AHIARA DIOCESE IN CROSSHAIRS: THE REAL STORIES …6 [EXCERPTS FROM A BOOK IN PRINT]

Chapter One: Breaking News... [ii]

Besides the glum that had become a permanent feature of the diocese since the demise of Bishop Chikwe, there was nothing in the morning of December 7, 2012 that could suggest that the day held a terrible omen for the people of Ahiara Diocese. As the day broke, the people of the diocese started to attend to their normal businesses hoping for the best from the dreary day. But as the midday hour passed, some ominous telephone calls began making the rounds that a bishop had been appointed for the diocese by His Holiness, Pope Benedict XVI. A reference was made to the internet as the source of the rumour. The situation kept growing stranger by the minutes. Nobody knew exactly what the true situation was.

The first person to bring me the message of the appointment of the bishop-elect of Ahiara Diocese was Fr Vitalis, my associate priest in the parish. Fr Vitalis called me while I was driving out of the house to inform me that a priest from Awka Diocese of Anambra State in Onitsha Ecclesiastical Province, by name, Ebere Peter Okpalaeke, had been appointed the bishop of our diocese. I asked him the source of his information. He told me that some people had called him from Bigard Memorial Seminary, Enugu, to inform him about the development. He told me that they had referred him to the internet as where the news had been published. Immediately Fr Vitalis mentioned the internet as the main source of his information, I dismissed it outright. I told him that the internet being open to the manipulation of rumour-mongers and mischief-makers was the least reliable medium of information in the contemporary world.

I had dismissed Fr Vitalis’ information on the belief that an event like the appointment of a bishop in the Catholic Church would not be conveyed to the people of the diocese via a publication on one of the news websites on the internet. I convinced myself that since I was among the first batch of American university students trained on popular use of the internet in the early 90s, I knew about the history, the strength and weaknesses of the internet as an information dissemination outfit.

Racing through the whole situation in my mind, I came to a conclusion that there was no way an institution as ancient and conservative as the Catholic Church would opt for the use of the unreliable internet as a means to communicate to the people of our rural diocese her important policies such as the appointment of her bishop-elect. With such conviction, I came to the conclusion that it was not possible that a credible bishop had been appointed for Ahiara Diocese. I convinced myself that the whole fuss about Ebere Peter Okpalaeke’s appointment was both a hoax and a rumour.

I would go ahead to inform Fr. Vitalis that I believed that when His Holiness, the Pope, got ready to make an announcement of a bishop for Ahiara Diocese, he would do it the normal way. That is to say, he would send down to the diocese the Papal Nuncio, or the metropolitan or any of the bishops of the province or even a Nigerian bishop to come down to the diocese and officially break the news to the clergy and the lay faithful of the diocese, either before or exactly at the very hour it would be announced at the Vatican. I told Fr Vitalis that such in my view had been the traditional way of making an announcement of the appointment of a new bishop for any particular diocese. I cited instances to him of previous announcements of new bishops that followed the order I thought had become traditional in the Catholic Church.

However, in spite of my scepticism, telephone calls continued to pour into the diocese that a bishop had been named for Ahiara Diocese. The name, Ebere Peter Okpalaeke kept tumbling off the mouth of every caller as the bishop-elect of our diocese. That was a very troubling time for me. What was happening was totally against my conviction of how things were supposed to happen concerning the appointment of the bishop-elect of Ahiara Diocese. I did not know whether to interpret that as a kind of disrespect for the people of Ahiara Diocese or an oversight on the part of the first African Papal Nuncio to Nigeria. It might be I had reasoned that the Apostolic Nuncio had not been well briefed on how to make known the appointment of a new bishop in an utterly vacant see.

More important, I could not make much out of the names that were being tossed about as belonging to our new bishop-elect. He was being described as Ebere Peter Okpalaeke. This was absolutely a strange name to me. I had never come in contact with such a name before whether in conferences or in meetings I had been involved with. Who is this Ebere Peter Okpalaeke? I remember asking myself over and over again.

Moreover, the strange combinations in the names ascribed to the bishop-elect perplexed me a whole lot. The three names he was associated with appeared to have three different linguistic origins. His baptismal name is of course, Peter. I was happy for that because Peter, being the name of the first Vicar of Christ on earth and the head of the apostolic bishops, was a good name a would-be bishop could have. If we have a Peter as the name of our bishop, we would not be doing badly, I had said to myself.

But a bigger confusion awaited me in the combination of “Ebere” and “Okpalaeke.” The names “Ebere” and “Okpalaeke” for me contained two almost contradictory dialectical strands. While “Ebere” belonged to the central Igbo-Owerri-heartland phonetic group, “Okpalaeke” belonged entirely to Onitsha-Awka-Anambra phonetic family. I could not reconcile the two names. How on earth did the new bishop get to have these two names?

