AHIARA DIOCESE IN CROSSHAIRS: THE REAL STORIES …37 [EXCERPTS FROM A BOOK IN PRINT]

Chapter 14: Countdown to Catastrophe [ii]

But as Cardinal Onaiyekan headed home with the promise to initiate some dialogues, the whole crisis took a dramatic turn in Ahiara Diocese. The few priests working to ensure that Okpalaeke was ordained in Ahiara Diocese on May 21 did quite a few things that rattled the whole of Mbaise land. First, they secretly sent a detailed letter to the Vatican and perhaps to all the bishops in Nigeria arguing as strongly as they could on why it would be a tragedy of unspeakable proportion in the Catholic Church of Nigeria if the resistance in Ahiara Diocese was allowed to succeed.They argued that other areas in the country would copy the bad example of the priests of Ahiara Diocese and make the Catholic Church in Nigeria ungovernable.According to the letter, should the bishops not ordain Msgr. Okpalaeke in Ahiara diocese, the “disobedient priests” of Ahiara Diocese would claim to have defeated the bishops of Nigeria which would spell disaster for Catholicism in Nigeria. The tightly argued letter insisted that the bishops of Nigeria had no other option than to go ahead and ordain Msgr. Okpalaeke in Ahiara Diocese on May 21 or risk hobbling the Nigerian Catholic Church for a long time to come.

The argument went on and on in its effort to persuade the bishops to come to Ahiara Diocese on May 21 and not to be afraid of the threat to violence being allegedly made by “a few priests and laity of the diocese.” The main thrust of their argument was that “disobedience to the Holy Father” and “rebellion against the bishops and Church in Nigeria” should not be rewarded with compliance.They said that failure to ordain Msgr. Okpalaeke in Ahiara Diocese might be construed as a moral failure on the part of the Catholic Church in Nigeria.

This detailed letter which bore the signatures of only four out of about ten priests listed on the last page of the letter was secretly sent to Rome and to the bishops of Nigeria without the knowledge of most priests of the diocese.As a result, there was no immediate reply to the letter. But the content of the letter was absolutely insulting to the people of Ahiara Diocese. It used some terrible language against the leaders of the crisis and called some priests “militants.”

The second strange thing the pro-Okpalaeke group would do early in that week following the visit of Cardinal Onaiyekan was to mount heavy enlightenment campaigns using radio jingles and bow horns all across Mbaise land. The group made a recorded announcement and rented a public address system mounted on a van with which they went all over Mbaise land calling on people not to fail to troop out en masse to attend the ordination of Msgr. Okpalaeke as bishop of Ahiara Diocese at Maria Mater Ecclesiae Cathedral Ahiara on Tuesday, May 21, 2013. The activities of this group and their announcement all over Mbaise land would immediately raise the temperature of the struggle.Wherever they would make their announcement about the ordination, there was an outcry.The situation was charged and bloody confrontation started to build.

The leaders of the Catholic youth organization quickly scrambled some vehicles, loaded them with their members and went in pursuit of the people and the vehicles doing the announcements.Wherever they met them there was war and free for all beating. With this latest development the situation gradually began to spiral out of control.As the pro-Okpalaeke group became more desperate trying to impose their will, the priests and the laity of the diocese became more determined than ever to stop them.

On their part, members of the Caucus gathered and made a decision to counter the activities of the pro-Okpalaeke priests.The Caucus quickly commissioned a special announcement to be written and circulated for announcement in all the parishes of the diocese.The announcement warned people to disregard the announcements being made for them to attend the ordination of the rejected bishop-elect - Msgr. Okpalaeke at the Cathedral on May 21. The announcement denied that there would be any Episcopal ordination in Ahiara Diocese on the said date. It ascribed the pro-Okpalaeke announcement to the handiwork of saboteurs of the Mbaise cause.The announcement compared the activities of the current saboteurs of Ahiara Diocese to the war saboteurs who were alleged to have robbed the Igbo people of victory in the civil war.Hence everybody was urged to ignore any announcement claiming or insinuating that Ahiara Diocese had changed its mind about the rejected bishop-elect and would now go ahead and welcome him into the diocese.

