Wynberg, Cape Town, March 1994. It''s summertime and it''s hot. Owen McCann is eighty-six years old. His energy has left him almost entirely, and he spends most of his days asleep in his bed or in his chair, his Breviary slipping away from his hands. He is bone-weary. He can barely carry his tall, heavy frame around. Midmorning he is gently revived out of his slumber by the housekeeper showing in a cheerful and devoted young priest who comes to say Mass for him in his chapel at the appointed, immovable time. The red cassock would have to be put on and buttoned all the way up--and down again--every day, a process that could take up to twenty minutes.

Conversation begins between the two men. That pile of papers on the desk, had it moved since yesterday? Had anything been happening there? There were letters, fragments of memoirs, and his will. One line of his now almost illegible handwriting catches the eye: "The plain small pectoral cross should be retained, as it belonged formerly to Bishop Grimley." Thomas Grimley (1821-71) was the second resident Catholic bishop of Cape Town. Grimley and his predecessor, Bishop Patrick Griffith (1798-1862), the first two bishops of southern Africa, were Irish. Owen McCann was born in the Cape Colony in 1907, a few years after the end of the Anglo-Boer War (1899-1902) and before the Union of South Africa came into being as a dominion of the British Empire in 1910. He was the son of an Irish emigrant to the Cape Colony, and he attended schools run by Irish religious. Because his life dates (1907-94) arc over the turbulent twentieth century of South African history like a rainbow, because he became his country''s first "Prince of the Church"--a title he repeated to others and to himself with undiminished pride--and because he was in a position to shape the self-understanding of the Catholic Church when churches and governments clashed over the notion of equal human dignity, anyone interested in the developing historiography of racial segregation in South Africa needs to know what it was that the tired old man, once so daunting, firm, and gruff, revered and emulated in those pioneering bishops, Grimley and Griffith, and what it was that he carried from them into his own apostolate.

Was it their Irish clerical culture and pastoral style? Was it their adaptation to South African circumstances? Diaries, memoirs, and correspondence archived in congregations and seminaries offer some insight. Those sources enable readers to concretely appreciate what Irish clergy were instructed to do in South Africa, how they saw their role as Irish missionaries and as clergymen in a country that was being colonized by the British Empire shortly after Ireland was itself subsumed into the United Kingdom by the Act of Union in 1801. A country that was now in a singular situation of dual colonization--Dutch (1652) and British (1806)--superimposing itself on groups of native populations settling in southern Africa at different time periods. Those nineteenth-century sources enable us to form a picture of the Catholic life that those first two Irish bishops tried to create in the Cape Colony with the education, culture, mission, and self-understanding they had received. Because Cape Town is the place where modern South African history begins, it is the meeting place of the various populations landing in that part of the world at various points in time. That unique degree of cosmopolitanism elicited different political projects, ranging from gradual emancipation following the abolition of slavery to immediate empowerment and franchise to separate development. The notion of Cape Town liberalism, or "the Cape Town exception," of the nineteenth century revolves around the window of time when all population groups could live alongside one another on the same terms as they would in the rest of the British Empire. The first two Catholic bishops of Cape Town, Patrick Griffith and Thomas Grimley, had been fully immersed in those realities, which they faced with the limited means and the view of their role as bishops that they brought to South Africa.

Because the Catholic Church is universal and hierarchical, the bishops, and later the apostolic delegate, constantly referred to Rome concerning their attempts to locate and sacramentally tend to the Catholics scattered across that immense territory, and ensure unity of rite. Within the Catholic world itself, local or personal agendas sometimes came to prevail over cura animarum, and the first apostolic delegate had an arduous task achieving unity among the bishops. Correspondence between Ireland, Rome, and South Africa, diaries, recollections, and archives form a repository of memory of foundational experiences, cultural influences, theologies, and social projects, a memory of a lost harmony that had seemed to exist under Bishop Grimley that Owen McCann particularly revered. The following chapters will show how McCann''s lifework was shaped by the desire to recover that lost harmony. (excerpted from Chapter 1).