AHIARA DIOCESE IN CROSSHAIRS: THE REAL STORIES …32 [EXCERPTS FROM A BOOK IN PRINT]

Chapter 12: Adding Insult to Injury [iii]

It is worthy of note that since Ahiara Diocese came into existence in 1987/88 His Eminence, Francis Cardinal Arinze has hardly ever set foot in it. The Very Rev Monsignor Emmanuel Ogu who chaperoned Bishop Chikwe during his ordination in St Peter’s Basilica, Rome, on January 6, 1988, has consistently lamented the fact that the then Archbishop Arinze working as a Nigerian high official at the Vatican was absent during the Episcopal ordination of Bishop Chikwe in Rome. He apparently detested Ahiara Diocese from the very day it was announced in Rome.

It appears that from the very beginning Cardinal Arinze showed his disdain for the people of Mbaise and their burgeoning diocese. He is apparently not a friend of the territory called Mbaise. There are many stories of the numerous frantic efforts Bishop Chikwe made to get him to visit Ahiara Diocese and celebrate mass for the people of the diocese, but each time he turned it down. The first cardinal in the Igbo Church never made any efforts to visit Ahiara Diocese all through the 22 years and 9 months Bishop Chikwe was shepherding the people of Ahiara Diocese. He came home several times a year for nearly twenty three years but never found a few hours to pay a courtesy call on the bishop and people of Ahiara Diocese. If this is not disdain that borders on hatred, we do not know what else to call it.

One particular story about Bishop Chikwe and Cardinal Arinze appears quite touchy. One afternoon Bishop Chikwe appeared in his refectory downcast and unhappy. He could not gather himself up to begin taking his launch. A priest asked him what the matter was. He told him that Cardinal Arinze had just written to cancel a visit to the diocese he had arranged with him about eight months earlier. Bishop Chikwe there and then began to lament the fact that each time he made an appointment with Cardinal Arinze to come over to the diocese to celebrate a Mass for the people of the diocese he would agree only to wait for the last minute to cancel. He did this on several occasions leading to the lamentation of Bishop Chikwe that afternoon. The truth is from his actions and body language, Cardinal Arinze did not like Mbaise people and their diocese.

There is another story that took place in 1984. A young Mbaise senior seminarian was sent on an inter-diocesan apostolic work to Onitsha Archdiocese. His last name did not sound like an Igbo name, because it was his father’s name that had been cut into one half. In fact, his last name sounded like a Ghanaian name. So the then Archbishop Arinze assigned him to work in his office at Holy Trinity. They were working very well like father and son until one day the archbishop wanted to know more about the hard-working young man who had impressed him with his work ethic. And when the archbishop found out that the young man rather than coming from Ghana as his last name had suggested came instead from Mbaise, he exploded. Archbishop Arinze told the young man off for having deceived him with his strange name. He implied that if he had known that he came from “such people” he would never have allowed him anywhere near his office. The truth is Archbishop Arinze from the very beginning appeared to have no love for Mbaise people. He showed at every opportunity he found his total contempt for Mbaise people.

The most heartbreaking action of Cardinal Arinze to all Mbaise people was that all through the time the diocese mourned the sudden demise of her great shepherd, Bishop Victor Chikwe, the most decorated cleric of Igbo land never for once came to commiserate with the people of Mbaise. He was home shortly after the burial and yet never thought it wise to come down to Mbaise land to spend some words of consolation for the mourning Mbaise people. The people longed for a special funeral mass for Bishop Chikwe to be led by the Cardinal. But he was a huge disappointment. Except for some words of tribute he penned on the funeral brochure, Cardinal Arinze never behaved as if Igbo Catholicism lost one of its greatest stars in Bishop Chikwe. The people of Ahiara Diocese considered his action a great scandal.

