Dear Pope: Whitey Basson’s plan to buy land from the Catholic Church

Former Shoprite CEO Whitey Basson wanted to buy a piece of land from the Roman Catholic Church, and he wrote a letter to the Pope to try and strike a deal.

Basson shared this story during a discussion with the True North podcast published by C2M Chartered Accountants.

Whitey Basson is widely regarded as South Africa’s top retail chief executive, having led Shoprite Holdings from 1979 until his retirement at the end of 2016.

He transformed an 8-store Western Cape grocery chain into the largest food retailer in Africa and one of the top 100 retailers globally.

During his tenure as Shoprite’s chief executive, the company focused on expanding across Africa.

During a visit to Mozambique, while sitting in a second-floor restaurant, he noticed that the clock in the church tower across the way wasn’t working.

“I wrote a letter to the Pope right then and there, saying, You must fix up your bloody clock. You can’t have a broken clock when you have all this money,” he said.

This was not the only time that Basson wrote a letter to the Pope. “Another time, I wrote to him with a genuine business proposition,” he said.

He explained that the Roman Catholic Church owns a lot of land in Africa, which it uses for very little.

“I was standing out there, I think it was in Tanzania or a similar country, looking at this beautiful piece of land,” he said.

“I wrote a letter saying, ‘I’m standing here looking at this property. Is there any possibility that you would sell it to us?”

Basson said he suspects that the problem was that he started the letter with ‘Dear Pope’ instead of something more formal.

When I told Shoprite Chairman Christo Wiese about it, he said, “You can’t call the Pope ‘Dear Pope’, you must address him as ‘Your Holiness’.”

Basson replied, “What? Everybody calls him the Pope. Why must I call him something different?” “Needless to say, the Pope never answered me.”

He said that he even tried to get the letter delivered directly to the head of the Roman Catholic Church’s bedroom.

“One of our employees had an aunt who worked in the Vatican, specifically in the section where the Pope lives,” he said.

I told him, “Take my letter and just leave it on the counter next to his bed. But even then, he still didn’t reply.”