Some consistency could have been achieved in my view if the new bishop bore the names “Ebere” and “Oparaeke” from the central-Igbo-Owerri-heartland phonetic family, or “Ebele” and “Okpalaeke,” from Onitsha-Awka-Anambra phonetic family. The apparent confusion embodied in his names worried me from the very start. Does this mean that the new bishop belongs to both Owerri and Onitsha families of dialects? Did he assume such names for political reasons or was this the way his parents named him? Did his mother come from the Igbo heartland tonal family? Or did his father, undoubtedly from Awka-Anambra linguistic zone, live in the heartland Igbo area when the bishop-elect was born and perhaps named him with the dialect of the place of his sojourn?

On another note, will the new bishop, reflecting the strange phonetic combinations of his names, speak both central Igbo and Onitsha dialects at the same time? I remember asking myself. And if he does not do this, how effective will his ministry be in Mbaise? Even that early when the new bishop’s appointment appeared to be just a hoax and a rumour, I had seen confusion brewing for Ahiara Diocese. But I had prayed fervently deep down in my heart that that initial confusion signified by his method of appointment and his confusing names might not become the hallmark of his tenure as the bishop of our diocese.

Moreover, the new bishop was said to be a 49-year old priest from Awka Diocese. I wondered who that might be. By his official age he would be younger than me by nearly eight years. And many priests of the diocese would by far be older than him as well. Will the new bishop have the humility and simplicity to deal respectfully with both his seniors and juniors in the diocese? I had questioned myself vigorously. And concerning his name, I asked myself whether the new bishop-elect would be a relative or the younger brother to one priest from Awka Diocese who was both my school mate and a volley ball team mate during our seminary days. I was not making any headway either way.

After thinking about the rumour and what it would mean for our diocese I decided to maintain a wait-and-see attitude. I was more comfortable viewing the rumoured appointment as a hoax than any other thing. I prayed in my heart that the joke about the appointment of a bishop-elect in Ahiara Diocese from Awka Diocese in Anambra State, might remain just a joke.

However, approaching the diocesan secretariat on my way to Owerri, I could see priests milling together and discussing the development. There was clear anxiety on their faces. I knew immediately that all was not well with them and with our diocese. It was then that I began to suspect that something terrible might have happened to our diocese. I began to visit the different clusters of priests discussing the development. Everybody appeared quite pensive about the situation. People pulled long faces as they talked about the development. There was hardly any joy on anybody’s face. It appeared as if the diocese had been thrown right back into the funeral of Bishop Chikwe. The conclusion of the scanty people I had talked with around Ahiara Cathedral was that if the rumour turned out to be true it would mean that the diocese had been thrown into an unmanageable confusion as it would mean a total loss of the entire battle that was fought to secure the establishment of the diocese in the 70s and 80s.

However, everybody I talked with before heading off to Owerri cautioned that we should hold our fire and wait for any confirmatory indications from the administrator, Msgr. Theo Nwalo and/or the chancellor of the diocese, Fr Godson Okoro. We all believed that if a bishop had been appointed for Ahiara Diocese, the administrator and the chancellor must know and would sooner than later convoke a Presbyterium meeting to inform the priests of the diocese officially. It was on that note that I would zoom off to Owerri to continue work on the brochure I was preparing for the celebration of the Silver Jubilee of my priestly ordination later that December.

As I buried my heading poring through the different pages of the print-out of the brochures manuscript, my phone beeped signalling the arrival of a text message. I immediately accessed the message. And there was the chancellor of the diocese, Fr Godson Okoro, announcing that the administrator was summoning an emergency Presbyterium meeting that evening by 5.00 p.m. Immediately I got that information, I knew that the said hoax and rumour had turned out to be true. My mind started to race very fast. I knew that a new situation had broken in Ahiara Diocese as things would no longer be same again.

For a while I would be greatly confused on what to do. I was in Owerri proof-reading my brochure. It was not possible for me to start rushing home for the meeting. The traffic situation was bad as people who were heading home from work had clogged the roads and snarled traffics. I was in a state of quandary about how I could participate in the all-important meeting taking place in my diocese a few minutes from the time the message had reached me.

The text message had reached me only a few minutes before 5.00 p.m. No matter how fast I drove, I would only meet part of the meeting if I was lucky. But I needed to try to see how much I could get from the meeting. I warned myself that the meeting might portend a turning-point in the history of Ahiara Diocese. So I convinced myself that I had to make some good efforts to try to be present. I closed shop with my proof-reading work at Edu-edy Publications’ office and started rushing home.

