Cardinal
Timothy M. Dolan, archbishop of Washington D.C. has successfully navigated through the
national conventions in view of the general elections in the U.S, and by so
doing has carved a niche for himself as a cardinal at work in his own home
country for God through the Church and for the people he leads.
And when
he offered the closing benediction at the Democratic National Convention in
Charlotte, reports Catholic News Service, he made allusions to issues that have
put the U.S. Church and the White House at odds with each other.
"Renew
in all our people a profound respect for religious liberty: the first, most
cherished freedom bequeathed upon us at our founding," Dolan prayed, an
apparent reference to an ongoing dispute between the U.S. bishops and the White
House over a mandate from the federal Department of Health and Human Services
that would require most religious employers to offer contraceptive coverage in
violation of church teaching.
"We
ask your benediction on those waiting to be born, that they may be welcomed and
protected," prayed Dolan, president of the U.S. Conference of Catholic
Bishops. While the cardinal uttered a similar phrase in his closing benediction
the week before at the Republican National Convention, the GOP's platform on
abortion is generally viewed as closer to the Catholic church's teaching than
the Democrats', which supports legal abortion.
Dolan
also made an allusion to same-sex marriage, the report continues, which
President Barack Obama voiced his support for earlier this year. "Show us
anew that happiness is found only in respecting the laws of nature and of
nature's God," the cardinal prayed. "Empower us with your grace so
that we might resist the temptation to replace the moral law with idols of our
own making, or to remake those institutions you have given us for the nurturing
of life and community."
Who says God cannot be worshiped and the authentic truth propagated even if one lives next door to Mr. President.
Who says God cannot be worshiped and the authentic truth propagated even if one lives next door to Mr. President.
Such
sensitive issues as raised by Cardinal Dolan at the Democratic National
Convention in Charlotte were the focus of a theological conference held at
Hekima College, the Jesuit School of Theology, in Nairobi, Kenya from August
21-23.
According
to Joshua J. McElwee, National Catholic Reporter correspondent, Bishop Eduardo
Hiiboro Kussala of South Sudan, whose diocese is located in the southwestern
corner of South Sudan, shared both his own personal story of living with
violence and the numerous challenges facing his newly formed country.
"By
the time I was born, we were already at war with North Sudan," Hiiboro
began his remarks. He was just 2 months old when his mother was killed during
the 1983-2005 civil war in Sudan.For years, the violence in his own life
hampered his ability to work for peace, Hiiboro said. A "point of
conversion" came during his seminary training when one of his professors
asked him if he'd like to see another child lose his mother. Hiiboro said he
told the professor then that he would work "from that day so that no child
would become an orphan in that way."
Bishop
Eduardo Hiiboro Kussala personal story touched me deeply and did fully capture
the real contents of my deepest concern for our dear country Nigeria.
Honestly
speaking, the task at hand demands first of all that insipid plutocrats be
sharply rebuked, not by witch-hunting do-or-die opportunists or by fugitives
who are playing the ostrich with self-righteousness, but by a resolute
personality imbued with the nationalistic characters of transparency and
accountability.
Unfortunately,
President Gooddluck Ebele Jonathan seems to be happier and more comfortable making
friends with and being in the midst of these criminals than working for the
good of all Nigerians especially the poor and oppressed who constitute about
eighty percent of the general population of our country. The evidence is
everywhere: the deathtraps which our roads have become; the rot in the
education sector; the corruption in the petroleum industry; the exacerbated
wounds on federal character issues; the insecurity in the land and the
swallowing gap between the haves and the have-nots.
There is
no way we can underestimate or underrate our need for money, individually and
collectively. And we must do well to appreciate the contributions of fellow
Nigerians to the growth and development of our dear country. But may I cease
this opportunity to make this all-important submission to fellow Nigerian
youths:
Your
dreams are your greatest assets your future possesses and the only key to that
future. And if the confidence and hope that have driven the struggle for
freedom and executed the war against terrorism and corruption are not to
be reckoned as perpetually barren, then the General Muhammadu Buhari presidency
-dream must be kept alive and nurtured - the price to wit!
General
Ibrahim Badamasi Babangida is the unkindest cut this dream for corruption- free
Nigeria has ever received. And Chief Mathew Olusegun Obasanjo is the face of
its most fatal failures and illusions. This is why Prof. Tam David West is
worried. This is why Pastor Tunde Bakare is still talking despite the risk of
being called names. This why Pastor W.F. Kumuyi is still at the prayer closet.
