The Southern African Catholic Bishops Conference and the Pope in Rome serve as the spiritual leaders of the South African Catholic Church, which is one of the 23 Eastern Catholic Churches and the Latin Church that make up the global Catholic Church. With an apostolic vicariate, it consists of 26 dioceses and archdioceses.
History of the church
About 3.3 million Catholics lived in South Africa in 1996, accounting for 6% of the country’s overall population. There are 3.8 million Catholics worldwide right now. Zulu, Xhosa, and Sotho are a few of the different black African ethnic groups that make up the 2.7 million. South Africans of color and white make up about 300,000 each.
Black South Africans have long been the target of Roman Catholic conversion attempts. However, evangelization efforts targeting Afrikaans speakers, who had hitherto been disregarded by Catholic missionaries, started in the 1950s. Up until the mid- to late 1980s, when Apartheid was in its latter stages of collapse, the Afrikaans Apostolate had little success. As Catholic writings were being translated into Afrikaans, friendly Dutch Reformed pastors helped with grammatical corrections in defiance of their church’s longstanding anti-Catholicism.
By 1996, the Coloured population made up the majority of Afrikaans-speaking Catholics, with a smaller number of converts from the Afrikaner language, most of whom were from professional backgrounds.
Classes and origins of the Catholics
The bulk of English-speaking White South African Catholics are descended from Irish immigrants. Others are Portuguese South Africans, many of whom left Mozambique and Angola in the 1970s after countries became independent and descended into civil conflict. Some, such as the Italian community in South Africa, are descended from immigrants from other European nations. The percentage of Catholics among largely Calvinist white Afrikaans speakers or predominantly Hindu or Protestant Asian South Africans is exceptionally low.
