Archbishop of Johannesburg Focuses on the Transmission of the Faith

South Africa is a country of 51.7 million people. Of these, 73.2% are Protestants, 7.4% Catholics, 1.7% Muslims, and 14.9% say they are “agnostic.”

Msgr. Buti Tlhagale is Archbishop of Johannesburg, a position he has held since 2007, when he was appointed by Pope Benedict XVI.

This Oblate of Mary Immaculate (OMI) confided in a group of missionaries in an interview relayed by the Fides agency, on September 20, 2021, on the evils that his country is going through, which has the dubious honor of having a particularly high crime rate in Africa.

The first project concerns the youth, whose living conditions and moral state are deplorable: deprived of work, “young people sleep in the streets, lose their dignity, beg for food, to the point where we should not be surprised by their abnormal behavior,” explains the archbishop.

The prelate then comes to wonder about the role of the laity in South African society: are they sufficiently “moved by faith to try to transform our society and thus meet the expectations of the population,” he asks himself, skeptically.

For Msgr. Tlhagale, the transmission of the faith is at the heart of the problem, in a society still marked by ancestral pagan religion: “the ancestral religion is mixed with the Christian faith even by Catholics, including some priests and nuns,” deplores the prelate.

The cure? Archbishop Tlhagale sees it in doctrinal formation: “we must put more emphasis on catechism for adults, which is almost non-existent, because after the sacrament of Confirmation, the faithful stop studying and deepening the teachings of the Church,” he notes.