The people of Ahiara Diocese rightly or wrongly translated Cardinal Arinze’s action as an act of hatred towards Mbaise people. As a result, the priests and laity of Ahiara Diocese do not believe that they have much in common with Cardinal Arinze. For them he is a cardinal only for Onitsha and Anambra people. He is not a Cardinal for the Igbo Church. His visions are too narrow for that. It would be little wonder then that the opposition against Bishop Okpalaeke would harden most tremendously when the latter was alleged to be the candidate of Cardinal Arinze. The people of Mbaise began to suspect that the new bishop’s mission in Ahiara Diocese if allowed to stand would be to pursue the hateful disposition of Cardinal Arinze towards Ahiara Diocese to its logical end.

Since the outbreak of the crisis in Ahiara Diocese, a lot of revelation has been made on how Anambra people schemed their way into producing the bishop-elect of Ahiara Diocese in the person of Msgr. Okpalaeke. Shortly after the death of Bishop Chikwe, some personalities from Anambra State, especially Awka Diocese in particular caused to be spread all over their diocese some false information that the struggle for the bishopric in Ahiara Diocese was drawn along the lines of the three local government areas of Mbaise. According to this slander, each of the three local governments was claiming the right to produce the next bishop. As one Awka priest recently confided in a priest from Ahiara Diocese, when they in Awka realized that there was no way the three local governments could be separated in their struggle to produce the next bishop for Ahiara Diocese, they decided to give them one from Awka Diocese.

As everyone could see, this is one of the wicked slanders of Mbaise land that produced the crisis. Somebody who calls himself or herself a Catholic spread the falsehood that each of the three local governments in Mbaise was insisting on being the one to produce a replacement for the late Bishop Chikwe and had fought themselves into a standstill in their struggle. It was their titanic struggle that would necessitate the appointment of a tiebreaker of a bishop from Awka Diocese. But this is all hogwash. The slander is absolutely wicked and unchristian in every sense of the word. There was no struggle for the bishopric among the three local governments being falsely accused by the slander from Awka Diocese. The whole story was made up to create an excuse for the appointment of Fr Peter Okpalaeke from Awka Diocese. This was a clear case of giving a dog a bad name in order to kill it.

The truth is there was a wide expression of disdain of Mbaise people all through the length and breadth of Anambra State long before the announcement of the bishopric of Msgr. Okpalaeke. Both the higher-ups and the down-unders of that state showed that they did not have much respect for Mbaise people. Obviously, it was this lack of respect that had motivated their using their powerful connections at the Vatican to recommend a very controversial candidate to take over the Episcopal See of Ahiara Diocese. They knew that Ahiara Diocese and Owerri Province in general had a gazillion of candidates far better and much more accomplished than the one they had recommended. But they went ahead and recommended him just to spite Mbaise people and show their hatred towards them. This was why it became almost a dogma that the Anambra elite, out of hatred, wanted to bring Mbaise people down to their knees. But the wise Mbaise people chose to stop them right in their tracks. This is fair and just!

There is no where the hatred, disdain and slander of Mbaise people by their Anambra brothers and sisters were better articulated and demonstrated than in a very outrageous essay published on page 56 of Daily Sun Newspaper of June 20, 2013, a day before the Episcopal ordination of Msgr. Okpalaeke at Seat of Wisdom Seminary, by a Daily Sun columnist called Uche Ezechukwu. Columnist Ezechukwu carried the slander of Mbaise people to a height unknown before by repeating in the process all the known and unknown slanders, stereotypes and character assassination of the great people of Mbaise. His accomplishment in this regard was breathtaking.

To his credit and in keeping with the time-honoured journalistic culture of full disclosure, Mr. Ezechukwu did introduce himself as a cousin to Bishop Okpalaeke. In other words, he warned his readers upfront to factor in the fact that he was an interest party in the crisis in the way his essay would be appreciated. That was very kind of him to let the world know ahead of time that he was a passionate member of the Okpalaeke advocacy group. But Mr. Ezechukwu demonstrated the pride and arrogance that inflamed the crisis the most with the avalanche of unpalatable words he employed in describing Mbaise priests and the lay faithful for daring to challenge the nomination of his cousin as their bishop.

