AHIARA DIOCESE IN CROSSHAIRS: THE REAL STORIES …29 [EXCERPTS FROM A BOOK IN PRINT]

Chapter 11: Injuries of Injustice [iii]

One of the more popular characterizations of the appointment of Bishop Okpalaeke was that which described it as Nsi bara aba – a faeces mess whose spill caught the spiller by surprise. Both the metropolitan and many Igbo bishops used the metaphor of “a faeces mess” to describe the appointment of Okpalaeke to Ahiara Diocese. The basic words here are “faeces” and “mess”. For the bishops of Owerri province, what happened was a terrible mess nobody had expected.

On the part of Awka and Anambra priests the same characterization of “a faeces mess” was used randomly but in a more subtle way. Some Awka priests were quoted as saying to their Ahiara diocese counterparts as a reaction to the latter’s protest over the appointment that: Fa lachasisaa nsi, anyi ga na-achi fa – when they finish cleaning up the “faeces mess” with their tongues, they will remain our subjects and minnows. In other words, Awka priests understood what had happened as comparable to “a faeces mess” but would want their Ahiara counterparts to clean it up with their tongues.

What a humiliation of the people Ahiara Diocese to require them to clean up the “faeces mess” made in Anambra State with their tongues! In other words, the Awka priests are treating their Mbaise counterparts as having a status worse than that of any slave in the history of humanity. If we will be required to clean up the faeces mess made by Awka people with our tongues, is there any more doubt about what Awka Anambra people think about the status of Mbaise people as human beings in the world? For them, we have no more status than that of a faeces mess cleaning dog! That is to say, before some Anambra State people, Mbaise people are nothing but dogs that clean up faeces mess with tongues.

Moreover, according to the logic of Awka priests, when Mbaise people had finished doing this unthinkable job of cleaning “a faeces mess with their tongues”, their situation would not improve any bit as they would remain the subjects and slaves of their Awka counterparts. There is only one word for this scenario that is being painted here by some priests from Anambra State. And that is slavery of the worst order. Some Awka priests believed in their hearts that Ahiara Mbaise priests and in fact the priests of Owerri Ecclesiastical Province were more or less their slaves who would continue to clean up their faeces mess with their tongues. This is extremely humiliating. And that was why Ahiara Diocese priests had no other choice than to fight to the finish an appointment that had been packaged as a symbol of their dehumanization and servitude.

Most important, there seemed to have been an early agreement that the appointment of Msgr. Peter Okpalaeke for Ahiara Diocese was comparable to “a faeces mess.” Nearly everybody seemed to agree that in the appointment of Msgr. Okpalaeke a terrible mess comparable to “a faeces mess” was made in Ahiara Diocese. Unfortunately what many people outside of Mbaise would encourage the people of Ahiara Diocese to do was to live with the stinking mess instead of asking those who made the mess to try to clean it up. Many people including the most highly placed individuals in the Catholic Church told Mbaise people; “yes, you’ve made an important point and it has been noted. But let us move on. Allow the sleeping dog to lie. Let the mess stay with you yet and the future will take care of it.” For this people the most appropriate way to treat what they compared to “a faeces mess” among Mbaise people was to encourage the people to live with it and let the future take care of it at any undetermined time.

But Mbaise people disagreed. They said repeatedly that they would not live with a stinking mess that was harmful to them. According to them, doing so would be a terrible injustice to them and a horrendous risk to their health and the health of the Catholic Church in their land. The problem became which of the two positions made more sense? And in our view the most reasonable thing to do was to agree that a mess had been made needing somebody to clean it up. When such an agreement had been reached, the obligation shifts to the person or group of persons that made the mess to clean it up.

In most civilized countries, when a dog makes a mess while it is being walked around in the streets, the law obliges the owner of the dog to clean it up. Where he fails to do so, he will be fined. In America, every dog owner walking his dog in the streets carries with him or her some plastic bags to collect the mess to be made by the dog and dump it in a street trash can. That is to say the dog owner understands the fact that it is his or her responsibility to clean up the mess made by his or her dog.

The same should apply in every other situation in life. If a mess is made as it is fairly generally agreed it was made in the case of Ahiara Diocese, it is a terrible injustice to demand that the people who are the victims of the mess live with the same stinking mess in order for them to appear obedient to the powers-that be. The fairer thing to do is to ask the people who made the mess to find a way to clean it up. The stench of the mess should not punish the innocent people from Mbaise who did nothing to deserve a mess to be deposited in their property. On the other hand, it should be usually agreed that the people of Mbaise have a right and even an obligation to demand that the mess be removed. It is unchristian for the people to be asked to keep quiet and live with a mess they did not make.

