Father Huddleston's Breaking Point

...The Church must slay out of polities...

...This is the voice of Vichy...

...Consequently, it is the outside world that he addresses in Naught for Your Comfort a book which, though hastily written, nevertheless conveys a forceful message long pent up which suffers from no lack of eloquence...

...Only the outside world can now do that...

...This book brings home, more forcefully perhaps than any other has yet done, the fact that we ignore the South African situation at our peril...

...Must the Church always bend over backward to adopt a conciliatory attitude in its dealings with the Government...

...Was it when his school principal, Mr...

...About the Church he is even more biting...

...Was it when one of his parishioners, arrested under the infamous pass laws, was kicked in the stomach in police cells, so that he died, leaving a widow and a month-old baby...

...Regarding the official political opposition, he finds himself in agreement with the South African Prime Minister that it is "like a banana: without a backbone and slightly crooked...

...Oh, no, Your Grace," Huddle-ston replies, "we cannot stand aside...

...Was it when a schoolboy, home for the holidays, had his pass torn up before his eyes...

...If the Church fails on the color question now, she will never have a second opportunity...

...Here, at least, the issue is clear-cut...

...His scorn and irony, however, are reserved not for the staunch upholders of apartheid, but for those who compromise with it out of fear...

...It was an earlier Father Huddleston who received Charles II (that wayward English king) into the Catholic Church on his deathbed...

...Reviewed by Keith Irvine Editor, "Africa Today" Benedetto Croce once remarked that, whether or not we ourselves are Christians, we cannot avoid recognizing that Western civilization has been built upon the foundation of the Christian Church...

...says the Vrchbishop of Canterbury...

...Small wonder that Huddleston has found himself in conflict with the hierarchy of the Church of England that same church of which Karl Marx once remarked that it would rather forswear all its Thirty-Nine Articles than abandon one thirty-ninth part of its income...

...This awareness led to words and to action this in turn led to counterattacks by the South African authorities and, late last year, Father Huddleston was recalled by his order to his native England...

...He left convinced that it is now impossible to mobilize forces within South Africa powerful enough to change the course of events...

...Strategically as well as morally, this is a situation which can no longer pass unchallenged...

...While the ecclesiastical language of the book may prove an irritant to some, it must not be forgotten that a Huddleston would find it hard to escape from this tradition...

...A man, they say, is known by the company he keeps...

...Was it when armed police broke into a legal meeting and made arrests without rhyme or reason...

...What it does not tell is when his moment of ultimate revolt arrived...

...However, contact with the ubiquitous Michael Scott a slightly older man, whom he met in 1946 when the latter was living among the shacks of "Tobruk" where "hundreds of families lived and hundreds of babies died" helped him further along the road which led from tacit acquiescence in racial injustice to uncompromising opposition...

...Mokoetsi, was stabbed to death by a 19-year-old boy, driven to become a "tsotsi" (delinquent) by the conditions around him...

...Or was it when the authorities arrived with 2,000 armed men to evict Africans from the only suburb in Johannesburg where they could own freehold land and to tear down their homes...

...Was it when the South African Government refused to give young Stephen Rama-sodi a passport for America to get an education, on the grounds that "it would not be in the best interests of the boy...

...Today, while Huddleston's attitude is no different from that of Scott, the temperamental differences between them make Huddleston appeal to the conscience of the West by every means, including the megaphone, while Scott relies on the "still small voice...

...the fundamental quality of all African housing schemes must remain impermanenee...

...Verwoerd put through the Bantu Education Act to limit African education to education for servitude...

...Throughout the uncommitted nations of the world, the West is notorious for the support that it has given and is giving to the Union of South Africa...

...Soott's appeal is particularly directed to individuals in power, Huddleston's to the public at large...

...Nor are Huddlestons strangers to authority: Trevor Huddleston's father at one time commanded the Royal Indian Navy...

...Was it when six men came back from work to find the roofs torn off their homes and their families huddled round a brazier in the street, their babies crying from cold...

...Was it when he realized that official policy was to make it impossible for any African, whatever his wealth or position, to own his own home that, whatever the backlog in African housing might be...

...In effect, Naught for Your Comfort tells the story of Huddleston's 12 years in a Johannesburg suburb...

...Was it when Dr...

...It was, therefore, not in any lightly considered fashion that Trevor Huddleston raised his voice...

...Like a mighty army moves the Church of God," he quotes satirically...

...Who knows at what point in the long, unfinished tale the breaking point came and one man said to himself: "Enough...

...None would agree with him more than Father Trevor Huddleston, who, in 12 years spent in the Union of South Africa, became increasingly aware of the responsibility of the Church for the society to which it belongs and which, presumably, should belong to it...