Denis Eugene Hurley, OMI OMSG (9 November 1915 – 13 February 2004) was a South African Catholic prelate who served as Vicar Apostolic of Natal from 1946 to 1951 and as Archbishop of Durban from 1951 to 1992.
Denis Hurley was born in Cape Town to Irish parents, spending his early years on Robben Island, where his father was the lighthouse keeper.
[1] Educated at St Charles College in Pietermaritzburg, Natal, he joined the Missionary Oblates of Mary Immaculate (OMI) in 1931 and in the following year was sent to Ireland for his novitiate.
During the council, Hurley wrote a series of anonymous articles for the South African Catholic weekly newspaper "The Southern Cross".
In recounting its informal cycle of lectures, workshops and long evenings of debates over dinner with interested members of the clergy and laity, Hurley observed that the presence of so many scholars who had been called to Rome to assist with the work of Vatican II had created "the greatest project of adult education ever held in the world.
Frederick McManus of Catholic University in Washington led to a plan that a number of English speaking conferences would join together to prepare a single text for proposed use all over the world.
Hurley frequently registered his disappointment at the reorganisation of ICEL under the auspices of the newly established Vatican office Vox Clara, as mandated by Pope John Paul II's instruction Liturgiam authenticam.
According to Anthony Egan, "Prohibited during Dutch rule, coolly tolerated by the British, and treated with intense suspicion after the Union of South Africa in 1910, the Church was (unsurprisingly) cautious in challenging apartheid.
With the majority of its clergy foreign-born and thus vulnerable to deportation, it was encouraged even by the Vatican to ‘play it safe’ after the 1948 National Party election victory.
[8] In the late 1970s Hurley held a daily silent protest, standing in front of the central Durban Post Office for a period each day with a placard expressing his opposition to apartheid and the displacement of people from their homes.
Due to his commitment to social justice, the Denis Hurley Peace Institute, an associate body of the Southern African Catholic Bishops Conference, was named in his honour.
[11] The final article to be published in his lifetime was a guest editorial in the Christmas 2003 edition of "The Southern Cross", headlined "God's special gift to us".
[13] Hurley died as he was being driven back to the Oblate retirement community in Durban after a celebration of the 50th anniversary of a school at whose dedication he had presided as a young archbishop.
[2] Hurley received the following honours during his lifetime: According to Gerald Shaw writing for The Guardian, "It was in part due to his sustained moral crusade and that of other churchmen that the transition to democracy, when it came in 1994, was accepted by white people in peace and good order.
[12] The Centre is planned as home to about a dozen projects to provide medical care, a soup kitchen, job training, support for people living with HIV/AIDS and in particular will offer assistance to refugees, migrants, who have reached South Africa from afar afield as Somalia, Zimbabwe and the Democratic Republic of Congo.