Fanning the embers of the burgeoning hatred against Mbaise by the people of Anambra State, Mr Ezechukwu described us as “the recalcitrant ‘Mbaise’ Catholics”. Mbaise priests and religious he described as “misguided priests and religious who must be a huge embarrassment”. Ezechukwu described Mbaise priests protesting the appointment as “Mbaise renegade priests”. And in a demonstrative show of arrogance, the Daily Sun columnist who a moment earlier decried that Mbaise “protesters” were not recognizing that it was the Vatican that appointed bishops in the Catholic Church sarcastically and slanderously alleged that after two years of Bishop Chikwe’s death “the ‘wise men’ clergy and laity of the Ahiara Diocese made it impossible for a bishop to be selected from among their 500 indigenous priests because of the damaging mud-slinging and putrid petitions they had levelled against one another.”

Piling his own sets of calumny on already sky-high slanders that were unleashed against Mbaise people, Mr. Ezechukwu disingenuously criticized Mbaise people’s love for big families and good education for their children. This smacks of envy because many of Ezechukwu’s kinsmen in Anambra State prefer to remain ignorant for life because of their penchant for primitive “buying-and-selling” called “business”. Isn’t it errant stupidity that in this day and age in the 21st century, Mbaise people are being criticized for their love for education while illiterate traders from Anambra State are being exalted as the civilized ones? This was the type of book haram civilization the Okpalaeke clan were attempting to bring to Mbaise land. Perhaps if the coast had been clear for Bishop Okpalaeke to assume the bishopric of Ahiara Diocese, he would closed down most of the Catholic schools and order Mbaise children to go into apprentice buying and selling in Onitsha and Awka main markets. Thank God, Mbaise people are united against the bishopric of Bishop Okpalaeke. His bishopric could have set Mbaise land a million years backwards!

However, in his desperate but vain effort to hurt the reputation of Mbaise priests, Mr Ezechukwu claimed that

Most troublesome Mbaise priests are there not necessarily out of vocation but rather as a bread-winning occupation….The priests who are organizing the current rebellion and activism against the Church’s decision on the bishop-elect easily fall into this class of those who see the priesthood as an economic venture and as a means for taking care of their extended families and dependants. They therefore see the bishopric position as elevation that attracts better economic possibilities, the way a plum ministerial portfolio does…

In the language of Mr. Ezechukwu, the cousin of Bishop Okpalaeke, the troublesome Mbaise priests embraced the priesthood not as a vocation but as a bread-winning occupation, an economic venture for taking care of their extended families and dependents, and by implication his cousin and his colleagues from Anambra State are in the priesthood for all the right reasons. But evidence abounds from places like America and Europe that Awka priests more than any other sets of priests in Igbo are the ones who are hawking the priesthood as a business venture. It is because they see the priesthood and bishopric as business ventures that they are cutting corners to attain it.

If Msgr. Okpalaeke was such a virtuous priest his cousin Mr. Ezechukwu implies in his essay, he could have easily prevented the crisis in Ahiara Diocese in line with the injunction of Our Lord Jesus Christ to His disciple that if they went to a place and were not received, they should dust off the sands of the place from their heels and leave. If Okpalaeke had been a true apostle, he could have told Mbaise people: “Since you do not want me as your bishop, I leave for the sake of the Church of Jesus Christ.” But he did not do this showing that his motivation was anything but the spread of the gospel of our Lord Jesus Christ. As majority of Mbaise people declare: “trust Awka people, they knew what they were looking for in Mbaise. Their anger is that their strategy to get to the secret of Mbaise, what makes Mbaise tick, was thwarted. And it will continue to be thwarted. We know them through and through and will never allow them to steal our last baby from us. The Catholic Church is the only baby Mbaise people have got and we will protect it with the last drop of our blood!”

As if there could be no end to how low the Daily Sun columnist could go in disparaging Mbaise people, he states,

There is no doubt that such self-serving and unexpected recalcitrance gives Mbaise people a worse reputation than they already enjoy amongst most of their fellow Igbo, who had often viewed them with a considerable level of suspicion to the extent that there is a common saying that ‘if an Mbaise person and a snake enter your house simultaneously, you should kill the Mbaise man first.’

