AHIARA DIOCESE IN CROSSHAIRS: THE REAL STORIES …27 [EXCERPTS FROM A BOOK IN PRINT]

Chapter 11: Injuries of Injustice [i]

The Catholic Diocese of Ahiara Mbaise would be ushered into the Holy Week and Easter festivities of 2013 with the controversy trailing Cardinal Onaiyekan’s Chrism Mass homily in Our Lady Queen of Nigeria Cathedral, Garki, Abuja. Like the Christmas period, this period would become for many people in Mbaise a time of great agony and reflection. There was a lot of reflection on how Ahiara Diocese that used to be a haven and symbol of joy and peace descended into controversy and crisis. How could it happen that a diocese the late Bishop Chikwe spent his entire life building on a solid foundation was cast into controversy barely two years after his death? This was the question on the lips of most people from Mbaise.

The desperate situation of anger was almost unthinkable for many people from Ahiara Diocese. There was a consensus opinion that what had happened on the bishopric crisis was not just a botched attempt by some citizens of Anambra State to steal the bishopric of the great diocese of Ahiara but also a slap on the faces of both Mbaise people and the late Bishop Chikwe. Many Mbaise citizens saw it as an impious dance by some powerful personalities of the Igbo Church and Anambra people in general on the grave of an innocent man, called Bishop Chikwe. This was seen as an injustice of the highest order. The conclusion was that Mbaise people would become a laughing stock for generations to come if they failed to fight and defeat this unwarranted attack with all their might.

But the question then was, why was it that many other people across Nigeria did not see what had happened to Mbaise people as an injustice? Has injustice become a relative term? Can what is injustice to Mbaise people be justice for other people? Or, is it that the people of Mbaise have not made their case to the rest of the Catholics in Nigeria? Why would there be such a disparity and descripancy between the way Mbaise people view the situation and the way many other Catholics of Nigeria view it?

I would spend the entire Holy Week and Easter poring over the issue of justice and injustice in the crisis that was rocking my diocese. It had perplexed me very much that many Catholics in Nigeria had not grasped what the people of Ahiara Diocese were crying about. It appeared that justice had become an ambiguous term, meaning one thing to Mbaise people and another to the rest of Nigerian Catholics.. Rather than focus on the cry of injustice that was blaring from the megaphones of Ahiara diocese, people outside Mbaise became almost paranoid condemning the priests and laity of the diocese for not obeying the pope.

I was caught up in the dilemma of trying to decide which one was prior and which one held a greater urgency and obligation for a Christian - to seek for justice or to obey an authority as highly placed as the pope? My thinking about all this resulted in a flurry of questions. Can the pope command what is unjust? And should he be obeyed if and when he appears to command what is unjust and harmful? When the pope appears to have been misadvised and misled to make an appointment people consider injurious and harmful, do such people have an obligation to obey him in that regard? Or, should they cry out and ask the pope to change his mind as my people in Ahiara Diocese had chosen to do? Do our people have a duty to suffer injustice in silence or do they have the right and even obligation to fight injustice with all their might?

I would be encouraged to pursue my line of thinking when it was alleged that one of the senior priests in Owerri Province aggrieved by what had happened to Ahiara Diocese had confronted the metropolitan and told him to be on the side of justice because the obligation to justice was prior to that of obedience. The implication of this assertion attributed to the great philosopher of Owerri Province, seemed to me that when cast in a dilemma in which the options were between justice and obedience, it would be much more prudent to seek justice first and obedience second. In other words, justice is prior to obedience.

Many detractors of the people of Mbaise were often quoting the Prophet Samuel’s declaration to the first king of Israel, Saul, “obedience is better than sacrifice.” But I considered this a classic misapplication of a biblical passage. The issues for Samuel and Saul were totally different from those of Ahiara Diocese. There was hardly any analogous relationship between the two scenarios. Saul was asked to obey a simple command from God by destroying everything in Amalek. But he thought he could improve on his compliance to the demand by preserving some of the materials he was commanded to destroy for later sacrifices to God.

