AHIARA DIOCESE IN CROSSHAIRS: THE REAL STORIES …4 [EXCERPTS FROM A BOOK IN PRINT]

Introduction: A Blessing in Disguise?

In 1985, the Catholic Church clocked her first one-hundred years in the once little dark spot in the global map that was then known as the Lower Niger. The big centenary celebration to mark that great milestone focused exclusively on the fact that the Catholic missionaries first arrived in Onitsha on December 4, 1885, to inaugurate an era of Catholic evangelization that had in its view the whole of Igbo land as well as the many other smaller ethnic groups in the Niger Delta region. Notwithstanding the fact that the areas of the earliest evangelization were mainly the upstream banks of the River Niger and the Atlantic coastal areas of Calabar and Port Harcourt, all other areas which would receive their Catholicism a little later joined in the celebration of that first centenary in Igbo land.

However, the entire Igbo heartland that lacked any major inland water ways would be skipped and sidetracked for many decades to come by the first missionaries to the Igbo world. In fact, regarding Catholic missionary evangelization of Igbo hinterland, the French Catholic missionaries of 1885 did not offer much of a hope. Their main focus was the tangential communities at the banks of the great River Niger.

But some twenty seven years after the arrival of those first missionaries, the Catholic Church hoisted her flag in the epicentre of the Igbo nation, a.k.a., Igbo heartland, thanks to the courageous efforts of the Irish missionaries led by Joseph Ignatius Shanahan C.S.Sp. In a strategically situated community called Emekuku, the Catholic Church would establish a mission known as Mount Carmel Church, on July 16, 1912, that would eventually transform the Igbo mission into a 20th century miracle in missionary evangelization.

The Emekuku mission would prove not just another missionary foray into the hinterland of the Igbo nation, but a clear statement that the Igbo race had indeed pledged her entire future to the new religion. In hindsight, July 16, 1912, was a day like no other in the history of Catholicism in Igbo land.

After one hundred years of this solemn pledge by central and southern Igbo people, there was no longer any doubt that the Catholic Church had taken a firm control of the heartland of the Igbo nation. That was why in 2012, the Catholic Church in Igbo land celebrated yet another one hundred years’ birthday. It was called the centenary of the coming of the Catholic in the Igbo heartland of Owerri Province.

These two centenary celebrations that were 27 years apart had great similarities. In fact, it can be said that both sang the same tunes. Both were seen as occasions for the celebrants to thank God for the miraculous success of Catholic evangelization among the Igbo people. The dominant theme during both celebrations was constituted by the rendition of the Magnificat of the Blessed Virgin Mary. Celebrants of the two centenaries were called out to thank God in imitation of the Blessed Virgin Mary for miracles of a successful Catholic evangelization which the Almighty God had accomplished in Igbo land.

The two history books that would be published to mark these celebrations were filled to the brim with appreciative essays that were laden with songs of praise over what the good Lord had done in the Catholic Mission of the Igbo people. There were reeled out wondrous statistics that underlined how successful numerically the Catholic Church had been in Igbo land in the last one hundred years of her existence in the different zones that were marking the centenary celebrations. It was all joy as appreciative chants of praises rent the air about the missionaries who risked everything to bring to the Igbo people the Christian message and their local collaborators who blazed the trail for Catholic missionary evangelization in most communities of Igbo heartland.

The same went also for the Igbo forefathers who quickly heeded the call of the missionaries and made a conscious decision to abandon their pagan ways in preference for Christianity. A lot of grace was also lavished on the strategy of the Catholic school system which the early missionaries had employed to woo the Igbo people to the Catholic faith. There were also many other factors that were praised for contributing immensely in making Catholicism successful in Igbo land.

However, during the celebrations notes of caution were repeatedly sounded on the fact that there were still works to be done in certain areas of missionary evangelization. Both centenary celebrations harped on the fact that though the Igbo nation has embraced Catholicism as a mass movement, the faith was still very shallow among the populace.