Msgr. Peter Okpalaeke’s appointment for Ahiara Diocese is a great injustice to the rural Catholics of Ahiara Diocese who were being asked to bear the unfair burden of listening to a dialect of the Igbo language they hardly understand. This would have been necessary if Ahiara Diocese lacked a bishopric material who could speak the dialect that is understandable to the local people. As it turns out, Ahiara Diocese has this type of manpower more than any other diocese in Igbo land. So, the only reason why the diocese would be given somebody else as her bishop, especially one whose dialect her local folks would not be able to understand, is to punish unfairly. And the people have a right to resist the unfair punishment.

In the controversy surrounding his appointment as bishop-elect of Ahiara Diocese, nobody has contested the fact that Okpalaeke speaks a different strand of the Igbo language than the one commonly understood in the heartland Igbo area which includes Mbaise land. Rather what has been the issue is whether they should live with the language variation like their counterparts from Aba and Okigwe Dioceses where Anambra bishops are holding sway. Unfortunately, little has been made of the fact that both Aba and Okigwe Dioceses are urban and semi-urban areas respectively where there are large representatives of indigenes of Anambra State who understand very well the dialect of their bishops. But even at that, those bishops are struggling to communicate with their flocks especially those in the rural areas. But the situation of Ahiara Diocese is totally different. It is a completely rural area.

Anambra bishops who have preached in the rural areas of Igbo heartland have not been successful in communicating with their congregation. Bishop Ezeonyia of Aba testified to this reality when he bucked preaching in Anambra dialect during the centenary inauguration on January 19, 2010. He excused himself from preaching in his dialect because he said that the people would not understand him. As a result, he preached the homily in English language. In other words, Bishop Ezeonyia recognized on that occasion that preaching to the people of Igbo heartland in a language they would not understand would amount to a terrible injustice to them and an inhibition to their understanding of the Christian message.

The flock must hear the voice of the shepherd to be able to follow him. Where the flock do not understand the shepherd how could they follow him? And where the flock do not follow the shepherd because they do not understand his command, what loses the most in the process? Of course, it is the flock. The flock loses when it cannot hear the voice of the shepherd. And this was what Mbaise people were fighting to avoid. The people of Ahiara Diocese would want to have a shepherd whose voice they would listen to and understand. This is a right that cannot be denied them. Anything outside of this is a terrible injustice and must be fought with all the might of the people. This was the argument Mbaise people made and have continued to make till the end.

On the part of the clergy of Ahiara Diocese, the appointment of Msgr. Okpalaeke as their bishop was seen as a terrible injustice as it would divide their Presbyterium. Since the creation of Ahiara Diocese, the clergy of the diocese have shown remarkable character of unity and harmony. The late Bishop Chikwe worked extremely hard to establish a modicum of peace and harmony among the priests of his diocese. And he was successful in doing this because he knew them and they knew him. He could feel their pulse and they could feel his.

But the case of Msgr. Okpalaeke would have been completely different. He had hardly been to Mbaise before. He did not know the priests except those he had met in the seminaries he had attended. His ministry would have annulled the great unity that had identified the diocese of Ahiara for about twenty five years. As a result, Ahiara diocese priests believed that giving them a bishop whose antecedents suggested that he would divide the Presbyterium and cause conflicts, when they had many candidates from Mbaise who had what it would take to sustain the unity that had become the hallmark of the diocese of Ahiara was a terrible injustice that needed to be fought. And this kind of reasoning cannot easily be faulted. The saying goes that the devil one knows is better than the one he does not know.

Another source of injustice was the mischaracterization of the struggle by both the Nuncio and Cardinal Filoni of the Dicastery for the Evangelization of Peoples at the Vatican. In his chastisement of Msgr. Theo Nwalo, the diocesan administrator, the Nuncio had told him that it was ethnicity, tribalism and clannishness that were motivating Ahiara Diocesan faithful to reject the appointment of Msgr. Okpalaeke as their bishop. In his reply to the suggestion of Msgr. Nwalo on the way to resolve the Ahiara crisis, Cardinal Filoni had also employed the same mischaracterization of the struggle. He told Msgr. Nwalo, “you speak to me about questions regarding the origins of the new bishop, of ‘historical’ [!], tensions within the dioceses, of jealousy, and of other less noble virtues. I ask: ‘From where did Christ come? Was He a Roman, a Greek, an Igbo, or from Ahiara?”