In Ahiara Diocese, the issue is obeying a command that is considered both unjust and injurious to the people. The people of Ahiara Diocese are conflicted whether they should go ahead and obey a command that will ultimately destroy their most cherished Catholic faith. So the attempt to draw an analogy between Samuel’s assertion to Saul and the reality in Ahiara Diocese’s challenge of injustice was for me a false choice as the people of Ahiara Diocese were not insisting on any sacrifice in place of obeying the Holy Father.

Something in me kept repeating that justice was more important and in fact, prior to the requirement for obedience. In my view, if there was no justice, there would be no religion, and believing in God would be entirely meaningless and odious. So, I believed that one has to pursue justice as a primary obligation. There is nothing more important in any community, whether religious or none, than the upholding of justice. The obligation to do justice is something that binds together everybody in any given community, no matter one’s position or rank or even religion or non-religion. The king or the pope is as much obligated to do justice as a commoner or a lay person. Everybody is required by his or her conscience and/or religion to be just and fair to his or her neighbour.

And for a Christian and a Catholic in particular, the obligation to do justice is the foundation of all righteousness and holiness. A person who does not practise justice cannot be holy; he or she cannot be a saint. If such a person is a minister or a priest in his or her religion, he or she is a hypocrite who cannot uphold justice. A religious authority almost loses his moral authority if he cannot uphold justice. Justice is the basis and guarantor of all moral actions. To be fair and just is the root of all goodness. This requirement underlies all ministries and missions in the name of God. It has been so since Abraham, Isaac and Jacob. The God worshipped by the Israelites and their descendants was and still is one that is just in all his ways. He showed justice and fairness to all including those who were considered wicked and undeserving of any justice. Justice for the Israelites of old was the same as righteousness. In fact, the same word in Hebrew is translated as justice and righteousness in English language.

Christianity is basically a justice-seeking and a justice-doing religious organization. Justice is prior to such indispensable virtues as charity. It is absolutely true that all other virtues build on and from justice. Our God is fair and just. This is the basis of His holiness. It is said many times in the bible that God’s justice is his holiness. The same is true of human beings. He or she is holy who practises justice at all times especially in imitation of our God. Nothing could demonstrate how fair and just the Judeo-Christian God was and still is than the statement of the Prophet Micah: “You have been told, O man, what is good and what the Lord requires of you: Only to do justice, to love goodness, and to walk humbly with your God” [6:8].

However, as I thought through the crisis that was raging in our diocese, the hysterical cry for justice the people of Mbaise were shouting into the ears of the Nigerian hierarchy and the lay faithful, and the deaf ear that was turned to such cries, I was conflicted. I said to myself that either there was something terribly wrong with the Nigerian practice of the Catholic Christianity or Ahiara diocesan people had not articulated their cry for justice very well to the understanding of their fellow Catholics all over the country. This drew from my conviction that the issue of justice should be self-evident to all Catholic Christians. No true Catholic can fail to perceive where justice lies in any given situation. What should distinguish a true Catholic from any other religious or non-religious person is a Catholic’s rabid pursuit of justice.

A Catholic must be one who is addicted to the pursuit of justice. For a good Catholic there can be no negotiation or compromise in giving everyone what is his or her due. The doing of justice should come with no strings attached for every authentic Catholic. Everybody deserves justice, be he or she a conformist or a non-conformist, obedient or disobedient; whether a Christian or a Muslim, a religious or a pagan. The doing of justice should not come as bait or as a reward for something else. It should come of its own accord because it is something one has a prior claim over. Justice is what is due to a person, what is a person’s right to own either by nature or by law.

But in Nigeria, especially as Ahiara Diocese continued to cry injustice! Injustice! I was surprised that both the Catholic hierarchy and the lay faithful of the Nigerian Catholic Church chose to counter them with the cry of obedience! Obedience! For many Catholics in Nigeria, obedience trumped justice and was prior to it. In other words, one who did not obey did not deserve to be shown justice. That is to say, for such people, justice is a reward for obedience.