Another issue was that of double affiliations whereby presumed Catholics of the Igbo Church maintained some allegiance to the traditional pagan gods. Also, the issue of what to do with some resilient pagan practices like the Osu-caste system and the pagan burial rites that had refused to be supplanted by Christian sacraments were noted as areas of great concern in Igbo Catholicism. Some other areas like invading secularism, materialism and indiscipline among the rank and file Igbo Catholics did receive some token mention during the reviews of the lives of the Church during the two centenary celebrations.

Unfortunately, in all the researches and reviews during the two celebrations, some areas equally of grave concern in the Igbo Church were hardly ever mentioned. These included the terrible intrigues that had been flowing as an under-current in the relationship between the different areas of the Igbo Church. Either by omission or commission, issues dealing with inter-communal relationships in Igbo Catholicism hardly received any mention. The fact that the old mutual mistrust and suspicion among the different individuals and communities of Igbo land that had marked Igbo people’s life in the pre-evangelization era had survived and had not been completely overcome through evangelization hardly ever received any mention in the essays dealing with the accomplishments and challenges of Catholicism in Igbo land in the past one hundred years. That there were major cracks, and, in fact, a fault-line, between the way the northern Igbo people with Onitsha as their epicentre and their central-southern counterparts with Owerri as the nerve-centre viewed realities was papered over completely and whitewashed in all of the essays that were penned on both centenary celebrations.

Way back in 1985, when the centenary celebration of the coming of the Catholic Church in Southern Nigeria was piloted by the then metropolitan, Most Rev S. N. Ezeanya, of the only ecclesiastical province in existence in Southern Nigeria, namely, Onitsha Ecclesiastical Province, the issue of relationship between the different Catholic communities in Igbo land received no mention whatsoever. To an outsider reading the reports and reviews of the performance of Catholicism from the centenary celebration of 1985, it would appear that Igbo Catholicism was one seamless body that did not have to bother about any internal issues of disunity and disagreements among its members. With the documents of 1985 centenary, Igbo Catholicism appeared like a flawless Christian community whose type had hardly been seen in the history of Catholicism.

The impression in the documents of the 1985 centenary was that the governance of the Igbo Church in the province was almost perfect and its trajectory impeccably orientated as it led the Church of the province towards a glorious future. The bishops and priests who were drawn from among the first generation Catholics in the area were almost seen as untouchable. Their motives were unquestionable and their ways were considered the right ones for the Church in this part of the world. Without even saying it, the image of Igbo Catholicism one could glean from the reviews and studies of the first centenary celebration was almost like that of a “cruising ship” that is joyously conveying a crowd of united, happy and singing Igbo Catholics on their way to heaven!

Twenty seven years later, 2012, and during the celebration of yet another first centenary in Igbo land, namely, that of the coming of the Catholic Church to Igbo heartland; when it had become obvious that a lot of water had passed under the bridge; and when clear strains had appeared in the relationship between Onitsha and Owerri areas after they were divided and raised into different provinces, yet there was neither the recognition of the ancient fault-line that sits as the elephant in the room of Igbo Catholicism, nor any mention of some terrible intrigues in the Igbo Church that undercut the false image of a “cruising ship” that the two centenaries seemed intent on propagating and projecting to the rest of the world.

In the essays that were published to mark the centenary of the Church in Owerri Province in 2012, which yours truly contributed two tracks, there was no mention whatsoever of the deteriorating relationship between the two sister-provinces. Rather, the centenary in Owerri followed exactly the script of the Onitsha centenary that had occurred some 27 years before it. It was celebrated in an atmosphere of joy and conviviality. Like its predecessor twenty seven years earlier, the Owerri Catholic centenary celebration was marked by pomp and triumphalism that attempted to mask all the aching pains Igbo Catholicism was experiencing at that point in time in her existence.