Immediately this announcement was made in some parishes of the province, the struggle took another dimension. All gloves went off.People everywhere became alarmed how the crisis in the diocese was spiralling out of control.The administrator returned to his usual status as the punching bag of everybody in the fight. Many bishops who got the wind of the announcement were calling on the administrator to find out what was happening in the diocese.Many were calling on him to turn in his resignation letter because they believed that he had lost control of the diocese, others openly questioned his loyalty.

Feeling the heat the administrator quickly circulated a directive in which he decreed that every announcement to be made to any congregation of Catholics anywhere in the diocese would have to be approved by him personally. But the administrator was made aware of the fact that he no longer had a complete control over the day-to-day operations of the diocese. The whole reason for the founding of the Mbaise Indigenous Priests Association to lead the struggle was to create a parallel administration in Ahiara Diocese for the benefit of the struggle.

On their part, the youths who had constituted themselves into the militant wing of the resistance were on a high alert.Every movement was being monitored and every piece of information was analyzed and digested even as immediate counteractions were contemplated or embarked upon. All parish communities were being urged to form their own militia groups whose battle fronts would be their own parish territories.The strategy was that the battle of May 21 would be fought in every parish especially those on the highways or those bordering neighbouring dioceses.

As preparation for a great battle raged on, a similar battle was going on in the hearts of many priests and the lay people of Mbaise, as well as those of their counterparts from across the six dioceses of the province. The desire of many was how to head off what was looking like an inevitable confrontation on the day of the ordination of Msgr. Okpalaeke.

As for me, I hated to death the very idea of using violence to realize or to stop the ordination in Ahiara Diocese.For me, that was a veritable oxymoron that should be unimaginable among civilized people.I believed that as civilized people, as priests and as Catholics, we had been endowed with everything necessary to achieve a healthy settlement on the matter so as to avert the dangerous confrontation.

The prospect of what a religious war could do to the Catholic Church in Mbaise land and Nigeria as a whole would push me to embark on some extra measures that I believed could help defuse the gathering tension. For many years I had been avoiding writing in Nigerian secular newspapers.I thought that that era of my life of commenting Nigerian issues ended when I left the United States to return home. But now my beloved diocese and I were at the brink of dabbling into an act that would destroy our beloved Catholicism in Mbaise land and leave us all messed up as the black sheep of history. The battle in me was whether to continue with my decision to avoid doing critical essays on Nigerian newspapers, or to roll up my sleeves and go back to what I did best in the USA which was analyze social issues forthrightly and fearlessly.

I promptly decided on doing anything I could do to contribute to the efforts to head off the looming catastrophe in Ahiara Diocese. This internal anguish so to speak would lead me into doing a few articles in the press that I believed could help educate the general public on why the resistance in Ahiara Diocese had continued unabated and why people must cooperate to see that it did not degenerate into a violent confrontation. On the other hand, I was persuaded to let Mbaise people’s voices and perspectives on the crisis be heard. I believed strongly that Catholics in Nigeria and the world over have a duty to know and appreciate the complaints of Mbaise people.

This came from the backdrop that the bishopric crisis had created a very large pool of anti-Mbaise crowd all over Nigeria that was roaming like a lynch mob wishing to hunt down every Mbaise person anywhere in the world and kill him or her for daring to cry out under the heavy burden of injustice. I thought that if many Nigerians understood that Mbaise people have a point in their resistance, they might appreciate more why the crisis had lingered that long.Perhaps a little education in the Nigerian newspapers could contribute in persuading the bishop-elect and his backers among the Nigerian bishops to begin the process of a dialogue rather than preparing for a military invasion that would inevitably result in a monumental catastrophe.

