"Wonderfully Affirmed" Says Tutu of Visit
Episcopal News Service. April 7, 1983 [83057]
NEW YORK (DPS, April 7 ) -- "We were wonderfully affirmed by all our friends from overseas," Anglican Bishop Desmond Tutu, general secretary of the South African Council of Churches said in a telephone conversation after a team of Anglican church leaders had spent five days in South Africa on behalf of Tutu and the Council which is the subject of a government inquiry that has the power to shut down much of its activities.
Tutu told Church Center staff officers that" we were greatly supported by the five members of the team who not only came to us in Holy Week but also appeared and offered evidence before the Eloff Commission" (the investigating panel)
Archbishop of Canterbury Robert Runcie had assembled the visiting team upon the request of Tutu and South Africa's Anglican Primate, Archbishop Phillip Russell. " In these circumstances we felt we had to demonstrate that in touching Desmond Tutu, you touch for better or for worse, somebody who is a member not only of the South African Council of Churches, but the episcopate of a worldwide Christian Communion," said Runcie.
The chief of the South African security police, Gen. Johann Coetzee has testified that the Council was cooperating closely with the banned African National Congress; that it does not represent the majority of South Africans and that it was financed by organizations hostile to South Africa. He recommended that it should be declared an "affected organization" and thus prevented from receiving funds from abroad.
Reflecting on that charge, Mrs. Pamela C. Chinnis, a member of the Executive Council of the Episcopal Church who was part of the team told of services at an Anglican church in the Soweto black community of Johannesburg on Palm Sunday.
"At the end of the service," she said, "Bishop Tutu was in the sanctuary with a great number of very young acolytes and they started singing what I later learned was the national anthem. Bishop Tutu sang lustily and the children, staring up at him, sang every verse. I don't think I could sing the national anthem of a country that was oppressing me. It was an extraordinary example of their loyalty to their country."
"If the Council were declared an 'affected organization', and if it were thus effectively silenced," said Terry Waite, Runcie's advisor on interAnglican affairs and a member of the visiting team, "there ware many outside South Africa for whom this would be the final straw." But, asked if it was his impression that the commission represented an attempt to discredit the Council he merely replied that there was an attempt, "rather a clever attempt," to discredit the ecumenical group. He refused to implicate the commission itself.
Chinnis, Waite and the other three members of the visiting team all testified before the Commission. The other members were: the Primus of the Episcopal Churchof Scotland, the Rt. Rev. A.I. M. Haggart, the Archbishop of New Zealand, the Most Rev. Paul Reeves, and Cline Harradance, a lawyer and prolocutor in the Anglican Church of Canada. testified before the Commission.