HOLY CROSS PARISH

ORDINATION DAY

ON THE 5TH OF DECEMBER 2010

Ordination day was a successful event. All the priests were ordained, and the Bishop emphasised unity in Christ to help one another, to pray for one another, to love one another, and he encouraged the congregation to support their priests.

He told them that "...do you not know that your body is a temple of the Holy Spirit, who is in you, whom you have received from God? You are not your own; you were bought at a high price. Therefore honour God with your body."

YOUTH OF HOLY CROSS PARISH

At the moment we are busy visiting sick people at Holy Cross Hospital, making sure the community area is very clean; we give to people who are in need of clothes, so we are collecting clothes for them, as well as food to make sure that they have something to eat. We also feed children through our soup kitchen.

Parish Youth Council is visiting outstations within the Holy Cross Parish, talking about HIV and AIDS. Our main topics are:

1. How to deal with HIV and AIDS as a young person living in a rural area
2. How to prevent HIV and AIDS as a young person living in a rural area
3. Purification as a young person living in a rural area
4. Abstinence is a guarantee
5. Giving
6. Stress free generation
7. Listening skills eg (family problems can affect our relationship with God) We are there to listen to other people's problems
8. Promoting testing eg HIV and AIDS, TB, within the premises of the church.

On the 21st of December 2010, the Parish youth will be at the hospital giving patients Christmas. We will be singing christmas carols and enacting Bible stories for them. From 26 to 29 December 2010 we will be holding the Young Disciples Conference at Nompumalanga at Bizana. All the young people are invited. On the 31st of December we will be holding a closing ceremony until the 1st January 2011 at Holy Cross Parish.

ABOUT HOLY CROSS DAY

Here are the highlights of everything, and these are short. Wait until 2011, when we will be celebrating 100 years.

All the programmes were there to perform their duties eg Home Affairs assisted people who do not have identity documents and birth certificates, the Health Department to test for HIV, AIDS and TB.

We are about to finish our new book titled 'Long Journey of Missionaries in Eastern Pondoland'. Then see for yourself how we celebrate this day. Holy Cross Heritage Day is all about the history of the Amampondo.

How it started:
Back in 1911 the Paramount Chief, Chief Sigcau, was invited by Callaway to make an official opening of the Mission. In his opening speech the great man said “Pondos here are your missionaries. You must support them.”

Sadly enough, the drought and the outbreak of East Coast Fever brought the work of the missionaries to a standstill, should we say it was to test the missionaries themselves, and Callaway concentrated on fundraising to support starving children for a very long time.

Dr. Drewe himself said of the Holy Cross mission: “Here has been one of the centres of the battle for Christianity: there is no doubt about that right through, running through it's whole history. It has never been a place of peace and quiet….but one intense battle.”

Callaway was the leader of the mission, and the first thing he did when he got there, I suppose he was inspired to do so, but he cut down a tree, made a cross, and put it in that valley, and that was the start of this mission.

I cannot tell you the exact date, but when they had decided that this was to be the place where they would start, the next day they saddled their horses and left their wagon where they were and rode to the Great Place.

There they saw the famous old Chief Sigcau. He was a tremendously big man; I have seen a picture; it is there in the great place now. He must have been well over six feet four inches. He met them very sympathetically when they said what they had come to do; they had come to establish a Mission to bring the Gospel to the people.

This old gentleman, seeing the main chance said, “Right, you can have your Mission, but I want a school and a hospital as well.” And they made their agreement and said as far as they could do so, they would see that he got his school and hospital.

The story told above is as Dr. Drewe told it, but it seems that the Bishop and others had already decided that the time had come to start a new Pondoland Mission.

The African preachers who worked with Dobbs realized that St Andrew’s (a site which Bishop Callaway had spotted for the building of the Cathedral) was an unsuitable centre and had already petitioned the Bishop to move the headquarters, and Walter Leary had spent a long time riding round looking for a suitable site before the day they all set off together from Ntlaza.

Thus many factors led to the foundation of Holy Cross. The important thing is that the men were ready when the time was ripe. Bishop Watkin Williams had laid down certain conditions that should be fulfilled in the choosing of a site: “It must be amongst the people and away from other missions; it must be healthy; there must be grazing and water and land for ploughing.”

