July
12, 1997 made my date with the Catholic Priesthood. July 12, 2014 saw me step
into the 17th year as a priest.
The motivation I have for doing this review is two-dimensional; authenticity of faith and responsible citizenship as the only mutually inclusive factors that can guarantee the Church’s position in the evolving new world order and the only resources that can serve the ever growing need for peace and security in the global community.
And while I subscribe to and make my own the experience of veteran journalist John L. Allen Jnr. (formerly of the National Catholic Reporter but now working with the Boston Globe Newspaper) regarding his Catholic faith, my vocation as a priest and a theologian in communion with the Church surely has something different to say about method and the goals I have set out to achieve.
I therefore presume permission to reproduce here some texts from two books by authors whose conviction about method, not ideas, won my attention in a very strong and irresistible manner.
..but I feel
compelled to offer some explanation of the dynamics that led me to write…. One
might wonder why a reporter for the National Catholic Reporter, with its
reputation as a progressive critic of the Catholic establishment, would choose
to write about the Chief doctrinal conservative of our time. Or, one might
assume that I chose Ratzinger in order to smear him, gambling that the cardinal
has enough enemies to guarantee sales of a few books. My hope here is to
present my interest in Ratzinger from the inside out, so that it might appear,
as it does to me, neither enigmatic nor mean-spirited but a sincere attempt at
understanding.
I am a child of
Vatican II. I mean that not just spiritually or ideologically, but chronologically.
Michael Harrington
once wrote a book on poverty called The Other American, and his idea of two
nations sharing the same geography but inhabiting separate spheres of existence
stuck with me. Later I found that this concept also captured my sensation of
growing up in one kind of Catholic Church, then finding another ensconced in
Rome when I began my work as a church affairs writer. I am the product of what
I can only call “the other Catholicism.” In short, I had a
thoroughly-even pervasively-Catholic upbringing.
But that upbringing
was of the post-Vatican II sort. Hence I never worried about non-Catholics
going to hell… I never learned to think
of priest as light out of the community, set apart in some mysterious sense.
The value of “full, active, and conscious” participation in the Mass by laity
seemed intuitively obvious. It would have struck me as fantastic had anyone
suggested that just three decades later advocating any of these ideas in the
public conversation of the Catholic church would stamp someone as a “radical”.
I also imbibed in
my parish and in my school that being Catholic meant being concerned for
justice. I remember clearly the day Father Chuck, one of the many Capuchin
Franciscans who were my teachers, spoke to my freshman religion class about how
Catholic doctrine had led him to oppose the war in Vietnam. I began making the
connections between Jesus, the church, and social activism, and as the United
States cranked up its military activities in Latin America under Reagan during
my high school years, I was ready with a moral critique that led me by a short
path into political activities. I still think the single best piece of writing
I did for my high school newspaper was an editorial defending, on the basis of
Catholic “just war” principles, college students who refused to register for
the draft.
I came to believe
that being Catholic means caring about the world and about other people, and it
means finding God in the midst of those concerns.
As I look back now,
I realize that my experience wasn’t this univocal. I know there were people,
even in my little hometown in Western Kansas, who had vastly different visions
of church, who were greatly pained by what they saw happening in my classrooms
and in my parish.
This still
describes the vast majority of the adult Catholic with whom I work, worship and
socialize. Polls show that my friends and colleagues reflect where a solid
majority of Catholics in the Western world are on those issues. Because these
are the people with whom I share my life, these positions seem natural and
almost inevitable to me. It was not until I began writing professionally on
Catholicism in the church early 1990s that I realized how many powerful figures
within the church regard this brand of Catholicism as a mistake. They see it as
a product of the turbulence that always follows an ecumenical council, and they
are determined to bring it back under control.
Of course, I always
had the sense that the pope and the Vatican were “more conservative” than most
people I knew. I was unprepared, however, for the vastness of the gulf that
seemed to separate the Catholicism with which I had grown up from the
statements and policies flowing from Rome. The turning point for me was
December, 1997, five months after I had started work at the National Catholic
Reporter, when I was assigned to do a story about a new Vatican pronouncement
on lay ministry. In technical parlance this was an “Interdicasterial” document,
meaning it was issued by several Vatican offices at once, and its general
thrust was to reassert a sharp distinction between laity and the ordained priesthood.
The authors believed that a softening of that distinction, in which priests had
come to be seen as members of the community distinguished by function rather
than essence, was one of the major problems facing the church. It was then I
realized that I didn’t understand what the church must look like to those who
author such documents. I didn’t understand the needs they perceive or the
dangers they obviously see.