And this equally is why many are scared about the rise in the number of
national magicians and charlatans parading as tools and instruments of nation
building and adjuncts of true federalism.
Nevertheless,
did the Holy Writ not affirm that the secret thoughts of the heart of man are
deep and deceptive? In this regard and in reference to the exchange of the
verbal fireworks between these two- seasoned generals of the Tellng.com, my
challenge goes by way of a proverbial Igbo phrase which says: “Udele onu kara
buru uzo mafuo ozu afo” (that is, let the vulture with the most developed
and strongest beak take the lead in opening the bowels of the corpse so
that the feast can commence).
The spirit
of the Nigerian people in their quest for God and for Divine intervention has
remained unbroken. And I strongly believe that the realization of this quest is
the demand of the cross which our love for Christ and his Church has placed on
the shoulders of every Church leader in Nigeria.
May God
give us cardinals, bishops, priests, nuns, pastors and general overseers in the
likes of Dolan, Eduardo Hiiboro Kussala and continue to empower Tunde Bakare of
the Latter Rain Assembly and W.F.Kumuyi of the Deeper Life Bible Church so that
we may not have to offer the kind of Dolan’s prayer here in Nigeria in the next
26 years but rather may rejoice that Christian/Muslim soldiers joined hands
together to kill corruption and conquer the Boko Haram terrorist sect, and in
this way let God be God in our dear country Nigeria.
And, of
course, the Cross did eventually triumph. Indeed, the cross is the only road to
freedom.
No human person or institution can arrogate the character of
supremacy or finality to oneself or itself as the case may be, for no person or
institution can accomplish a “deed” or
an “act” that is supreme and irrevocable in an affair in which God is directly
involved.
God is that undivided Absolute Mystery of eternal beauty and
goodness. God, as he is in himself, is unknowable. He is the Immanent Trinity.
And no one has seen God.
In the words of Karl Rahner, God is not the “Undiscovered
Unknown” but the “Discovered Unknown”. He is the Economic Trinity. And Jesus
Christ of Nazareth (A.D. 34) is the only God. He was seen by many. And I see
and remain in deep communion with him everyday in the Blessed Eucharist.
In an affair in which God is directly involved, there is no
and there can never be a Court of Final
Appeal or what is literally referred to in modern parlance as “The Supreme
Court”, except God himself. This was the fatalism that greeted the religious boat
of Judaism as it sheepishly allowed itself be led into the dark alley of
unbelief by co-operate Pharisaism.
If the punishment for playing God was heavy upon the Israelite
community to the extent of being linked to the fate of the six million Jews killed
by Adolf Hitler, the German mad-dog of the 2nd World War, its toll
on Caesar’s Rome did not have to wait up
till 1940 before it became felt by the Empire. Christendom – the faithful
remnant of the old Israel took over Rome. And with this, the chosen people
acquired a new identity and a new homeland.
But the taproots of the authentic faith lies undeniably
with the Abrahamic covenant which was further systematized by the Mosaic Law
and rendered universal by Mystical Prophetism especially as found in the
prophetic ministry of Elijah before reaching its climax in the life and ministry of Jesus Christ.. This fact is inescapably significant and
radically instructive for every Christian life and ministry even today.
And this is the reason why a Papacy situate in Rome may have
to be transferred to the disputed Bakassi peninsula that was formerly a
Nigerian territory but now ceded to Cameroun by an International Court of
Justice judgment in the late nineties.
A concordant between the Holy See (of the One Heaven
Organization) and Cameroun which allows for the displaced indigenes of the peninsula
to maintain their rights of citizenship and ownership of the 1/3 of the
disputed territory even as they are fully absorbed and integrated into the
Nigerian society will surely not be an entertaining news for the Vatican nor for
Christian Africa.
Of course, Islam has taken its place in and continues to
solidify its hold on Northern Africa- St Augustine’s homeland. Or can Vatican
take the lead in negotiating a new homeland for her teeming 1.2 billion
Catholic population outside of Rome, and far away from the Masonic eyes and
manipulations of the Italian government. Again, the only available space is in
the direction of Bakassi Penisula.
