Roots of the Crisis in Ahiara Diocese

[Fr David Ihenacho's Article published by the Guardian on Ahiara Crisis on May 5, 2013]

As a Catholic priest from Ahiara Diocese, Mbaise, Imo state, I have been doing a lot of soul searching since December of 2012. In fact, since the crisis that broke out in my diocese following the announcement of Msgr. Ebere Peter Okpalaeke as the bishop-elect of the Catholic Diocese of Ahiara by the Holy Father, Pope emeritus, Benedict XVI, at Noon of Friday, December 7, 2012, I have been passing from one intellectual convulsion to another. I have had quite a lot of mental torture trying to understand what has hit my beloved Catholic Church, my diocese and me. Sometimes it appears to me that I am in a dream world where some of what I am experiencing now will soon turn out not to be real after all. I still wish that the nightmare of the present time will eventually turn out a dream that vanishes with the daybreak!

Until I emerge from this apparent bad dream of mine, I find it very hard to comprehend what is happening to my beloved diocese. How did the once idyllic diocese of Ahiara transit from being a symbol of joy, peace and order under the late venerable Bishop Chikwe to the current situation in which it is seen as rebellious, crisis-riddled and anger-prone? How did the Ahiara Diocesan priests famous for their loyalty and obedience to the Catholic Church, the Pope and the instrument of authority in the Church become disloyal overnight to this new appointment of the Holy Father? How did Mbaise people who have brooked quite a lot of terrible injustices in their lives descend to the current level in which they appear permanently fitted with short fuses? Has this situation become our new normal in the diocese or will this terrible experience of ours pass away sooner than later so that we can return to our real normal of peace and tranquillity?

Beyond my current questions about Ahiara Diocese, I have been asking myself what has happened to the Catholic Church which prides itself as the one personally established by our Lord Jesus Christ. The Catholic Church of today seems bedevilled by terrible problems all over the world. In America and Europe, there is the terrible crime resulting from the abuse of innocent minors by priests who claim to act in the person of our Lord Jesus Christ.

In Africa and in Nigeria in particular, there are the alleged issues of cronyism, son-of-the-soil syndrome and terrible injustices being committed at the highest levels of the Church.

Even in the heart of the holy city of the Vatican, there is the bemoaned issue of Vatileaks, of alleged corruption and betrayal resulting in the Holy Father quitting prematurely because he found himself too frail to mount a real combat against the monstrous devil that has made its way right into the heart of the Church. What is happening to the Church of our Lord Jesus Christ? What is happening to my beloved diocese of Ahiara? What is happening to the world at large?

For those who might not yet know, the Catholic Diocese of Ahiara Mbaise, in Imo State, was created on November 18, 1987, by Blessed Pope John Paul II with her first bishop as Victor Adibe Chikwe. Bishop Chikwe would die suddenly on September 16, 2010, creating a vacuum that has been very had to fill till today.

Before the territory which is famously called “Mbaise” was raised to the status of a Catholic diocese adopting the name, “Ahiara Diocese” in respect of the community of Ahiara that first established the Catholic Church as a permanent presence in Mbaise, in 1933, the whole territory had been reeling from one terrible injustice to the other. The name “Mbaise” came into being in 1941 following the transformation of the five court centres in the territory into one county which the colonialists named “Mbaise.”

Following the death and disappearance of a renowned British physician, Dr Roger Stewart, in the area in 1905, the whole territory was punished and stigmatized as land of criminals and wicked people. As a result of this crime committed by primitive “Mbaise” ancestors who had not seen a white person before, the British colonialists visited the territory with genocide and reprisals that endured for several decades. The place was abandoned by the colonialists and subsequently by the local administrations after Nigeria’s independence.

Till today the entire territory has remained comprehensively rural. There are no federal establishments in the place. The only federal road that crosses the place which construction had begun in 1902 is still a patchy road. The whole of Nigeria appears to view Mbaise land and her people from the prism of the avalanche of stereotypes created by the colonialists.

Perhaps to temper their chains of frustration and pent-up feelings against colonial and independent Nigerian governments as well, the people turned to Catholicism en masse. More than 70% of the population of 1.5 million Mbaise citizens living at home and abroad profess Catholicism as their only religion. For years the Catholic Church has remained a refugium peccatorum for all Mbaise people. The people consider the Catholic Church as their last line of defence.

Nowhere was this exemplified the most than in their sustained battle to get their own diocese. From 1966 to 1987 the people of Mbaise waged a relentless battle to have their homeland raised to the status of a Catholic diocese. They not only fought for their own diocese but also to have their own son as their bishop to forestall a situation whereby a foreigner comes in to govern them with loads of colonial-inspired prejudices and stereotypes.

