Raymond Perrier's blog

With much noise and expenditure and traffic confusion the ANC last weekend marked its centenary.  100 years ago the movement was founded in a small Methodist church in Bloemfontein; the current generation of ANC leaders gathered to celebrate in a large football stadium in Mangaung – what a difference 100 years can make.

The Church marks the first day of the New Year with the feast of Mary, Mother of God.  This is one of the oldest and also most controversial titles of Mary.  Early Christians found it hard to believe that the human Jesus can also have been God.  One idea which was rejected as heresy was that He stopped being God in order to become human and then became divine again after the Ascension.  After all, it was argued, if Jesus remained God while on earth then Mary was not just the mother of Jesus but also the mother of God.  The Council of Ephesus in 431AD decreed that this was indeed true and by giving Mary the title of ‘Theotokos’ (literally ‘the one who gives birth to God’) they were making a statement as much about the nature of Jesus as about the nature of Mary. 

To celebrate the 50^th anniversary of Vatican II, and to help deepen our understanding of it, our large network of Catholic organisations has taken the name ‘Hope&Joy’, from the Vatican II document ‘Gaudium et Spes’.  This document has the subtitle the ‘Pastoral Constitution of the Church in the Modern World’ and is one half of a pair, its twin being the ‘Dogmatic Constitution of the Church’ or ‘Lumen Gentium’.  And that Latin phrase means ‘the Light of the Nations’.

The media has been saturated this last week with coverage of the UN Conference on Climate Change taking place in Durban – popularly known as COP17.  Perhaps you were hoping that church would be one place you could escape from all the ‘greenwash’.  After all, isn’t interest in the planet just something for a few eco-warriors, tree-huggers and vegetarians? Who else cares about the planet?

“May this greeting rise as a new spark of divine love in our hearts to produce in the Church and in the world a renewal of thoughts, activities, conduct, moral force and hope and joy which was the very scope of the Council.”

50 years ago a Pope, whom many thought would be just an interim caretaker, called the Second Vatican Council and started a change in the Church which we are still only beginning to live out. In 1961, Blessed John XIII announced that the would be "opening the windows of the Church so that we can look out and others can look in".

Those of us who woke up in Gauteng on Wednesday to the mother of all deluges might have been forgiven for thinking that the end of the world – that was supposed to have happened on 21^st May – had just been delayed by 18 days.  Wind, rain, lightning, hail, darkness, and then more rain – all of Biblical proportions.  I was surprised not to see a wooden ark being erected at Zoo Lake and the animals being rescued two-by-two. 

From the cow to the farmer, from the farmer to the dairy, from the dairy to the store, from the store to my fridge. The way in which we get our milk is called by economists a ‘value chain’ – and at each step of the chain people are adding value and making money.

This week the Competition Commission ruled that the world’s largest public company (Walmart) can buy a majority stake in one of SA’s most successful retailers, Massmart. This news should matter not just to financial pundits but also to ordinary South Africans.

I wake up this morning exhausted after a 17 hour-day at the elections.  Not, I emphasise because there was such a long queue.  But because I was acting as an independent election observer (part of a group mobilised by the South African Council of Churches).  In fact, I did not vote because, as a British citizen, I could not.  The generosity with which the UK extends the right-to-vote to Commonwealth citizens resident there, is not a privilege granted reciprocally by other members of the Commonwealth, South Africa included.

By the time he died, Pope John Paul II was the most recognisable religious figure on the planet. His funeral is said to have been the most watched Church service in history.

Of course, the same might have happened to any man who was Pope for 26 years in the multimedia age. The Catholic Church is truly global and so the media gave the Pope global coverage.   But John Paul was not just a passive pawn in the media game.  Cometh the hour, cometh the man.  ‘JP 2’ had a raft of assets which fitted him perfectly to be the media Pope. He was photogenic, outgoing, energetic (until his final years), a natural actor and – as the first non-Italian Pope since the 16^th Century – exotic.