200th anniversary of Church in South Africa
June 20, 2017
In 1818, Pope Pius VII established the Vicariate Apostolic of the Cape of Good Hope, the beginning of the institutional presence of the Church in South Africa. For the previous 150 years, Dutch colonizers had forbidden the practice of the Catholic faith.
On June 25, the Archdiocese of Cape Town will begin a yearlong bicentennial commemoration with a Mass of thanksgiving at the cathedral.
“We owe an immense debt of gratitude that can never be expressed adequately to so many religious congregations for their establishment of schools in our Archdiocese and throughout Southern Africa as a whole, and their invaluable contribution in the field of education during these two hundred years,” the archdiocese’s vicar general said in a statement.
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