Then there was the appointment on December 7, 2012 of Msgr. Ebere Peter Okpalaeke, a priest from Awka Diocese in Onitsha Ecclesiastical Province, as the bishop-elect of the vacant See of Ahiara Diocese. That singular appointment and the unprecedented crisis it generated blew the lid off the rot that had been covered up in the Igbo Church for more than a century. The gale and firestorm that would greet that announcement would blow away all the papering, plastering and posturing that had been going on in the often difficult relationship between the two sister-provinces since the beginning of the Emekuku mission one hundred years earlier.

What the crisis in Ahiara Diocese has revealed was perhaps our common hypocrisy and oversight in the two centenary celebrations. It was a kind of a poke into the eyes of the organizers of the celebrations that had neglected to point out that there were major points of concern in the operations and relations between the two zones of the Igbo Church. It appeared that Providence allowed the Ahiara crisis to occur at the close of the Owerri centenary to remind us, the organizers of the centenary of the poor job we had done in the centenary celebrations by neglecting to include any reflections and discussions on the internal administration and organization of the Igbo Church. God, in fact, used the crisis in Ahiara Diocese to remind us of what we had neglected to give priority attention to in the two centenary celebrations. We had fallen prey to our hubris and marketing strategies throughout the celebrations. In the two celebrations, we had embarked on marketing our Church with some level of arrogance as one of the most successful in the contemporary world while neglecting to cast our searchlight on the ever-widening gaps between the two regions of the Igbo Church.

In both centenary celebrations, there was no talk about how the Igbo Church was being governed. There was no discussion about how the leaders of the Igbo Church were being selected or how they emerged to become leaders of one of the most promising Churches of contemporary Catholicism in the world. There was no discussion or review of how the leadership of the Igbo Church was faring and how improved leadership of the Igbo Church could be accomplished. The two centenary celebrations had shown such a terrible amnesia on the all-important issue of leadership and governance in the Igbo Church. In hindsight, it is almost a scandal that nothing was done about this very important area of church life in Igbo Catholicism until the Ahiara Diocese crisis broke.

A focus on the area of leadership in the Igbo Church could have perhaps drawn some attention to the deteriorating relationships between Onitsha and Owerri provinces in matters of appointing leaders for the Igbo Church. Nobody wanted or remembered to talk about the fact that while filling their seven dioceses with their indigenous bishops, Onitsha Province had taken hold of two out of the six dioceses of Owerri Province. A review of the distribution of leadership in Igbo Catholicism could have included talks about leadership and seminary formation in the Igbo Church, structures of authority in the Igbo Church, dispensation of authority in the Igbo Church, the situation of the led or the governed in the Igbo church, etc. All such areas dealing with governance and leadership in general could not feature in the self-congratulations that lavishly marked the two centenary celebrations.

This is why the crisis that occurred in Ahiara Diocese, though very painful from the point of view of how it had impacted on the faith in the diocese and the Igbo nation as a whole, was in fact a blessing in disguise. It had forced the Igbo Church, nay, the Nigerian Catholic Church, to examine herself properly. For the first time the issues of governance, justice, selection of leaders, and in fact, all those no-go areas, are being forced into discussion in the Nigerian Church. Until the breakout of Ahiara Diocese crisis, Igbo Catholicism had been presenting herself as a high-flying kite that had been longing for some reality check. The bishopric crisis in Ahiara Diocese brought the Igbo Church and in fact the Nigerian Catholicism down to the earth. As it has turned out, this fact-check of Igbo Catholicism instituted by the crisis in Ahiara Diocese was more than due.

In imitation of what was then happening in the Arab world, the Ahiara Crisis was described in some section of the Church press as the Igbo Catholicism’s equivalent of Arab spring, in the sense that it created consciousness and raised questions on the true situation of church administration and leadership in the various Catholic dioceses in Nigeria. Ahiara crisis gave both priests and the lay people across Nigeria the courage to question whether things were working as they should in the highest echelon of the Nigerian Catholic Church.