I also realized
that my ignorance was interfering with my work as a reporter. I could do no
more than caricature views for which I had no understanding. I needed to break
through to the other side of my own perceptions, and in the end that meant
wrestling with Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger. More than any other figure in
contemporary Catholicism, more so even than the pope, he embodies the
hospitality to the “other Catholicism” I have described.
I am, by the way,
assuming that the concerns expressed in that document on lay ministry, and
scores of Vatican pronouncements like it, are genuine. I do not subscribe to
the theory that curial officials such as Ratzinger make policy solely in order
to secure their own power, though I would not deny that such considerations
play their own, often unconscious, role in shaping decisions. I believe
Ratzinger’s theological arguments are more than ex post facto rationalization
for exercise of authority. I believe his analysis of church and world is
sincere, and I wanted to understand it -and, where necessary, be challenged by
it. If conversation within the church is ever to move forward, it seems to me,
Catholics need to do more than impugn one another’s motives. They need to
understand one another’s concerns and make some effort to speak the same
language.
I knew the official
catechetical rationale for the positions Ratzinger takes, but I needed more. I
needed to understand how any religious leader in the modern world could believe
that silencings and condemnations and banning books accomplish anything other
than inflamed resistance and public incredulity. I needed to know how positions
that seemed so obviously detrimental to women, to the intellectual life, to the
cause of social justice, all of which the church cares a great deal about,
could be so deeply entrenched and so vigorously defended by the best and
brightest of Catholic officialdom.
(John Allen jnr:
Pope Benedict XVI A Biography of Joseph
Ratzinger; London; Concilium; 2005. Pp vii-ix)
From another angle,
Hans Kuhnl writes thus:
Throughout my life,
there is also a thread of militancy, which is not to be confused with
quarrelsomeness. I have been involved in many controversies, most of which I
have neither sought nor avoided, but none of them have been about incidental
matters which I could easily have ignored. They have been about a great cause
in which I believe. The struggle for this cause has been worthwhile, and in
these memories I hope that it will come through as clearly as the person who
seeks to serve it.
... I certainly do
not share the view of Oscar Wilde that while everyone has disciples, it is
usually the Judas who writes the biography- after all, the author can also be
the beloved disciple John. (But), I would like as far as I can to prevent the
formation of legends, whether malicious or well-meaning.
(Hans Kuhn: My
Struggle For Freedom; (transl. by John Bowden); London; Concilium, 2004. P.1).
In this regard, therefore,
anybody who gets genuinely hurt by me in the course of doing my work rightly
deserves some apology. Likewise all those, especially friends, colleagues and
fans, who are truly offended, misled or deceived as a result of
communication-gaps occasioned by my resolute disposition and commitment to duty
– gaps that seemed quite unavoidable. But any personality- high or low,
cooperate or individual - and achievements which impugn, manipulate, vandalize,
prevent, subvert and finally invert the nature and goals of a system erected to
serve the GOOD, whether this personality or system is spiritual or secular, is
highly quixotic and needlessly exasperating and so much so also do it’s victims
stand in need of rescue and rehabilitation. Put directly, the identity, goals
and behaviors of some people, cooperations, institutions, organizations and
nations are a big contradiction to what they portray or claim to serve and seek
to inculcate into the larger society.
Between
commitment to the faith and an honest subscription to responsible citizenship,
between dissenting or rioting theological voices and disintegrating or vandalized
magisterial fortresses, a virtuous Christian woman spoke up against the
totalitarian pretensions of church leaders, the dictatorship of relativism and
the approaching arsenals of global Satanism.
She
gave a detailed report that was yet subject to wider interpretation,
explanation and application. That virtuous woman is the Blessed Virgin Mary,
the Our Lady of Fatima.
One
could point to a deliberate attempt to lower, downplay and finally disable the
urgency, force and power the 3rd message of Fatima carried. Today in
Nigeria, the issue has proved more disturbing than the Boko Haram menace. It is not probable, but rather the case, that
a cabal emerged in the Roman Curia and constituted itself into and usurped the
place occupied by God in the church to subtly but heavily undermines the noble
efforts of Pope John Paul II and his team. Thus, in a venture dictated by
worldly diplomacy and totalitarian pretensions that stifled the voice of reason,
murdered the conscience of the church and suppressed viable alternatives that
generously donated themselves in the form of reforms, transparency and
commitment to the gospel ideals, a cabal in the Roman curia went out of the way
of the church to negotiate its personal security, career and ambition with
freemason - the real but hidden face of the enemy and it’s unseen hands.