It would pain me the most that the position of Mbaise people on the crisis in Ahiara Diocese did not find any voice in the Nigerian mass media. The numerous essays on the internet demonstrating clearly why the people of Mbaise were rejecting the appointment of Msgr. Okpalaeke from Awka as their bishop were not getting through to the Nigerian populace.Rather, the press and majority of Catholics in Nigeria believed that Mbaise people were embarrassing the Catholic Church worldwide with their continued resistance and “disobedience”.As a result, Mbaise people were being denigrated both in the newspapers and the pulpits as xenophobic, ethnic and intolerant.

After coming to a personal conviction that I needed to do something extra, I contacted my former classmate and friend, a columnist at the Nigerian Guardian Newspaper, Dr Luke Onyekakeya. I inquired to know whether his newspaper could accept any unsolicited essay on the crisis in Ahiara Diocese.He told me that the Guardian was open to publishing any essay it adjudged worthy of publication.That was how I would quickly pen my first published essay on the crisis in Ahiara Diocese entitled: .This fairly long essay would be drastically cut down by the editors of the Guardian. But it was meant to be an objective essay representing both sides of the crisis as truthfully as possible.But the editing appeared to slant it giving more prominence to the position of Ahiara Diocese.

“Roots of Ahiara Diocese Crisis” would be published in the Guardian Newspaper of Monday, May 6, 2013.Immediately the essay hit the newsstand, I started receiving calls, some blaming me for trying to justify the “disobedience” in Ahiara Diocese.But many others congratulated me for helping to put the crisis in a proper perspective. Late that night, the secretary to the Catholic Secretariat in Abuja, Fr Ralph Madu, called me to express his dissatisfaction with the essay.He told me that the Nuncio, Archbishop Augustine Kasujja had drawn his attention to that essay.Fr Ralph told me that he was of the opinion that the Nuncio would not like to see me write again in the Nigerian newspapers on the crisis in Ahiara Diocese.

The next morning, my friend, Fr. Austin Echema, professor of Liturgical Sciences at CIWA called me to warn that I refrain from publishing further essays on the matter. He told me that such essays would not go down well with the powers that be in Abuja.But I said to myself, that my motive on the matter was clear to me at least. I must do whatever I could to prevent bloodshed in Ahiara Diocese in the name of the Catholic Church.I convinced myself that I would not accept nor listen to any advice that would tie up my hands against doing whatever I could to try to avert blood-spilling in the name of the Catholic Church in Mbaise land.

My May 6 essay would stir the hornet’s nest sort of. Many among the anti-Mbaise lynch crowd across Nigeria took offence against me and began pouring replies to my essay.The Guardian would within the Month of May publish about three or essays commenting or responding to my May 6 essay.Other newspapers in Owerri published about two or three more responses to it.It appeared that many people became offended that I presented the reason why Mbaise people were feeling that they had been unjustly treated with the appointment of Msgr. Okpalaeke as their bishop.

But as the countdown to the day scheduled for the ordination drew as near as ten days away, I discovered that tension had reached a bubble-burst point as the bishops appeared to be playing coy on what they would do on that day. I was convinced that the bishops and many in Nigeria had not gotten the true picture of what could happen in Mbaise land if there was any attempt to employ police and military force for the ordination of Msgr. Okpalaeke. I quickly penned my next essay which I entitled “Ahiara Diocese Crisis: Countdown to Catastrophe.”I quickly emailed it to my friend, Dr. Luke Onyekakeya who preferred to send it over to The Sun Newspaper with the title “Averting Catastrophe at Ahiara Catholic Diocese”. The essay was broken into two parts and published in the Sun newspaper of May 15 and 16, 2013.In this-two part essay, I painted a dire scenario of what would happen if there was any attempt to invade the place with military force on May 21. There was no doubt that this essay got the attention of many people to appreciate how dangerous it would be to contemplate the invasion of Mbaise land on the said date.

