Father Albert Nolan – a non-believer remembers

I first met Albert Nolan when I emerged from prison in 1983. I was then a communist, although it was illegal to be one and I didn’t admit that in public or in private. And I was an atheist. It was not compulsory to be an atheist in the Communist Party. There were many members who were believers in Christianity and other belief systems. But I was not one of those. I was an atheist, and I did not then understand how much I could learn from someone like Albert Nolan, or other believers.

Atheism is not a belief system in the sense that it conducts missionary activities or actively propagates its denial of the existence of a Superior Being like a religious or political doctrine. In my case, I simply did not believe and my atheism only needed to be articulated when I was asked to swear an oath and chose to “affirm”. It is just how I understood that aspect of my life.

I grew up in a Jewish household, which was not very devout, and I did not know very much about Judaism or any other religion.

Until late in life, I did not understand what a disadvantage I was at in not drawing on the insights of a range of religions, especially in the developments that had been occurring during the 20th century with the emergence of liberation and feminist theologies.

In fact, it is only in the 21st century that I’ve come to grapple with some of the insights that I’ve derived from these teachings. I was fortunate in this journey to benefit from discussions with Father Albert Nolan and also the late Chris Langefeld, with both of whom I formed close relationships which were based on shared understandings and values.

Chris was a Catholic priest ministering to the Phiri parish in Soweto. (He left the Catholic Church in 1996 because he had fallen in love and married Barbara Gilbee in 1998. He died in 2017.) Although Chris had left the Catholic Church and was a parish priest in the Anglican Church, he and Albert were inseparable and Chris remained involved in the Catholic Church.

Our discussions – with Albert or together with or separately with Chris – also related to our analysis of the situation in the country, what non-believers, perhaps especially Marxists, would call the current conjuncture, and what Albert, Chris and other believers would call “reading the signs of the times”. As Albert put it in his book, Jesus Today, to be a prophet, or to be prophetic is not to forecast the future or be a fortune teller, but to understand what is happening at any particular moment, to read the “signs of the time”. A lot of my discussions with Albert and Chris were related to this analysis.

When I first met Albert, it was at a distance because although we had a cordial relationship, I was not engaging theological questions, and I did not appreciate what I had to gain from such works.

And I did not know that Albert was one of the foremost liberation theologians, or theologians in general, in the world. He was, as I saw it, simply a comrade who was a priest. Equally, when I spoke to other priests, like Reverend Frank Chikane, and interviewed him about the Freedom Charter, I had not yet developed adequate respect for his specific belief system. I just wanted to harness his support for the Freedom Charter as a member of a constituency that carried weight in a time of contestation with other political trends. I did not show adequate respect but had also not yet learnt what I had to gain from their belief systems.

Albert’s book, Jesus Before Christianity, had gone into its 25th reprint about 10 years ago. I gather from Father Michael Lapsley that it is being republished as a theological classic this year. As a theologian, he was a bestselling author and this work was prescribed in a range of educational institutions, not only Catholic ones. I had no understanding of this. I didn’t appreciate that he was not simply a conventional priest, university pastor or something of that kind.

I did not then know that Albert had been elected to the position of Master of the Dominican Order in 1983. He asked to be released from this prestigious position because it would have meant being based in the Order’s Rome headquarters. He believed his duty was to remain with the people of South Africa and the Dominican Order agreed to his request.

Open to everything