The
fearless commitment of Benedict XVI to the faith through the Fatima message
pursuant to the reform of the Roman Curia, enthronement of transparency and
recovery of the original missionary spirit of the church is legendary in
sustaining the horizon of hope and keeping the tiny thread of faith alive that
have seen to the emergency of Pope Francis. Indeed, the church is alive. One
only hopes Pope Francis will sustain the tempo and imbibe the radical
disposition that moves with the speed of an underwater current instead of the
many publicity bubbles –as healthy and well deserved as these may be that greet
him everywhere he goes.
Quite Frankly, Pope Francis is proving to be
the hidden and unknown side of ex-pontiff Benedict XVI- that radically decisive
revolutionary force which was at work before and during the Second Vatican Council
but which was silently used to infiltrate and recover the Roman curia and the
entire machinery of the Holy See from magisterial malcontents and satanic
marabouts that “played God in the human flesh.”
The
recovery of the church is not only about the emergence of Pope Francis. The
church must resuscitate efforts, take resolute and proactive steps and be clad
in the ash-garments that will prepare and dispose her to a meeting with the
Blessed Virgin Mary, Mother God (theotokos), Mother of the Church, Mediatrix of
all Graces and the Our Lady of Fatima. This preparation must begin by confronting
the Masonic alleys where the original power and appeal of the 3rd
secret of Fatima message was thrown into and then going back into the archives
to repair whatever damage that was done to the entire corpus of the message
ever since it arrived the Vatican many decades ago.
If God lives among
men in the human person of Jesus Christ of Nazareth, and if we cannot be Jesus
Christ because he is God even though we can be another Christ -alter Christus-
and if Jesus Christ is the symbol of perfect humanity who inspires us and to
whom we aspire, and given the Masonic interpretation of the mystery of
Incarnation as “man’s recorded successful attempt at becoming God while still in
the human flesh” which, in real spiritual times, is another way of “becoming like unto God”,
then the person and example of the Blessed Virgin Mary can be the only factor
that defines and holds the very contents of authentic Christian discipleship today
- the radically decisive affirmation and confirmation of the unity of God and
the response it evokes in practical existential terms.
Christianity is
that original form of discipleship ordained by God for the chosen people as the
most real and authentic way of worshiping him and keeping his commandments but
which was hijacked and hidden away from them by the deceptive arsenals of
pharisaism. Or, to put it in ecumenical terms, Christianity is the most purest
and authentic form of Judaism which came under strong illumination by the
perfect witness of Jesus Christ to God in his life and ministry- an example he
recommended to his disciples and all true believers in the God of Abraham,
Isaac and Jacob. That Jesus Christ is God has a decisive implication for this
endorsement and recommendation. It goes to say that God intervened in a very
personal and revolutionary way to defend his name and execute his will in the
community of believers, and in this way rescued the chosen people from the rambling
fingers of pharisaism and gave them over to the transformative power of the Holy
Spirit. And if as a human being Jesus Christ was the self-practicalizing
teacher of this renewed and re-vitalized religious sensitivity, the Blessed
Virgin Mary was its self-practicalizing follower, and the best ever to attain
maturity in that faith. Her presence in the community of believers must have
taught the church some practical lessons which the Pentecost experience did not
contradict but rather re-affirmed and confirmed.
Jesus Christ did
not found a new religion different to and opposed to Judaism. In this context,
it is therefore natural to argue that if Jesus Christ practiced Judaism, to
hold the view that he is the founder of the Christian religion has far reaching
implications. It goes to admit in a very helpless and defenseless manner that
Jesus Christ was schismatic. And this brings us to a conclusion that is as
certain as it is scandalous. The Jewish law prescribes death-sentence for such
a one. Therefore, Christians are the rebels. This is true if it is still worth arguing
that the separated churches have some trappings of rebellion. But rebellion is
not a character of the Christian religion and cannot be.
If revelation is
still an event and a source despite the fact that everything that needs to be
said has been said and that nothing new can be said, and if there exists
necessarily the need to be concerned or worried about the events and situation
at the world scene, then the 3rd secret of the message of Fatima – not human
sacrifices reminiscent of the type crude practices that usually obtain in
pre-historic African societies - holds the missing bricks and promises to
supply the cement that are urgently needed at the construction site of the
pyramid of faith in the 21st century Church especially in Africa.
No adequate
theology can afford the luxury of neglecting the Fatima message or trivialize
its significance for the 21st century Catholicism without lapsing
into a mere ideology or an intolerable messy opinion. And to contrive to lock
it away in the archives is as weighty as locking up the fountain of knowledge,
truth and life against the 1.2 billion catholic population across the globe.