But two incidents would convince me that I must embark in more daring measures if I must contribute meaningfully to the prevention of catastrophe in Mbaise land as a result of the ordination. First was a visit we paid to a retired bishop for a private matter. Some marriage issues had taken us to one of the retired bishops of Nigeria. I had gone with a prominent man in Mbaise land who had a complex marriage situation.We were looking for a quick solution.And we were advised to meet this retired bishop.

One Tuesday in mid-May we went to meet with him.He gave us expert advice on the problem that had brought us to him.But realizing that I had come from Mbaise, he dabbled into the crisis in Ahiara Diocese.The summary of his long advice was that Mbaise people would have to back down and accept Okpalaeke as their bishop because there was nothing they could do to prevent it.He told me that the Church had a pre-existing arrangement that whenever she ran into problems regarding the acceptance of any bishop the government would supply troops to stop the crisis and ensure a successful ordination and installation of the bishop-elect.

This retired bishop would cite two examples to convince me that Mbaise people had no chances to stop the ordination of Msgr. Okpalaeke.First was the ordination/installation of the then Archbishop Anthony Okogie in Lagos. And the second was that of Bishop Anthony Gbuji of Iselle Uku all in 1973.In both cases the retired bishop noted, there was resistance to the appointments, but the situation was easily gotten control over through military assistance from the Federal Government.The retired bishop told me that Ahiara case would not be any different, that the military would surely be there to keep order and ensure that the bishop-elect was properly ordained and installed.After listening to this bishop, I froze on my seat.I came to a conviction that the Nigerian bishops had made up their minds to come to the ordination with armed soldiers and the police.

But I was also convinced that they would be stoutly resisted. And any resistance to armed soldiers and police would necessarily result in casualties. This was the scenario that I had hated the most.I had made peace with my conviction that I would do whatever it would take to sabotage any effort to introduce violence in the ordination of Msgr. Okpalaeke. For me it was a situation that would not pay any dividend to anybody. Moreover, I was convinced that the bishops did not know what they were getting themselves into, or what they would meet when eventually they would try to enter Ahiara Diocese on that day.So I was determined more than ever before to charge ahead in my effort to contribute to the aversion of the looming disaster.

As we drove a long way from the residence of the retired bishop to my home, I was buried in my thought of what I could do to help head off the inevitable. Immediately we got home, I decided to write my third essay on the crisis. But this one was to be different. I would go back to history to alert the bishops that the judgement of history awaited them in Ahiara Diocese. The essay titled: “Ahiara Crisis: Stitching in Time to Save Nine” would included excerpts that read thus:

In secular management and institutional studies around the world, the Catholic Church is always held up as a model in spite of some obvious lapses present in her structures. One of the secrets of her popularity, longevity and resilience has been her ability to weather and resolve crises she encounters in the various places from time to time. The universal Catholic Church is a master in weathering and resolving crises.

But every once in a while, local church leaders tend to remove their eyes from the ball and mismanage some innocuous local crises which end up plunging the universal church into some unmitigated confusion and disasters. One must remember here the Arian crisis of the fourth century in Alexandria, Egypt, the Nestorian heresy of Ephesus in the fifth century, the East-West Filioque controversy of the 6th century, and the indulgence crisis of the 16th century that resulted in the disintegration of Christianity.

And coming closer to our time, we must remember the recent priests’ sex abuse scandal of 2002 in America and the Vatileaks of 2011 and 2012. All these to a large extent were local crises which could have been better managed but were not. So they ended up inflicting a terrible damage on the psyche and fabrics of the universal Church.

The Catholic Church in Nigeria is a very young institution in comparison with the universal Church and other older churches around the world. The Catholic Church here is barely above one hundred years old. As a result of its youthfulness, Nigerian Catholicism does not appear to have much experience managing potentially damaging crises that could end up impacting her seriously as well as the continental and universal Catholic Church.

The crisis in the Catholic Diocese of Ahiara, Mbaise, Imo State, Nigeria, is shaping up to become one of such crises that could inflict a very damaging repercussion on the corpus of the Catholic Church of Nigeria and Africa as a whole, if not well managed.