The East Pondoland Mission was established in 1911 and named the Mission of the Holy Cross and was officially opened by Chief Sigcau. In the later years, after the opening of the mission, the old chief became incurably ill and told Walter Leary, the Archdeacon, that he wanted to became a full member of the church.

A few years down the line, the church Holy Cross had 165 candidates to be confirmed, four villages and 140,000 people to care for.

King Sigcawu, through the Bishop of Glasgow, appealed to the people of Scotland, specifically the society for the propagation of the gospel, for a Doctor to establish a mission in Pondoland. His request was for a mission that would care for people mentally, physically and spiritually.

The society for the propagation of the gospel asked a newly qualified doctor and clergyman if he would undertake the challenge of establishing a new mission hospital and train nurses in eastern Pondoland. Dr. Drewe accepted the challenge with a £100 of collection and arrived in Pondoland by horse with his young wife and child to start a mission from scratch. So the establishment of what became a major medical centre for Pondoland began.

Holy Cross Mission was supported entirely by the church. Funds were raised in England to send doctors, nurses and teachers to the mission and to build hospital wards and a school.

It’s almost a hundred years ago Anglican missionaries were granted a 15 morgen site about 24 km east of Flagstaff, 46 km to the Mkhambathi Coastal Game Resort on the picturesque Pondoland Wild Coast.

This Land was granted to the church primary for missionaries (Gospel spreading) purpose. However, need demanded that the two other vehicles of the gospel visit, the school and the hospital, were soon started by the pioneer missionary Dr. Drewe, this done entirely through the efforts of the church.

When the government of Transkei was established, it took over the hospital and the school, leaving only the church and the priest's house to the mission. During this time, however, no rent was paid for any of the buildings and little if no renovation was undertaken on the buildings.

Subsequently new buildings have been erected. The school built by the mission, where Oliver Tambo started his education, has been demolished and the church has received no compensation whatsoever for any of the buildings taken over by the Hospital.

These institutions (church, hospital and school) all worked harmoniously under the auspices of the church with great support from overseas religious and philanthropic bodies. For example, a trust fund to support missionary and development work was started.

This was administered by the Holy Cross Hospital Board whose Chairperson had always been the Rector or Priest in charge of Holy Cross Mission. The school with its boarding facilities was run by the church under its discipline. The good name of the school attracted pupils from all over the former Transkei and beyond.

Holy Cross boasts itself of having been the breeding cradle for such big names as the late O. R. TAMBO. He was baptized, confirmed and passed his higher primary education at Holy Cross. Needless to say, early in 1993, O.R. Tambo find his way back to Holy Cross where he had a peaceful sleep in the Rectory and the early morning bells woke him up to an early morning Eucharist in a place which bred him.

The church used to access the trust funds money especially for capital works such as building houses and maintaining the picturesque old gothic style church hall - one of only three such designs in South Africa.

Ties between the church and the hospital began to weaken when, first the apartheid regime in the 1950’s, Transkei self-rule (1973) and independence (1976), the state started to unilaterally seize/grab the hospitals and schools from the control of the church missionaries.

The church investments and improvements on these institutions were never compensated. In Holy Cross in particular the church suffered a lot in losing all its investments, as it was not only systematically robbed of the hospital!

Premises taken from the church’s original allocation of 15 Morgan but still after the fall of apartheid has been systematically elbowed out of the trust houses it built and other residence and Post Offices which were meant not only to be a source of support to the church but also a service to the community and the hospital.

About five years ago the remaining portion of the church land was claimed by the surrounding community ostensibly for an Agricultural Project which two years later completely collapsed into a wild wattle plantation.

Of the original 15 Morgan granted to the church last copy of permission-to-occupy certificate having been in 1971, the church now remains with only about a quarter Morgan; the bigger portion of the land and properties having been lost to Holy Cross Hospital.

As I am talking to you know our very own History was destroyed - the Scholl which was built by missionaries was destroyed without consulting any one in the church.

Where is humanity?

Our wish as a Holy Cross youth is to bring back missionary schools - look at the leaders who were groomed by missioneries eg OR Tambo, Mrs N Luswazi, advocate F Bam (Land Claim) and Mrs B Bam (IEC) and other older leaders like Tata Holihlahla Mandela - and you could see the way they talk; you can see that they were groomed by Christians. If we can bring back missionary schools, imagine the leaders of tomorrow; they would have respect and they would never insult the older leaders or adults.

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