Inside a couple of hours of learning of the death of Albert Nolan, O.P., I used to be in conversation about him with Dominican friends, fellow Jesuits and one formerly high-ranking member of the South African Communist Party, who recalled how Father Nolan helped him higher understand Christianity and what faith might mean.
Those that knew Albert, as his friends and confrères called him, mustn’t be surprised.
Father Nolan, who died within the early hours of Oct. 17, was a remarkable figure within the South African Catholic Church. A world-renowned, even bestselling, theologian and an activist against apartheid, he was a humble, easygoing person—until he began to evangelise or lecture.
Father Nolan sought during his tenure to assist white Catholic students discover a way of working with their Black colleagues for the common goal of ending apartheid.
Born in Cape Town in 1934 in a lower middle-class family of Irish extraction, young Dennis Nolan worked as a bank clerk after ending school until he joined the Order of Preachers in 1954. Taking the name Albert, he accomplished his studies for the priesthood at St. Nicholas Priory in Stellenbosch, near Cape Town, before completing doctoral studies on the Pontifical University of Saint Thomas Aquinas, the Angelicum, in Rome.
Because he considered the associated fee of publishing his thesis a waste of cash, the degree was never conferred. Undeterred, he returned to South Africa to show theology on the Dominican house of studies from which he had graduated. He combined his teaching with serving as chaplain to Catholic students on the overwhelmingly white and Afrikaans-speaking Stellenbosch University.
He would also within the Nineteen Seventies onward function a chaplain and advisor to the Young Christian Students and Young Christian Employees. His fame as a preacher grew. Occasionally he even had opportunities to evangelise on national radio.
Father Nolan’s responsibilities as chaplain broadened in 1973 when he was made National Chaplain of the National Catholic Federation of Students, at a time when even liberal-minded student movements were in ferment generated by the rise of the Black Consciousness movement. Began in 1969 by the late Steve Biko, the movement encouraged black pride and self-reliance, with a view to political liberation.
This movement split quite a few student groups, including N.C.F.S., when Black students—a minority within the country’s university system, but the vast majority of South Africans—felt they’d no real voice even in progressive but predominantly white organizations. Father Nolan, who was familiar by that stage with the Black Consciousness movement, sought during his tenure to assist white Catholic students discover a way of working with their Black colleagues for the common goal of ending apartheid.
Albert challenged through his writings and his life an entire generation of Catholic students and young Catholic men and ladies religious of many orders.
His specific contribution at this stage was theological. Prompted by a gathering within the mid-Nineteen Seventies with liberation theologian Gustavo Gutierrez (who would himself later turn out to be a Dominican), Father Nolan gave a series of lectures on the historical Jesus to 2 N.C.F.S. national conferences, which he later was a book published in 1976 as Jesus Before Christianity.
After a small print run from an area publisher, the book was picked up by theological publishers in the UK and United States. It became certainly one of the bestselling theological texts of the last 100 years and remains to be in print.
A synthesis of contemporary Anglo-German Christology and liberation theology, it presented a give attention to the human, activist Jesus of Nazareth. It has been a textbook in lots of Catholic and Protestant theology faculties, including Harvard Divinity School, since. James Martin, S.J., editor at large for America Media, recalls reading it in his novitiate. He said it helped him see the truly human side of Jesus. Generations of Catholic and Protestant students in South Africa,who were coping with tips on how to reconcile faith and political commitment, read this seminal work.
I too read it in 1986, aged 20, while involved with N.C.F.S. and dealing through the potential of a vocation. I subsequently met Father Nolan, who became almost immediately “Albert,” a mentor and friend.
By the early Nineteen Eighties, Father Nolan was provincial of the Dominicans in Southern Africa, which necessitated a move to Johannesburg. While in Johannesburg, he helped to found the Institute for Contextual Theology, an ecumenical network of pastors and theologians engaged within the struggle against apartheid. This brought together white and Black university professors and clergy in South Africa’s townships who had embraced Black Consciousness (which had been suppressed as a movement in 1977).
As a gaggle, they developed Contextual Theology—a synthesis of Black and Liberation Theology. Politically the climate of resistance had shifted. The exiled African National Congress was gaining a recent public voice. Internally, recent civil organizations and trade unions broadly sympathetic to the principles of non-racialism and social democracy of the A.N.C. were emerging. The institute became a theological voice of this social evolution within the church.
