Willowgate" scandal, which resulted in several resignations from the cabinet of President Robert Mugabe.

The Tablet is a Catholic newspaper published in the interest of the Diocese of Brooklyn. It has circulated in Brooklyn and Queens, New York, since 1908. Its website, thetablet.org, serves the greater Catholic populace.

The Roman Catholic Metropolitan Archdiocese of Cape Town is a Latin archdiocese of the Roman Catholic Church in Cape Town, in the south-western part of South Africa. The archdiocese's motherchurch and its archbishop's see is the cathedral of St. Mary of the Flight into Egypt, who is also the archbishopric's patron.

Catholic News Service (CNS) is an American news agency owned by the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops (USCCB) that reports on the Catholic Church.

<i>Alive!</i> (newspaper)

Alive! is a free monthly publication in the style of a newspaper which has been produced since its first edition in 1996 by Alive Group, an organisation with an address at the Dominican Order St Mary's Priory, Tallaght in Dublin, Republic of Ireland. The current editor is a Catholic priest, Fr Brian McKevitt, who refers to the publication as a 'newszine'. While it claims a circulation of 240,000 copies, its actual readership is difficult to establish since a substantial portion of its circulation is delivered door-to-door, with most of the remainder being available through Ireland's network of Catholic churches. It is printed by Datascope, an independent publishing company in Enniscorthy and contains an appeal in each issue for donations totalling €160,000 annually to remain in circulation.

Pierre Denzil Meuli was a writer, former newspaper editor, Roman Catholic priest of the Diocese of Auckland and a leading traditionalist Catholic in New Zealand. In 1969 Meuli was appointed editor of the newspaper, Zealandia, by Archbishop Liston of Auckland in a controversial episode accompanying the profound changes to the Catholic Church in New Zealand engendered by the second Vatican Council. For nearly 30 years from 1989 he ministered to the Auckland Catholic Latin Mass community.

<i>Arkansas Catholic</i>

Arkansas Catholic is an American weekly newspaper and the official publication of the Roman Catholic Diocese of Little Rock. Founded in 1911 as The Southern Guardian, it was renamed the Arkansas Catholic in 1986. Today it has a circulation of 7,000.

Political activity of the Catholic Church on LGBT issues

The political activity of the Catholic Church on LGBT issues consists of efforts made by the Catholic Church to support or oppose civil government legislation on issues of importance to LGBT people. The Church generally condemns all forms of violence against gay and lesbian people and all criminal penalties against them. However, the Church in certain countries has occasionally resisted efforts to decriminalize homosexuality or to introduce measures to tackle discrimination. The Catholic Church also supports legally defining marriage in civil legislation as the union of one man and one woman, therefore generally opposing efforts to introduce gay civil unions and gay marriage – although some clergymen have expressed support for same-sex unions. The Church teaches that not all discrimination is "unjust," and that sometimes the rights of individuals, including gay men and women, can be limited.

Dabula Anthony Mpako is a South African prelate of the Catholic Church who was appointed as the Archbishop of Pretoria on 30 April 2019. His installation was celebrated on the following 22 June. He was also appointed as the Military Bishop of South Africa. He was Bishop of Queenstown from 2011 to 2019.

Michael Theodore Hayes Auret was a Zimbabwean farmer, politician, and activist. A devout Catholic, he served as chairman and later director of the Catholic Commission for Justice and Peace in Zimbabwe (CCJP) from 1978 until 1999. He also served as a member of Parliament for Harare Central from 2000 to 2003, when he resigned and emigrated to Ireland.

Abel Gabuza was a South African prelate of the Catholic Church who was Archbishop Coadjutor of the Archdiocese of Durban from 9 December 2018 and until his death in 2021. He was Bishop of Kimberley from 2010 to 2018.

References

  1. "Catholic Illiteracy?"
  2. “Pleas to Church on condoms”, BBC, 17 July 2001.
  3. Bird, Mary Ann; Noble, Kate (30 July 2001). "WorldWatch". Time. Archived from the original on 30 October 2010.
  4. "Mugabe in the Vatican". The Southern Cross. 18 May 2011.
  5. “Catholic paper: Dictator's Vatican welcome undermined Zimbabwe bishops” Catholic News Service , 19 May 2011
  6. "Mugabe's communion angers Africa". Vatican Insider. 10 June 2011.
  7. "Africa's anti-gay laws". The Southern Cross. 29 January 2014.
  8. "No to laws that discriminate homosexuals". Agenzia Fides. 29 January 2014.
  9. "South Africa: Catholic bishops' newspaper calls for an end to laws that criminalise homosexuals". Vatican Insider. 30 January 2014.
  10. Günther Simmermacher (6 March 2014). "Southern Cross history – Part 1: Founding a Catholic newspaper". The Southern Cross. Retrieved 6 June 2017.
  11. "The Holy Land Trek"
  12. "Church Chuckles: The Big Book of Catholic Jokes"