Many bishops were preaching to priests of Ahiara Diocese saying that if they obeyed by accepting Msgr. Okpalaeke as their bishop, many good things would come their way. That is to say, for some bishops in Nigeria, the justice Ahiara Diocese demanded would only come their way as a reward for their obedience and acceptance of a papal appointment they considered both harmful to their Catholic faith and perilous to their socio-economic progress as a people. That is to say, Mbaise people would have to swallow what they saw as a bitter pill of injustice for them to get what they regarded as justice. This for me appeared like putting the cart before the horse.

As I agonized about what was being made of the issue of justice and injustice in the Catholic Church of Nigeria, I became very sad. My sadness would spur me into taking a second look on the issues we were all crying about. What were the issues of injustice that had been inflicted on my people? I remember asking myself over and over again what the justice and injustice issues were in the Ahiara Diocese crisis. I had concluded that injustice should be self-evident to all just like justice itself. This is because injustice to one is injustice to all as the saying goes. The whole world has a stake in rooting out injustice from the world.

Another area that would bother me as I reflected deeply on the crisis in Ahiara Diocese during that holy period was the dissonance in the apprehension of injustice in the Ahiara case. I had asked myself, if injustice is that self-evident to all, why are the Nigerian hierarchy and laity ignoring it in the case of Ahiara Diocese? Why would people not see that Ahiara Diocese has a strong case in favour of justice in the lopsided appointments of bishops in both the Igbo and the Nigerian Catholic Church as a whole? And why should there be this deafening hush on the people crying against injustice? Is this the case that fulfils the Igbo proverb that when a dead body of a neighbour’s son is being taking out for burial, it appears to the other neighbour that it is a log of wood that is about to be buried?

This was the frame of mind that would drive me into reviewing what injustice and its ignoring by the larger Nigerian Catholic Church was doing to the people of Ahiara Diocese. It appeared to me as if there was a conspiracy of silence against the cry against injustice from the people of Ahiara Diocese. And that encouraged me to go back to review the instances of injustice the appointment of Msgr. Okpalaeke had thrown up and how injuries had been meted to the Catholics of the diocese.

The number one claim of Ahiara priests and laity is that it is an injustice that out of the 220 incardinated priests of the diocese and the more than three hundred other Mbaise priests who are affiliated to other religious congregations or incardinated into other dioceses around the world, not one Mbaise priest was found worthy to be appointed the bishop of Ahiara Diocese or the bishop of any other place in the world. As it had been argued over and over again in some other places, the people who had by right the first shot at being considered for the appointment for the bishopric of the diocese were the priests of Ahiara Diocese. If there is no incardinated priest of Ahiara Diocese found worthy of the bishopric appointment then Mbaise indigenous priests in other dioceses and religious congregations would be the next people to be considered to fill the vacancy in their home diocese. It would be only when all these people were found unfit and wanting that a non-Mbaise person incardinated into another diocese could be considered. Ahiara diocesan priests insist that a process that found all of the more than five hundred priests of Mbaise origin as unfit for the bishopric must be totally flawed. And I agree completely. If none among the more than six hundred priests of Mbaise origin cannot be appointed a bishop then the process that selects bishops in the Catholic Church has to be adjudged flawed through and through.

This position seems to be buttressed by the fact that at the time of making the appointment many Mbaise sons held responsible positions in the Catholic Church of Nigeria. About two of them were the active rectors of the two major seminaries run by Owerri Ecclesiastical province; one had been a rector of a major seminary in the old Onitsha Ecclesiastical seminary; many of them had been major seminary and minor seminary teachers; some had been superiors of major congregations, and others held responsible positions in both the province and the nation. In fact, the person who was appointed bishop of Ahiara Diocese was taught in the major seminary by many Mbaise priests. If all these people could not be considered as suitable to be appointed bishops then the process that was used to judge them unfit must be terribly flawed. This seems in my view an irrefutable argument.