This battle was fought and won in 1987 when the then an Mbaise son, Msgr. Victor Chikwe of Mount Carmel Church Emekuku, was declared their bishop. The joy that followed that announcement was beyond anything that had been seen in Mbaise before. The people were ecstatic and embraced their new baby diocese with all their hearts.

The diocese would turn out to be regarded as exemplary throughout Nigeria and Africa as a whole. The Catholic Diocese of Ahiara during the life and times of Bishop Victor Chikwe, though poor and rural, was a model diocese in Nigeria and Africa as a whole.

Now, fast forward to the present moment where a new bishop has been declared for the Diocese of Ahiara. The level of anger in Mbaise now is beyond anything that had been seen over here before. The Catholic Church of Mbaise that was once a haven of joy has transformed into a place of bitterness and anger. Why has Mbaise land turned from a city of joy and peace to that of anger and war-threatening?

Everybody who loves the Catholic Church in this part of the world should be eager to find out the answer to this question. Many uninformed people have been making ignorant and lopsided allegations against one party to the crisis or the other. I think this kind of disposition draws largely from willful ignorance. In my view, there is enough blame to go round for all the parties.

First, when Bishop Chikwe died in September of 2010, the process of selecting his successor was assumed to have taken off. For this process to be fair and genuine the more than five hundred priests of Mbaise origin should have been given a fair chance of being considered for the position. The process of the review had lasted for more than two years in which the more than five hundred priests were supposed to have been reviewed one way or the other.

But surprise! Surprise! After two years and nearly three months of this process a young and an unknown parish priest from Awka Diocese, a diocese in another ecclesiastical province, was announced by the Holy Father for the position. This resulted in Mbaise priests crying foul about the process that produced him.

Many Mbaise priests and lay faithful believe that the process that reviewed the more than five hundred priests of Mbaise origin and found none of them worthy for the bishopric was fraught with problems and terrible injustice. So the fight of Mbaise priests is not against the choice made by the Holy Father per se, but the process that brought about the choice in the first place. The priests of the diocese feel that an injustice had been done to them. And they feel that they have a moral obligation to fight injustice wherever it reared its ugly head.

Moreover, they argue that if the whole five hundred-plus priests of Mbaise were judged unworthy for the bishopric of their homeland, such a judgment would kill the morale of priests working in Mbaise in general and bring their esteem down among the Catholic faithful of the diocese thereby undermining pastoral growth in Mbaise land.

Since the crisis began in December 2012, many among the Nigerian church hierarchy have privately acknowledged that a mistake was made somewhere along the line of filling the bishopric vacancy in Ahiara Diocese. Many of them have also cautioned that since the mess had been made, Ahiara Diocese should live with it. The Igbo proverb that is being often quoted in this crisis is: Nsi abaala abaa. Ihe o foziri bu ikpo nkita - “The faeces mess has already occurred, what remains, is to call in the dog to clean it up.”

But the position of the priests and lay faithful of Ahiara Diocese is, if the Church recognizes that there was a mistake in the process of selecting a bishop for Ahiara Diocese, they should correct it and not let the people suffer from obvious mistakes which would translate to a monumental injustice to the people of the diocese. Many people in the top-echelon of the Nigerian Catholic Church are insisting that it is important to help the Catholic Church of Nigeria save face in this crisis.

But the priests and lay of the diocese argue that it is morally indefensible for them to live with injustice in order to help the Catholic Church save face. The popular opinion among Catholics of the diocese is to bare the shamed face of the Church in this part of the world in order to help tackle the problem of the prevalence of injustice in the Nigerian Church.

Another angle that is being explored in this crisis is the obligation of the bishop-elect himself. Among people in Ahiara Diocese who are not just shouting No! No! to the bishopric of Okpalaeke in the diocese, there is a widely held opinion that the bishop-elect should consider whether he would be of any pastoral value to the flock of Jesus Christ in the diocese following the massive rejection of his appointment.

What is important in the here and now is not whether the bishop-elect would become a bishop in the Catholic Church. This had become a fait accompli following his announcement as one by the supreme pontiff. But what is really at issue here is whether the bishop-elect could indeed become a good shepherd of the flock of Jesus Christ in Ahiara Diocese following the persistence of the crisis. The answer of this question can only be provided by the bishop-elect himself if he takes to heart the position he has been called into which is that of an apostle of our Lord Jesus Christ.

Moreover, there is a gospel principle in question here. Jesus Christ in sending out his disciples ahead of him told them that “whatever town you enter and they do not receive you, go out into the streets and say, ‘the dust of your town that clings to our feet, even that we shake off against you”. [Luke 10:10-11]. There is no place the Lord Jesus says that if a town fails to receive a disciple, he should go and mobilize and invade them.

The issue of threatening the use of force in resolving issues of injustice in the Catholic Church in Nigeria is indeed scary to say the very least. Somebody out there is misunderstanding the gospel of our Lord Jesus Christ! With the current standoff in Ahiara Diocese, it is obvious that there are some other principles operating here other than that of the gospel.

