AHIARA DIOCESE IN CROSSHAIRS: THE REAL STORIES …17 [EXCERPTS FROM A BOOK IN PRINT]

Chapter 6: Struggle for Igbo Heartland [ii]

However, the relationship between the two provinces has always been marked by Owerri Province trying to grow up and grow out of the shadows of Onitsha Province, and the latter finding a way to maintain her leash over the progress of her baby-province. Onitsha Province whose greater part is constituted by today’s Anambra State has always desired to control the destiny of her sister province in Igbo land. And the latter has always struggled to break free from Onitsha province’s shadows and stranglehold. The relationship is not quite dissimilar to that of a colonized people trying to break free from their colonial masters. As it usually happens in a battle for liberation; the fire of the liberation struggle burns higher and deeper among the colonized than among the colonizers. The colonizers would always try to maintain the status quo that favours them, while the colonized would always be longing and struggling for liberation from their colonial masters.

For quite a long time, the fight would remain a draw, or, at times, tilted towards the direction of the Owerri province. This was a part of the letter on February 4, 2013, to the Cardinal Prefect of the Dicastery for the Evangelization of Peoples, Fernando Cardinal Filoni, by the erstwhile administrator of Ahiara Diocese, Rt. Rev. Msgr. Theo Nwalo, on the way to resolve the escalating bishopric crisis in Ahiara Diocese. Msgr. Nwalo noted:

The Catholic faith came to Igboland through the Onitsha area. For this we remain ever grateful. However, for most past our relationship with the Church in Onitsha area has been mainly that of father and son; teacher and pupil; even though the former son and pupil of the Onitsha area, that is Owerri Province, appears more gifted in every way and has been practically outshining his former father and teacher being Onitsha Province. This situation, of course, has in the main, not gone down well with the progenitor. The issue of the bishopric of Ahiara Diocese consciously or not touches this very sensitive nerve.

From all indications and backed by experiences, Onitsha Province would like to maintain the status quo in which this father and the under-aged son relationship would continue even subconsciously. This is why the doctrine of universality of the Catholic Church seems to be conceived by our brothers and sisters in Onitsha Ecclesiastical Province as a tide that must continuously flow in their favour. And as it flows in their favour and their chosen direction they continue to send downstream their own people to minister and serve as bishops in the downstream area which is Owerri Province. But they are not willing to accept those from Owerri Province swimming upstream to make their contributions to the great work of evangelization up there.

The question agitating the minds of both the clergy and lay faithful in Owerri Province is: Is Owerri Province a suffragan diocese of Onitsha Ecclesiastical Province? If the answer is “No”, the follow-up question is: Why is it that Onitsha Ecclesiastical Province maintains a tight grip over all the bishoprics in that area, but is gunning to take hold of 50% of the Episcopal Sees in Owerri Province that is the most dynamic province of the Catholic Church in Africa?

When Owerri area was raised into a vicariate in 1948 and a diocese in 1950, the balance tilted heavily in favour of Owerri province as it was able to harness its rich human and material resources as it pushed forward into many frontiers of growth and evangelization. With a great leader in the person of the then Irish Bishop Joseph Brendan Whelan CSSp, Owerri area got rid of its first stranglehold which was the Onitsha Catechism whose preferred language made very little meaning to the Catholics of Owerri Igbo heartland because of an acute variation in dialects.

The issue of differences in dialects and the fact that the dominant dialect in Igbo Catholicism was the Onitsha dialect had always constituted a flashpoint in the relationship between the two sister dioceses that stand as provinces today. It has never been hidden in the history of the Igbo people that Southern Igbo people do not quite understand the dialect spoken by their northern Igbo brothers and sisters. The Igbo language has always been an issue in the relationship between these two areas. Many a time, Onitsha people derogatorily describe their southern Igbo brothers and sisters as “Ndi Igbo” which in this context is to be understood as “rural bush dwellers” while as the southern Igbo people derogatorily describe them as “Ijekekebee”, a word, which in its original meaning could have been construed as “migrants” or “nomads” or “itinerants”; people who were always on the move.

Moreover, the issue of culture and language of Onitsha area was always conceived as “not quite pure” as it was seen in the southern and central Igbo areas as a hybrid of the interaction between borderline north-western Igbo language with the other south-western languages like Yoruba, Edo, Hausa, etc. As a result of what was considered “traditional impurity” of the Onitsha dialect of the Igbo language, speaking the language in the southern Igbo areas was always resented and at times considered an insult to the people of the heartland Igbo area.

The people of southern and central Igbo would be made to swallow their language pride and sheathe the sword of their resentment when the Onitsha dialect became the only channel for them to get into mainstream Catholicism which brought them the gospel of salvation, education and medical breakthroughs which they had cherished very much. As the Igbo of the heartland would say in their adage: a hu ihe ka ubi e ree oba – seeing that Catholicism held greater value for them and their children, they had to sell whatever they had in order to purchase it. What they had sold in the process to get Catholicism was the pride they took in their heartland Igbo dialect which would later on mutate into what is called central Igbo language today.