With the clampdown
on the power and urgency of the third message of Fatima and the idolatrous recourse
made to Freemason, the many different routes to genocide, terrorism, corruption
and Satanism have been grafted unto the very imposing trunk of church life and
ministry. Those responsible for this clampdown must be made to take responsibility for their
actions, or rather helped to appreciate the level of their culpability in the
sponsorship, advertisement and enthronement of corruption, terrorism,
insecurity and Satanism that have gripped the world.
And by a continuous
deliberate neglect, by the church, to re-invent and acquiesce to the demands of
the 3rd message of Fatima, and confronted by the invading arsenals
of global Satanism, Vatican bureaucracy runs the risk of being reduced to an
imposing ideological cult. Again, the umbilical cord which unites Christianity
with Judaism will be further threatened by the violent disposition of Islam
towards the State of Israel in the sense that there is no way the church can
pretend to be fighting corruption and terrorism on the world scale while she
herself is also at the same time a major beneficiary, with Islam, of the powers
that shore up global terrorism.
Anti-Semitism holds
no attractions for the Christian spirit because it neglects the lofty
implications of Divine Mercy and the providence of God for fallen humanity and
goes ahead to hold the chosen people of God up in Judgment forgetting that any
day the Jews become aware of the abiding presence of God in Jesus Christ,
Judaism will be upgraded to its original status which is Christianity, and the
Christian believers will be contented to re-connect with their natural
ancestry.
Witnessing to the
gospel and queuing for global power and influence before global Satanic
dictatorship are not mutually inclusive functions of the Roman Curia. They are
mutually opposed. Steps in this direction must be retraced whether here in
Nigeria or in the larger Church affairs.
By and large, the
person and example of the Blessed Virgin Mary, Our Lady of Fatima presents a
contrast to the many unhealthy divisions between that which is sacred and that
which is mundane, and at the same time constitutes a very strong rebuke against
every attempt at confusing them. In
other words, while her life of witnessing to God was highly distanced from fundamentalistic
and syncretic pre-occupations, the pretensions of careerism and ambitions that color
most feminist agitations today, she is the model of unity between the sacred
and the secular, and the most foremost agitator for the liberation of
womanhood.
In respect of the 3rd
message of Fatima, the contents of Mary’s struggles are one of the issues and
events that are locked away in the Vatican archives. Yet the church is poised
for a showdown with LCWR. From Rome to USA, from the far East to emerging
democracies in modern Africa, such pockets of ecclesiastical prison yards are
becoming increasingly obsolete and disgusting as instruments of coercion or control
in the midst of noble alternatives.
Therefore the very
contents of my struggles and concern for the past few years present a complex
picture, giving many a cause to believe that someone is out to experiment on the
issue of theological impunity. But the difficulty of the question is not on
excuse for avoiding it.
The situation in
Nigeria presents the real face of the challenge and urgency which this question
posits for the church today.
In my meeting, or
rather discussions with Nigeria’s Cardinal John Onaikan shortly before his
elevation to the Cardinalate, he said they (that is, the bishops of Nigeria) knew
what they were doing and went ahead to berate and even warned that our brand of
activism- in manifest reference to my person, and at a different level, Fr.
Ejike Mbaka, Spiritual Director of Adoration Ministry, Enugu, Nigeria (AMEN)- is
creating unnecessary and unhealthy enemies for the church. He maintained this
view unequivocally even against all threads of evidence and abundance of facts
I laid at his disposal to prove the opposite.
In my letter to Cardinal
Muller, Prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of Faith through General
Muhammadu Buhari, and having as its subject Nigeria’s President Goodluck
Jonathan’s visit to the Vatican, I wrote:
As a priest who is
very well aware of the significance of and unreservedly subscribed to
legitimately constituted authorities (both ecclesiastical and civil), my part
in this theater of absurdity is becoming vey tetchy to me personally but the
imperiling questions have refused to go away, (because) I am ordained for these
people, to work for their well being and salvation. Is it possible that the
Vatican, under any kind of Treaty whatsoever, can give an overt or even tacit
approval to genocide?
Whichever way, and
notwithstanding the murderous intents of the murderers and terrorists that still hang around our ecclesiastical courtyards I am all the more resolved to stand with God who is love and
the Father of the Our Lord Jesus Christ through witnessing to Christ the the Prince of Peace
with and serving the needs of the Blessed Virgin Mary, Our Lady of Fatima and
Queen/Patroness of Nigeria for the poor and oppressed.