And this seems a very good thing. The Nigerian Church and in fact the Igbo Church had reached a point in which it needed to examine herself properly and thoroughly. What the Ahiara crisis had revealed was that the Igbo Church was cruising on the fuel of massive injustice, fraud and cronyism. That God used the crisis in Ahiara Diocese to call attention to the dangerous situation of the Church in Igbo land and Nigeria as a whole is now indisputable. The crisis in Ahiara Diocese became a felix culpa both for the diocese and for the rest of the Nigerian Catholic Church.

In other words, the Ahiara crisis is a veritable revolution in the Church of Nigeria. I remember many bishops after their plenary Episcopal Conference in Abuja in February of 2013 confessing that the crisis in Ahiara Diocese had opened the eyes of the bishops of Nigeria to some realities in their midst that they had not been keeping track of. God used Ahiara crisis to remove a terrible blind scale from the eyes of the Catholic Church of Nigeria. It is this scale that had allowed all sorts of terrible injustices to fester for years in Nigerian Catholicism. And with the blinding scale now removed, the Church of Nigeria is bound to do better in the future because every member of the Church is now wide awake knowing full well that the fabulous Catholic Church of Nigeria has also the capacity to incubate some terrible issues of injustice and corruption.

Since the crisis in Ahiara Diocese, the priests of the diocese in particular have been flooded with congratulatory messages for saving the Igbo Church and the Nigerian Church in general. There have been torrents of “thank you” banters flooding Ahiara Diocese for the new consciousness it had created all over Nigeria about the true situation of the Catholic Church. Many priests and even lay people have gone a step further in their congratulatory messages. Many of them continue to heap praises on Ahiara Diocese insisting that only her among the dioceses in Nigeria was uniquely placed to help midwife a fairer and more just church for the Igbo people and Nigeria as a whole.

According to this line of thinking, Ahiara Diocese with her highly educated clergy and lay people, her unity and homogeneity, and her highly evolved Catholicism and devotion, was the right choice by the Holy Spirit to help the Igbo and Nigerian Church come to get some grips over her true situation. The revolt in Ahiara Diocese was the only way the Church of Igbo land could have saved herself from the disastrous consequences of her hubris and hypocrisy regarding justice. The almost unanimous view among Nigerians was that the Ahiara crisis has helped the Igbo and the Nigerian Church more than it had hurt her. According to this opinion, the Church in Igbo land and in fact the Nigerian Catholic Church would have a better future because of the revolt against injustice that had taken place in Ahiara Diocese.

And when on June 21, 2013, the Holy Father addressed the 120 Nuncios or Papal legates from across the world and harped on the themes Ahiara Diocese had been insisting on in their struggle for justice, it became obvious to every discerning mind that the crisis in Ahiara Diocese had had a global impact and implication. It had not only changed the Church of Nigeria it has in fact brought about a new tune in the affairs of the universal Church. And this is true. The crisis in Ahiara Diocese did engender a new way of thinking about justice issues in the selections of leaders in the world Church.

I do not think that there is anybody in this world who could doubt that the Holy Father, Pope Francis, in addressing the world Nuncios on June 21, took cognizance of the crisis in Ahiara Diocese of Nigeria and responded to it accordingly. And if that is true, the story of Ahiara Diocese has indeed served not only the Igbo and the Nigerian Church but the universal Church as well.

Our almighty God through the mediation of the rural Diocese of Ahiara, Mbaise, has brought a new illumination on justice and fairness to His Church on earth. And this is a monumental achievement, a great blessing indeed. Anything that helps both the local and universal church live up to their calling to be a Church of justice and charity cannot be any other thing but a great blessing to humanity. It is safe to say that the crisis in Ahiara Diocese has indeed turned out to be one of the great blessings of the universal Catholic Church of the 21st century. St Paul told the Corinthian Christians of the First Century:

God chose the foolish of the world to shame the wise, and God chose the weak of the world to shame the strong, and God chose the lowly and despised of the world, those who count for nothing, to reduce to nothing those who are something, so that no human being might boast before God [1Cor 1:27-29 NAB].