Dr Alexandra Slaby is an Associate Professor at the University of Caen Normandy where she teaches British, Irish and South African civilization. She is half-South African. She published L’Etat et la culture en Irlande (Caen UP, 2010) prefaced by Michael D. Higgins. She is a former editor of Etudes Irlandaises (2011-2017) and was commissioned to write an Histoire de l'Irlande de 1912 à nos jours (Paris: Tallandier, 2016, 2021). She is now researching Irish Catholic presence in South Africa and writing the first biography of Owen Cardinal McCann.

Abstract

When the Catholic hierarchy was established in 1951, the Catholic Church had an institutional platform from which to begin to undermine the Apartheid regime. Alexandra Slaby shows the under-acknowledged contribution of Owen McCann (1907-1994), archbishop of Cape Town and South Africa’s first cardinal, on the basis of his hitherto unopened archives at the Archdiocese of Cape Town. McCann was born to an Irish father and Australian mother. He is a product of the Irish missionaries – the Irish Dominicans and Irish Marist brothers. As chairman of the South African Bishops’ Conference and cardinal, his denunciation of Apartheid as violating the Christian recognition of the equal dignity of all human beings echoed from the archdiocese to parishes across the country, the Parliament, the government, the Vatican, and his relatives and clerical correspondents all over the English-speaking world.