Considering how dirty Uche Ezechukwu chose to go in his essay, it would have been most surprising if he neglected to rehash the old stereotype against the preference of a serpent over Mbaise people. But he forgot to include the context that produced the stereotype. It was a situation similar to what Awka people wanted to do to Mbaise with the bishopric. It is only when Mbaise people either individually or collectively refuse to be outwitted and cheated that they are called names and a snake is preferred to them. But Mbaise people are strong and big enough to brook any kind of bad name in order to withstand the type of criminal injustice Awka people wanted to perpetrate in Mbaise by stealing the bishopric of Ahiara Diocese.

At the heat of the crisis, the bishop-elect himself was not spared of pride and arrogance against the people he was gunning to shepherd as their bishop. I remember when I met him at the CBCN plenary meeting in Abuja in February of 2013. I introduced myself to him as a priest from Ahiara Diocese. Rather than embrace me and initiate some preliminary dialogue with Mbaise people through me, the bishop-elect, who is younger than me in every sense of the word, answered me perfunctorily and continued on his way in a manner I would interpret as a snub. I left that encounter convinced in myself that the resistance Ahiara people were putting up against him were more than justified. In fact, as the crisis has lasted, the bishop-elect has often been quoted by those who interact with him on a day-to-day basis as boasting that he must come to Mbaise and serve as a bishop come what may. He is often quoted as saying in Igbo language; M ga-abialili Mbaise [I must come to Mbaise].

The same blustery was continued even during the ordination of Bishop Okpalaeke. Addressing the congregation that witnessed his ordination at Seat of Wisdom Seminary, Ulakwo, Owerri, he was quoted as saying that he was not only the bishop of Ahiara Diocese but the Church in Ahiara Diocese. What an insufferable arrogance! And after all sorts of victory lap having been ordained “bishop” of Ahiara Diocese in the chapel of Seat of Wisdom of Seminary, he noted in the address he read to the congregation, among many other things:

Before my conversation with the Nuncio, I had asked myself why it was taking so long to appoint a bishop to the See of Ahiara. News were [sic] flying around and I had heard many stories, founded or unfounded, about what was going on….. Let us thank all those who were at the centre of the storm - the Metropolitan and the Bishops of the Province; the Diocesan Administrator, the priests, religious and lay faithful of Ahiara Diocese; the Apostolic Nuncio and the Catholic Bishops' Conference of Nigeria. You have had sleepless nights, nerve-wracking and tempestuous sessions in the effort to address the issues that arose. Many of you were hit by verbal missiles, had mud slung at them, were misunderstood, called names and persecuted in one form or another.

Without a doubt, the would-be bishop-elect of Ahiara Diocese was a part of Anambra group who spread the rumour that Ahiara Diocesan priests were killing themselves through infighting and petition-writing - allegations that were totally false and baseless. But such was systematically spread around Anambra State in order to procure an excuse for the seizure of the diocese. The Anambra cabal employed all sorts of tactics to corner the bishopric of Ahiara Diocese. They slandered the people of Ahiara Diocese and painted them black so as to make it easy for them to steal the bishopric of the diocese. There was nothing in the strategy they had employed to procure the Ahiara Diocesan bishopric that suggested that they were qualified to be accorded the status of a catechumen in the Catholic Church. The strategy of slandering a people so as to be able to steal from them is pagan and banditry, short and simple!

The Awka group trumpeted the fictitious infighting and petition-writing among Ahiara priests because that was the only excuse they could offer for recommending their own man to steal and usurp the bishopric of Ahiara Diocese. And when the priests of Ahiara Diocese reacted as they were supposed to, they started calling them names. For a people who surreptitiously came to steal in the name of the Catholic Church, they could not have expected anything less than missiles and other weapons of war hurled at them. The truth is all these insults poured on the numerous injuries of injustice inflicted on the people of Mbaise have not worked and will never work because Mbaise people are primed more than ever before to preserve the Catholic faith in their land which is the most precious treasure they have in this world.