This essay would plumb deeper into the root of the crisis in Ahiara Diocese and suggest ways to achieve resolution without adverting to violence and confrontation.

My original intention was to send it for publication in one of the Nigerian newspapers. But on a second thought, I realized that the primary audience of the essay was not the public but the bishops of Nigeria who were the ones planning to come to Ahiara Diocese on May 21. So, I decided to mail the essay to about ten of the bishops whose email addresses were available to me. I emailed it also to the secretary general of Catholic Secretariat Abuja, Fr Ralph Madu. It was Fr Ralph who would send the essay to many other bishops.

One of the bishops I had sent the essay to was Cardinal Onaiyekan who was attending a conference in South Africa. It appeared that once many bishops received my essay they consulted among themselves and requested Cardinal Onaiyekan to send me a reply. His reply would read thus:

Dear Fr Ihenacho,

Peace be with you.

Greetings from Cape Town, South Africa, where I am attending a meeting and taking some time off to write this:

Thank you for your email.

I agree with the tone of the beginning of your mail, and the need to find a Christian way out of the present problem. But this is valid for all concerned. Even when we feel aggrieved, there are ways of expressing this without losing the spirit that should guide all that we do. Obviously you are not aware of the moves on ground for precisely the kind of “dialogue” that you are talking about. It is important to give such a dialogue a chance, without escalating the crisis in any way, by unguarded gestures and utterances.

Please know that as far as I know, nobody in the Church is preparing to bring in any government security forces to invade Ahiara. I too have heard the rumour, with great sadness, especially as I am supposed to be behind the Abuja end of the plot!! Whoever is concocting the rumour must know that he is not telling the truth. Is this a case of “All is fair in war?”

By the way, it is NOT true that we brought soldiers and troops to Benin. The government heard of what was happening and decided to prevent any breakdown of law and order. And besides, the Benin case is quite different from the Ahiara situation in more ways than one.

We continue to pray for God’s guidance, as we seek ways and means to restore peace and progress to your diocese, dear to all of us. May God hear our prayers.

+John Cardinal Onaiyekan, Archbishop of Abuja.

Cardinal Onaiyekan’s mail would bring me some relief especially as it cleared up one important matter that had dominated the atmosphere during that period, namely, that the bishops had concluded arrangements to bring soldiers and police to the ordination arena at Ahiara on May 21. The cardinal made it clear that such was not the case and suggested that he would not support any such proposal if it were to be made. That was absolutely consoling to me. I knew that if the cardinal flexed his muscle as the most distinguished cleric in Nigeria, the bishops would agree to back-off bringing the military to Ahiara to quash the resistance.

But the cardinal’s mail also confirmed my fears. By denying that the bishops had brought the government security to Benin City during the installation of Archbishop Akubueze in 2011, the cardinal confirmed for me what the retired bishop had told me only two days earlier. The retired bishop had claimed that the Nigerian Catholic Church had a pre-existing agreement with the federal government in which case if they ran into trouble with regard to establishing the authority of a bishop in any diocese, the federal government would automatically send in the security forces to help them achieve that. And this much was more or less confirmed by the cardinal when he said “By the way, it is NOT true that we brought soldiers and troops to Benin. The government heard of what was happening and decided to prevent any breakdown of law and order.”

The inference I could draw from the cardinal’s assertion here was that on the day of the ordination of Okpalaeke in Ahiara Diocese, the bishops could claim that they did not invite government security forces who would be there present on their own accord for the sake of keeping law and order. In other words, notwithstanding the promises of the bishops that they would not be bringing the police and the military on the day of the ordination, these forces would be there any way on their own accord on the basis of a pre-existing agreement between the Nigerian Church and the Federal Government. That is to say, the danger of having a mass slaughter of innocent people on the day of Msgr. Okpalaeke’s ordination in Ahiara Diocese was still present. It would be on the note of this terrible and unresolved uncertainty that we would enter the final lap of the countdown to May 21, 2013 scheduled ordination in Ahiara Diocese.