The allegation that by their struggle the people were embarked in ethnic and ethnocentric battle seems to me the greatest oxymoronic charge that could have been levelled by anybody who understood what the battle was all about. If there should be a charge of ethnic agenda in the crisis, it should go straight against Awka and Anambra people in general who are pulling all strings to plant only their brothers and sisters in the dioceses across Igbo land and Nigeria as a whole. The people who want only their own people to dominate the Catholic Church in Igbo land and Nigeria are in fact those carrying a clannish-ethnic agenda. The people who are exporting only their own people to rule others are in fact the clannish and ethnocentric people.

But the people who are rejecting such domination cannot be ethnocentric or clannish. Rather, they are a people who are fighting for freedom and survival. How can I become ethnic and clannish by refusing anybody from taking advantage of me? It does not make any sense whatsoever to charge Ahiara Diocese of clannishness because they refused to be colonized by priests from Awka.

That Ahiara Diocese is being defamed as carrying out an ethnic agenda shows the poor reasoning by the highest officials of the church. And this is exactly what had resulted in the current crisis that is now raging. The people who could have reasoned correctly before making the recommendation of whom to appoint the bishop of Ahiara Diocese failed to do so and what resulted was crisis of unprecedented nature. No wonder people are accusing them of having been induced to abandon correct reasoning on the matter. The fact is there is a failure of reasoning in the appointment of Msgr. Okpalaeke, which Ahiara people are right to see as injustice done to them.

The way the bishop-elect has been conducting himself since the crisis broke as a result of his appointment has demonstrated one thing about him, namely, that he was among those Pope Francis described as ambitious careerists and social climbers who seem hell-bent on assuming authority in the Church. It would have been a terrible injustice to Ahiara Diocese to allow a careerist bishop and a social climber to assume the bishopric of the humble and rural diocese of Ahiara. As the pope has emphasized, the bishop of a place like Ahiara should be one like them in every way. He should be humble, simple and unassuming. Ahiara Diocese does not need a Prince from the Kingdom of Awka to serve her as her bishop. They need a simple pastor whose voice they will hear and follow.

A consensus that has arisen since the crisis in Ahiara Diocese broke is that the appointment of Msgr. Okpalaeke from Onitsha Ecclesiastical Province to Ahiara Diocese in Owerri Ecclesiastical Province is a terrible injustice to the people of Owerri Province. This is based on the fact that Onitsha Province has indigenous bishops for all of her seven dioceses and already controls two of the six dioceses of Owerri Province.

With the appointment of Msgr. Okpalaeke for Ahiara Diocese, Onitsha Province was gunning for the third diocese in Owerri Province while maintaining intact all of her seven dioceses for her indigenous bishops. What it means is if Onitsha Province got Ahiara Diocese it would have gotten three of the six dioceses of Owerri Province without losing any among the seven dioceses she has in her own province. At the end, Onitsha Province would command one and a half province to Owerri Province which commands only one half of a province. No matter how the math is done, the terrible injustice of this situation is more than obvious. People believed that by gunning to possess half of Owerri Province while retaining intact her seven dioceses, Onitsha Province was showing unchristian greed that must be challenged.

Along the same line, there was an agreement that the appointment of Msgr. Okpalaeke for Ahiara Diocese was a terrible injustice to the metropolitan and the suffragan bishops of Owerri Province who had on several occasions confessed that they were never consulted for the appointment when the canon law decreed that they should have been adequately consulted. The same is true of the President of Catholic Bishops Conference of Nigeria, Archbishop Ignatius Kaigama, who confessed both privately and openly that he only heard the name “Ebere Peter Okpalaeke” on the day he was announced as the bishop of Ahiara Diocese. But the canon law provision is clear that these individuals must be consulted for any appointment of this kind of nature. The fact that they were not consulted shows how unjust the process that produced a Bishop Okpalaeke was and still is.

Finally, the appointment of Msgr. Okpalaeke does a serious injustice to the law of the Church whose process and procedures were set aside and not truly followed in the events preceding the announcement of the appointment by His Holiness. The process of selecting bishops is made abundantly clear in the canon law. The fact that it was not truly followed caused injury to the body of those laws and to the reputation of the Church. It cast the Church as a community that could not keep the law it made for herself. It also caused injury to the corporate body of the Church. As the procedure was set aside, what resulted was crisis that injured the unity, love and harmony of the universal church.