However, the low-level tension between the two provinces appeared to be temporarily overcome when Bishop Whelan became the bishop of Owerri Diocese. Recognizing the problem, he easily published a different Catechism and prayer books for the Owerri Catholics. This was greeted with joy all over southern and central Igbo heartland areas. Bishop Whelan would go ahead to implement many other policies that ensured that Owerri Igbo heartland Catholics had their own legitimate identity that was different from that of Onitsha area peoples.

But when Archbishop Francis Arinze became the metropolitan of Onitsha Province comprising the Onitsha and Owerri heartland Igbo areas, he began the subtle manoeuvres that were obviously aimed at returning Owerri Igbo heartland areas to her former tutelage position under Onitsha area. All the time the missionaries were in charge, he would make little progress in such a questionable effort. He was then a young metropolitan running a territory dominated by expatriate Irish bishops and senior Igbo bishops like John Cross Anyiogu, Anthony Nwedo and Godfrey Mary Paul Okoye.

However, the little progress he could make then as a metropolitan was to institute or reinforce a pre-existing policy in which seminarians from southern and central Igbo heartland who were either born in Onitsha and its environs or whose parents lived in the cities of north-western Igbo cities of Onitsha and Awka, who wanted to attend the archdiocesan junior seminary in Onitsha called the All Hallows Seminary, did not realize their wish. Immediately any one was fished out, a letter would be handed to him to return to the southern Igbo junior seminaries like, St Peter Claver Seminary, Okpala, Immaculate Conception Seminary Ahiaeke Umuahia Ibeku and Sacred Heart Seminary, Port Harcourt.

Any child with his parents traced to the Igbo heartland areas would either be prevented from passing the entrance examination and interview into All Hallows Seminary, Onitsha, or, he would be given a letter and sent packing to the seminaries in the Igbo heartland immediately he was fished out. One of our senior priests has not finished lamenting the fact that his dream to go to the seminary of All Hallows in Onitsha was torpedoed on the day he went for an interview and was ordered to return home to pursue his priestly vocation in the seminaries within his parents’ home in Owerri area.

Msgr. Theophilus Nwalo, who was the first black priest to join the staff of St Peter Claver Seminary, Okpala, in September of 1965, shortly after his ordination, recounts how Fr Kevin Dohany, the rector of Okpala seminary was livid about the policies of deportations or repatriations of seminarians of Igbo heartland areas who wanted to attend the All Hallows Seminary, Onitsha.

Notwithstanding the universal condemnation and outcry, Onitsha Archdiocese would insist on this rather xenophobic policy of repatriation of seminarians from Owerri area. This was happening in spite of the fact that seminarians from Onitsha area who were attending Okpala seminary were never treated in a similar manner. As Msgr. Nwalo would recount to us often, such great priests as Peter Damian Akpunonu, Anyaka, Achebe, Idika, and many others finished their junior seminary trainings in Okpala seminary before voluntarily opting to return to their home diocese of Onitsha.

However, immediately the war ended and the white Irish missionaries left, the road appeared cleared for Archbishop Arinze to begin gradually to implement his policy of returning Owerri area to its subservient status under Onitsha Ecclesiastical Province’s tutelage. The first place this post-civil war project of Archbishop Arinze manifested was the alleged ordering of the Congregation of the Immaculate Heart of Mary, Mother of Christ, which was headquartered in Urualla, to relocate to Onitsha. As the late Msgr. Okoroanyanwu would report in his memoir, Lest It Be Lost, the archbishop of Onitsha with the acquiescence of the then Superior General of Immaculate Heart, Mother Joseph Uzoigwe, would forcefully relocate the congregation without even the courtesy of seeking for the consent of administrator of the then Owerri Diocese.

In the same 1970, Archbishop Arinze would flex his muscles once again in the manoeuvres he made to replace the expelled Irish bishop of Owerri Diocese, Bishop Joseph Whelan. He would make sure that the person favoured by the Irish missionaries for the position of the bishopric of Owerri Diocese did not get it. And that would be how an Mbaise man, Rt. Rev. Monsignor Ignatius Mmereole Okoroanyanwu of Obodo Ahiara, Mbaise, who received the nod of the Irish missionaries to serve as the administrator or Vicar Capitular of Owerri Diocese was prevented from realizing his mandate to become the bishop of the diocese. Rather, Archbishop Arinze favoured his former master, mentor and collaborator, Bishop Mark Unegbu to get the Owerri bishopric stool.

