Hurley, Denis E.

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. He was a member of the Oblates of Mary Immaculate. He was born in Cape Town and spent his early years on Robben Island, where his father was the lighthouse keeper. In 1951, Hurley was appointed Archbishop of Durban, becoming the youngest archbishop in the world at the time. Hurley was an active participant in the Second Vatican Council, which he described as "the greatest project of adult education ever held in the world". An outspoken opponent of apartheid, as chairman of the Southern African Catholic Bishops' Conference, Hurley drafted the first of the ground-breaking pastoral letters in which the bishops denounced apartheid as "blasphemy" and "intrinsically evil." Upon his retirement as archbishop, he served as the chancellor of the University of Natal.