Jesus Before Christianity became certainly one of the bestselling theological texts of the last 100 years.
Midway through all this, in 1983 Father Nolan was elected master general of the Order of Preachers. In an unprecedented move in Dominican history, he politely turned down the appointment, believing that his work in South Africa would serve the Gospel more.
Returning to South Africa, in the last decade of apartheid’s endgame, Father Nolan threw himself into his work. Crucial to this era was his involvement in drafting and editing the 1985 Kairos Document, a call from pastors and theologians to the churches of South Africa to completely embrace the struggle for democracy and to place their institutions on the service of nonviolent resistance. Although the institutions responded uneasily to Kairos, criticizing (perhaps accurately) the representation of themselves within the text, by the tip of the Nineteen Eighties the churches the truth is took a number one role in nonviolent motion.
Meanwhile inside the Catholic Church, though he was controversial, Father Nolan was a significant resource for the Southern African Justice and Peace Commission, advising the bishops on public statements and even at one point visiting and reporting on the state of the church in Communist countries. (The report has never been published!)
Throughout the State of Emergency, 1985 through February 1990, in South Africa—the start of the tip for apartheid—Father Nolan’s life took further dramatic turns. For some time, he was in hiding, hunted by the safety police who desired to detain him without trial for his work on the Kairos document.
Father Nolan saw a chance and wrote his second major book, God in South Africa, literally on the run. It was published in 1988. This work, in some ways his most radical, analyzed the South African situation from a perspective very near the A.N.C.’s understanding and argued that hope lay within the very struggle for freedom that the A.N.C. and other internal resistance moments committed to non-racial democracy were waging.
Father Nolan wrote his second major book, God in South Africa, literally on the run.
As South Africa moved towards democracy within the Nineteen Nineties, Father Nolan, perceiving that the hope created by the 1994 election could easily be dashed by government corruption and a too-easy acceptance of unbridled neoliberal capitalism, edited a radical ecumenical Christian journal, Challenge. In between his Dominican duties—he served three terms as provincial in addition to becoming novice master—Father Nolan continued writing and speaking. The fruits of this were two more books, Jesus Today: A Spirituality of Radical Freedom in 2006 and Hope in an Age of Despair: And Other Talks and Writings in 2009.
Father Nolan has been each honored and vilified. Due to his fame as a liberation theologian, his award of an honorary doctorate from Fribourg University was blocked in 1990, but Regis College, University of Toronto, went ahead and awarded him one in the identical 12 months. In 2003, President Thabo Mbeki awarded him the Order of Luthuli in silver for his contribution to the struggle for human rights and dignity.
He was in the primary group to receive this award that honored not only political figures, but other South Africans whose social, cultural or mental lives promoted the values espoused by the brand new democracy. And in 2008, Dominican Master General Carlos Aspiroz, O.P., conferred on him the order’s master of theology.
The list of achievements in Father Nolan’s life is considerable, but in some ways, Albert Nolan would have been the primary one to shrink back from such honors. He was genuinely humble. He turned down university posts in South Africa and elsewhere. I do know, for instance, that within the Nineteen Eighties the University of Cape Town wanted him to be professor of Catholic Studies of their Religious Studies Department. Not bad for somebody who officially never got his Ph.D.
I recall too once begging him to write down his memoirs, a request asked of him by many Dominicans too. He smiled humbly and suggested that is perhaps the work of another person. On occasions after I’ve visited him, I discovered him sitting with the young friars, just certainly one of the group—a really Dominican Dominican.
For those of us who usually are not Dominicans, Albert’s witness too was considerable. Albert challenged through his writings and his life an entire generation of Catholic students and young Catholic men and ladies religious of many orders.
I discussed, earlier, his Communist friend. That was common, definitely not within the dramatic Nineteen Seventies and Nineteen Eighties where religious beliefs and political ideologies blurred around what side you took in South Africa. This was the great side to bad times. Albert would say that this was a present-day expression of Jesus’ “kingdom/reign of God” and an indication of hope.
May his memory encourage us all to hope and struggle onwards in recent times for that reign.
Correction:This text has been updated to make clear that although he was elected master general of the Order of Preachers in 1983, Father Nolan declined to serve in that role, owing to his desire to stay in South Africa at the moment.