Our Lady of Sorrows has on This Day, September 15, 2012
resolved to present Four Thesis on why
the Sacred Deed is an
imperative.Three are published here below:
Through a secret
Concordant duly signed and ratified with the Organization of Islamic
Countries (O.I.C)by General Sani Abacha on behalf of Nigeria and in
anticipation of the establishment of the Islamic version of the Holy See, the Bakasi
Penisula was designated a special Islamic territory. The International Court of
Justice ruling ceding the highly disputed Bakasi Penisula to Cameroun was just
to kick-start the process of handing the island over to O.I.C. This Concordant
was also signed and endorsed by Chief Mooshood Abiola as a condition for the
restoration of his mandate and the inauguration of his presidency. But the people who made Abiola sign the
Agreement also had their life-presidency ambition to execute. The personality
and struggles of Alhaji Asari Dokubo is very central to the planned Islamic
inversion of Nigeria through a false
declaration of a Sovereign Ijaw Nation which has necessitated the piling up of
sophisticated weapons in the Niger Delta between 2011 and 2012. Major Christian
actors in this struggle have been criminalized. And the well doctored and
documented facts and evidences against them can speak for themselves in any court
anywhere in the world. As regards this, it is instructive to note that Alhaji
Asari Dokubo did not sign the “Amnesty”. Why? Realistically speaking, there is
no Niger Delta project, what more of an Igbo agenda. The only way forward
before it is too late is for Mr Goodluck Jonathan to Convoke a Sovereign
National Conference immediately and then hand over to General Muhammadu Buhari
by October 1, 2013. Surely, a war of cessation led by Niger Delta Militants with tacit
approval by O.I.C and supported by the African Union in which the Igbos hope to
find an anchorage for liberation does not promise to be a father Christmas for
Christians in Nigeria. See <http://revfrkennethevurulobi.blogspot.com/2012/08/upgrading-save-nigeria-groups-option.html
>
During the ill-fated
regimes of General Ibrahim Babangida and General Sani Abacha respectively, the
national treasury – Niger Delta oil wealth- was subjected to the kind of
looting that has remained unrivaled and unparallel in modern history. A chunk
of this wealth found its way into the Middle East, Gadafi’s Libya, Afghanistan and
Yemen through secret accounts operated by the O.I.C. The administration of
Chief Mathew Obasanjo did not succeed in retrieving 30% of Abacha’s loot.
While General Ibrahim Badamasi Babangida registered Nigeria
into the Islamic body, General Sani Abacha was committed to executing the
Islamization project to the last dot.
General Muhammadu Buhari wholeheartedly bought into the
Islamization agenda. But the spate of assassinations that trailed General Sani
Abacha self-succession bid made him become very skeptical and jittery. However,
if Abacha’s death brought Buhari to a rude shock, that of Chief
Abiola brought him face to face with the “mystery” which Nigeria had become
then as far as back as 1998. With these intrigues at work in the general
framework of political life of the North, it became obviously clear to Buhari
that the Islamic agenda had been subverted.
The Niger Delta struggle remained what it is – struggle for
liberation and self-actualization untill 2007 when General Gusau, then National Security Adviser, in a double –agent capacity, dangled the the Islamization project
before a select few Muslims who were members of the Niger Delta militant group,
and instantly won their unrivalled support and sponsorship. Alhaji Asari Dokubo
made a retreat when the option of Jonathan’s presidency presented itself as a
passing alternative but still remains committed to the Islamization project of
the Niger Delta and that of Nigeria in general.
Today, there is a booming arms-market in the creeks of the
Niger Delta. Politicians may anticipate the 2015 elections to become part of
this dangerous arm’s trade but the real actors –members of the Boko Haram
terrorist sect - are still at large and fully disguised. A successful coup or impeachment
against President Goodluck Jonathan will put the whole of Niger Delta and South
East into the hands of Boko Haram. It will also liquidate, or rather undertake
a sequestration of wealth from major political and religious actors from the
region.It is therefore for the Niger Delta and South South to consolidate on the
gains of their struggles through a Sovereign National Conference.
The oil subsidy rip-off is just a pea nut compared to the
kind of robbery that Babangida, Abacha and their foot-soldiers subjected the
Niger Delta to. The Saro Wiwa story of the Ogonis has not even been addressed.
And I do not believe that any amount paid to the people of the Niger Delta as remuneration
or compensation is too much as to raise unnecessary and uncalled for questions
on issues of on-shore and off-shore that have been led to rest.
That Mr Goodluck Jonathan cannot be president amounts to a
cruel and unjustifiable denial of his fundamental human rights. But that
complications of unimaginable proportions have been introduced personally by
him into the circumstances of this denial suggests in very strong terms that
the GEJ question be rested, except if the constitution will have to be
subverted. Over and beyond this is the need to assert that the right to choose
a president for Nigeria is not the prerogative of a canonized greedy mind
perpetually befuddled by the impotency of irredentism and bigotry. Therefore,
to hell with Babangida and babangidarism!
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