However, when Archbishop Arinze, now Francis Cardinal Arinze, got his job at the Vatican during the pontificate of Pope John Paul II and rose quickly in the ranks to go as high as becoming the fourth citizen of the State of Vatican City, he sought to permanently tilt the balance of power between Onitsha and Owerri provinces in favour of his home province of Onitsha. It appears that the only visible Igbo agenda pursued by Cardinal Arinze while working in the Vatican was to try to subjugate Owerri Province to the authority of Onitsha Province.

It is not certain whether Cardinal Arinze agreed to the creation of Owerri Province as an independent entity. But one thing is widely believed among the priests and some laity of Owerri Province. Rightly or wrongly many priests and laity of Owerri Province believed that Cardinal Arinze used up all his powers to make sure that whether Owerri existed as a part of Onitsha Province or as an independent Ecclesiastical Province, its future remained that of a servant or baby of the Onitsha Ecclesiastical Province. According to allegations widely held among priests and laity of Owerri Province, Cardinal Arinze appeared to believe that he could realize his wish of ensuring the perpetual subjugation of Owerri Province by Onitsha Ecclesiastical Province through the appointments of Onitsha Ecclesiastical Province priests as bishops in Owerri Province. They accuse him of single-handedly constituting Onitsha Ecclesiastical Province priests serving as bishops in Owerri Province into a modern day Capet-baggers.

According to this line of thinking, at the creation of Ahiara Diocese in November of 1987, the bishopric of the new diocese was not much of interest to Cardinal Arinze and his group. Perhaps they had seen it as an unviable rural diocese. So, the battle for the bishopric was fought between Mbaise priests and Bishop Unegbu who was allegedly dreaming of introducing one of his relatives to the diocese – Msgr. Nwafor. But he was strongly rebuffed by the gallant fighters of Mbaise led by the late Monsignors Okoroanyanwu and Donald Okoro.

If reasonable insinuations were anything to go by, the original wish of Bishop Unegbu was to introduce a foreigner as the first bishop of Ahiara Diocese. But two things might have frustrated and discouraged him. The first was the type of fight-back mounted by Mbaise indigenous priests and lay people led by Msgr. Okoroanyanwu and Chief D.O. Onu of unforgettable memory. The second was the fact that the place was a risky experiment. It was completely rural. While having viable parishes under Owerri Diocese, the new diocese was not considered viable enough to attract the interest of foreigners. As a rural diocese, it was better left in the hands of its own to either rise or sink with it.

However, Cardinal Arinze’s alleged battle along the line of returning Owerri Diocese under the tutelage of Onitsha Province would manifest itself further in the battle of who would be appointed bishop to succeed Bishop Unegbu of Owerri Diocese. According to Cardinal Arinze's many critics in Owerri Province, evidence abounds that suggests that Onitsha Province under the influence of Cardinal Arinze did everything humanly possible to seize the bishopric of Owerri Diocese on the eve of its being raised to the status of a metropolitan see.

Bishop Unegbu seemed to have played along a little bit with the desires of the so-called Cardinal Arinze group before succumbing to pressures from the priests of Owerri Diocese. There were insinuations then to bring people like Bishop Albert Obiefuna of Awka and make him the archbishop of Owerri Archdiocese. Another kite which was flown at one point or the other was to appoint the then rector of Catholic Institute of West Africa, Fr Peter Damian Akpunonu as the bishop of Owerri Diocese. All those ploys fell through as both Bishop Unegbu and Owerri diocesan priests stuck to their guns of having an indigenous bishop in place for the diocese of Owerri.

According to the critics of Cardinal Arinze, he would win a strategic victory in his ploy to help Onitsha recapture Owerri province when he facilitated the appointment of his friend, Fr Vincent Ezeonyia, CSSp, of Uke in Onitsha Archdiocese as the bishop of Aba Diocese. He pulled off a masterful stroke in that adventure in uniting the ambition of Bishop Nwedo to appoint a Holy Ghost priest into one of the dioceses in Owerri area in succession to him and Cardinal Arinze’s alleged own ambition to plant Onitsha priests as bishops in Owerri Province as a way of recapturing and subjugating the entire area to their mother house that was Onitsha province. Bishop Ezeonyia fitted the profile perfectly. He was a Holy Ghost father who had worked quite extensively in Owerri province and a citizen of Anambra State whose presence would tilt the balance of power in Owerri province in favour of Onitsha province.

The alleged strategy of Cardinal Arinze to recapture Owerri Province would become glaringly obvious to all perceptible Catholics of the province when in 2005 he allegedly facilitated the appointment of Bishop Solomon Amatu of Awka Diocese into the Okigwe Episcopal See being vacated by the ailing and retiring late Bishop Anthony Ilonu. Immediately Cardinal Arinze allegedly pulled all buttons to muscle his man into Okigwe Diocese, the people of the province regained consciousness of what was happening. And there began to be vows in all the dioceses of the province that through one way or the other, his alleged adventure and the policy of recapturing Owerri Province and returning it under the tutelage of Onitsha Province must be stopped.