At the root of the current crisis in the Catholic Diocese of Ahiara are two dangerous vices condemned with vehemence by our Lord Jesus Christ.

The first vice is that of pride. Pride is fueling the current crisis in Ahiara Diocese. There is a dangerous pride playing at every level of this crisis. There is pride in acknowledging that a mistake has been made and yet wanting to save face by not correcting it. If it is clear that a mistake has been made, it should be corrected immediately. We are dealing with the Church of Our Lord Jesus Christ and not the house of politics. In politics people employ all means to save face so as to retain their political capital and viability. In the church we acknowledge our sins and make amends.

Moreover, what is being seen as a simple mistake for one party could translate into a tragic injustice for the receiving party. What is being used to save our prideful faces could lead another to hell fire. But if we remove pride from all this, both the injured and the perpetrator should come together and seek an amicable solution to the crisis.

This in fact is what Pope Francis has ordered to be done in Ahiara Diocese. He wants dialogue and not warfare. Let the CBCN, the Nuncio, the bishop-elect and the Catholic faithful of Ahiara Diocese commence immediately a serious dialogue to resolve all outstanding problems that will enable peace to return to Ahiara Diocese.

Second, there is pride on the side of Ahiara Diocesan priests and lay people in trying to have it their own way. We must realize that ours cannot always be the highway. The law of the Church is clear on this. It is the pope that makes the appointment of a bishop in the Roman Catholic Church. He presumably does so prayerfully, honestly, freely and without interference.

However, listening to the regrets of most members of the Church hierarchy in Nigeria, it seems that Pope Emeritus Benedict XVI had not been well served by his officials in Nigeria in the case of the bishopric of Ahiara Diocese. What we in Ahiara Diocese should do is to seek a middle way to reduce the adverse effect of the apparent mistake on our people and their Catholic faith while allowing the Holy Father to retain his power to appoint bishops freely and without interference even in our injured diocese of Ahiara.

The second dangerous vice that is being revealed by the bishopric crisis in Ahiara Diocese is the abject ignorance on the meaning of the bishopric in the New Testament. On both sides of the divide there is a terrible and in fact an impious ignorance of what a bishop is and stands for in a local Church.

There is a terrible concentration on the worldly powers and paraphernalia of a bishop. The bishop is being seen as that single person with all the authorities and power over the Christ faithful in a local Church.

If the bishop had been correctly seen in the image laid down by our Lord Jesus, as a servant of the higher-ups and down-under, a person who sacrifices himself completely for others, an abject poor man who must starve so that others could eat, a servant who does the greatest and the meanest among his colleagues, I bet you many will pray and even pay not to be saddled with the job. People who understand what a bishop is feel terrified to embrace it. People who crave to be made bishops are usually impious and dishonest. And when they get it, they usually mess it all up!

The truth is there is nothing glamorous, glorious and celebrity-like about the Catholic bishopric that comes from our Jesus Christ himself. The ambitious and celebrity bishop is not a bishop after the mind of our Lord Jesus Christ. The human Jesus was a humble servant of God who laid down his life to save his brothers and sisters.

Rather than celebrated, the New Testament Jesus was humiliated, tortured, crucified and died amidst hardcore criminals.

Rather than ride a Jeep or limousine, he rode a humble and lowly ass.

Rather than live in a palace, he was homeless.

Rather than own or keep the money of his church he was penniless and poor. The little money his community had he left in the hand of the man who would betray him.

That is the Jesus whom bishops of all over the world claim to represent. Judge for yourselves how many of them are doing a good job doing what they claim to do. The human Jesus was radically selfless and without ambition to earthly powers. The worldly bishops want to have it both ways. This is the source of the crisis in the Church all over the world. A true Catholic bishop is supposed to replicate the true image of the humble Jesus in his life.

What has put the Catholic Church worldwide into an enormous problem is the presence of the celebrity bishops. The celebrity bishops are proud and not humble in any sense of the word. They possess enormous power, show it recklessly and destroy their perceived enemies with their powers. They commit crimes with impunity and are not repentant from their sins.

Because of the way celebrity bishops manifest power in the Catholic Church many priests, even the least prepared ones, want to be bishops. And many go out of their way to do everything humanly possible and sometimes humanly impossible to try to get it. This is the source of the crisis.

What will save the Catholic Church from going into extinction because of the numerous sins in its rank and file is coming back to the image laid down for her by our divine master and saviour Jesus Christ.

Nobody should be made a bishop unless he is widely acclaimed to exhibit the humble traits of our Lord Jesus Christ. Let the Catholic Church worldwide return to the era of appointing bishops through popular acclamation of the priests and lay people. That was the type of process that produced some of the greatest men of the Catholic Church like St Ambrose of Milan, St Augustine of Hippo and St Cyprian of Carthage.