Holy Trinity Catholic Church in Joburg desecrated in attack

“The question for me,” muses Father Russell Pollitt SJ, the outspoken leader of the Holy Trinity Catholic Church in Braamfontein, “is if people start to feel that they can’t come here – that it’s unsafe even to sit in the church – what does that say about the society that we live in? Where do people actually go any more?”

Pollitt is sitting, looking troubled, in his sun-dappled office overlooking a parking lot in which the unhoused regularly come to receive meals and medical care. Alcoholics Anonymous meetings take place here. Students from the neighbouring Wits University make up a good proportion of the 500-strong congregation that worships in a church regarded as a refuge and a place of peace and comfort for the 90 years it has been serving the downtown Johannesburg community.

That sense of safety was violently disrupted on Thursday, 14 May, shortly before midday mass.

A young man believed to be a South African in his late 20s or early 30s entered the church, walked down the middle aisle of the nave and took a running jump onto the altar on the right side of the sanctuary.

He then proceeded to desecrate it, pulling down the heavy marble archangels from their plinths with “brute force”, as Pollitt described it, destroying them and the altar in the process, before leaping back down and confidently striding back out of the church. At the gate he grappled briefly with Gabriel Madukife, a member of the church who sells Bibles and rosaries in the parking lot, before breaking free and running away.

Altar desecrated

The congregation arriving for midday mass was forced to sit and look at the desecrated altar, as the police waited outside to process the crime scene.

According to Madukife, the young man had visited the church two days before, entering at around 4pm to ask to sit in the nave for a few minutes, before leaving again. It is unclear if or how his two visits were linked.

“In the Catholic mind, the place he chose to attack in the church […] is one of the most important, if not the most important one in the church,” Pollitt said.

For Pollitt, the perpetrator’s decision to target that specific altar was a particularly galling detail.

“In the Catholic mind, the place he chose to attack in the church […] is one of the most important, if not the most important one in the church,” Pollitt said.

“When we have mass, we celebrate the Eucharist,” he said. “If there is any leftover bread [after communion], we put it in what we call the tabernacle. And the belief of the church is that, during the mass, that bread becomes the body of Christ. So it’s a place where communion is reserved.”

CCTV footage of church attack

CCTV footage from several angles shows the young man, roughly 1.65m in height, well dressed in what appear to be black jeans, sneakers and hoodie as well as an orange beanie and headphones, approach the altar. He appears to psych himself up with music as he leaps up onto it, and as he turns, the message on the back of his hoodie is legible. “Only Jesus Can,” it appears to read.

“My first reaction to this was to say [he] was either on drugs or high or something. But he didn’t look like that from the visuals. He had earphones that looked quite fancy. He dressed quite well, and had a bag on his back. So whether he was someone from some organisation that has some issue with Catholics – maybe there’s a problem with what the church is saying about certain matters – or whether it was just coincidental, or whether that’s a cover? Because having a top on like that to send a message while you’re doing what he was doing – was that some sort of cover-up for something else that’s going on?” Pollitt said.

“Who knows?”

Throughout the attack, the perpetrator screamed religious profanities, according to an eyewitness, who can be seen attempting to run away as the desecration was taking place. She told police that as the man passed her in the aisle, he screamed more profanities at her before exiting the church.

Daily Maverick was unable to reach her for further comment in time for publication, but Pollitt says that she and other congregants who witnessed the incident were left deeply disturbed and shaken.

Grappling with reasons for attack

Pollitt is also grappling with what transpired. As a prominent religious leader known to be outspoken on matters of principle, he recently took on Chief Rabbi Goldstein in an editorial in this publication for criticising Pope Leo’s call for peace in war-torn parts of the world.

“His hands are dripping with blood because he makes no distinction between the barbarians of Hamas and the genocidal maniacs of Tehran and the noble and brave soldiers of the State of Israel,” Goldstein told a roomful of Jewish South Africans on 20 April, Israel’s day of remembrance Yom HaZikaron.

Pollitt wrote in response: “To suggest that a call for peace makes one complicit in bloodshed must be denounced by any person of faith who values the truth. We, people of faith, from different traditions, must agree on the basics: the truth should not be manipulated by anyone because that strikes at the very heart of the common good, for all.”

He has also been outspoken regarding socio-political developments in the US under President Donald Trump, the local church’s stance on same-sex blessings and other issues that often raise hackles and prompt blowback.

It is unclear if either of these is related to Thursday’s attack.

“This church has been here for 90 years. This has never happened before. Let’s take a long view here as well, because for the one guy who did that, you’re going to deprive the many other people who have come here.”

“If there is a disagreement, if it is a religious objection, how do we handle disagreements? There are other ways of also objecting to things. There’s other ways of dealing with these things, you know, than just to destroy property. [Because] people are saying, ‘Okay, lock the church now. Don’t let people come. Only open it for mass times’.

“This church has been here for 90 years. This has never happened before. Let’s take a long view here as well, because for the one guy who did that, you’re going to deprive the many other people who have come here.

“What’s been destroyed is not replaceable. How does one replace this sort of stuff? So it’s frustrating. So I feel quite frustrated, yeah. And I think one does feel disheartened to say, you know what’s really going on?” DM