But the meeting would not wait for me to start no matter how hard I tried. According to Fr Vitalis, my associate priest, at 5.00 p.m., the administrator, Monsignor Theophilus Nwalo, walked into the meeting in the main secretariat hall of the diocese and read a terse email message from the Apostolic Nuncio, announcing that His Holiness, Pope Benedict XVI had appointed Msgr. Ebere Peter Okpalaeke, of Awka Diocese, the bishop-elect of Ahiara Diocese. At this announcement, the hall dropped dead into a very ominous silence. Many people in the hall felt like dead people.

As the administrator would relate to us later, as early as 9.30 a.m. that morning of December 7, the Nuncio, Archbishop Augustine Kasujja had called him to tell him to expect the announcement of the new bishop of Ahiara at Noon on that day by His Holiness, Pope Benedict XVI. But Msgr. Theo Nwalo had told him that he had a memorial mass to celebrate that would keep him in the cathedral beyond 12.00 noon. But he went ahead and promised the Nuncio that he would monitor the announcement through his staff. The Nuncio told the administrator to expect an email message of the documents of the announcement to be sent to him as quickly as possible.

That is to say, apart from the oral communication of the time of the announcement of the new bishop by the Nuncio, the other way the message of that appointment was to have been delivered to the Catholic faithful of Ahiara Diocese was through an email message which the Apostolic Nuncio had promised to immediately send to the administrator on that regard. Even that early, the way Ahiara Diocesan bishopric appointment was being handled by the Apostolic Nuncio to Nigeria seemed totally unprecedented in the history of bishopric appointments in the more-than-two-thousand-year old Catholic Church!

According to the administrator, when he concluded the memorial mass and was handed the email message by the chancellor, Fr Godson Okoro, that indicated that it was Fr Ebere Peter Okpalaeke from Awka Diocese who had been appointed the bishop-elect of Ahiara Diocese, he was too distraught to share the content of the message with the three deans of the diocese he had gathered for the purpose. Knowing the potential for trouble the news held for the entire Catholic faithful of the diocese, the administrator kept it to himself while he thought about how best to deliver it to the priests and the lay faithful of Ahiara Diocese.

When eventually the administrator read to the gathered Presbyterium of Ahiara Diocese, the email message announcing the appointment of Msgr. Ebere Peter Okpalaeke as the bishop-elect of Ahiara Diocese, the meeting turned into something like a funeral. Many priests were seen wailing that a serious injustice had been done to Ahiara Diocese. Many others felt embarrassed and humiliated that the diocese had been terribly disrespected and in fact humiliated by the process through which the new bishop was selected and announced to her.

It would be inconceivable to many priests of the diocese that the bishop of Ahiara Diocese was announced to the people of the diocese through an email message. The whole arena was filled with sadness. The priests felt worthless in the eyes and hands of the powers-that-be that had selected the new bishop. It seemed like an ocean of sadness had made Ahiara Diocese its permanent home. That emergency meeting would disperse on that note. Nobody knew exactly what to do with the announcement. Everybody was distraught and unhappy.

After the brief Presbyterium meeting to communicate that ominous message, the administrator called for the meeting of the College of Consultors of the diocese to begin the arrangement on how a visit would be paid to the new bishop and congratulate him as early as Monday, December 10, 2012. With the ominous silence, the whole Presbyterium appeared to have resigned itself to the situation. Nobody knew what line of action to follow. Everybody appeared completely confused.

However, what had become obvious was that the announcement rather than bring joy to the priests had turned the entire secretariat hall into a funeral scene. It appeared as if a monstrous tragedy like a tsunami had struck Ahiara Diocese. While the older priests were exiting the hall with bent-over heads, the younger priests were in tears. Everybody was making his way to his car in tears and anger. It was absolutely surreal, to say the very least.

It was at this juncture that I would drive into the secretariat compound. I was immediately swept into the funeral mood of the moment. I could not find anything to cheer about on the news that had been made official about the bishopric of Ahiara Diocese. I did not know where to begin to lament what had happened to our beloved diocese. It appeared to me that somebody either at the Vatican or at the office of the Papal Nuncio had decided to take Ahiara Diocese for a ride. How come the announcement of the bishop of Ahiara Diocese came by the internet and email? How come nobody found it courteous and respectful enough to send down a bishop to the diocese to do the announcement? What has Ahiara Diocese done to deserve such an insult?

There were just too many questions in my mind. There was nothing that made meaning to me anymore. And like every other priest that attended the emergency meeting that evening, I would leave the Cathedral compound with bent-over head, anger and disappointment. I knew that a very dangerous situation had appeared in our diocese. But like every other priest on that day, I left for my house not knowing what our next move would be. And I did not think that we had any other options than to accept the person the Holy Father had announced as our bishop and find a way to work with him in the years ahead.

To be continued...