Ahiara, Nigeria, Feb 19, 2018 / 11:13 am (CNA/EWTN News).- Pope Francis accepted the resignation Monday of a Nigerian bishop who had been rejected by many of the priests of his diocese since his appointment more than five years ago.
In June 2017 Pope Francis met with clerics of the Diocese of Ahiara and demanded that they accept the bishop appointment that had been made, or face suspension and loss of office.
In accepting Bishop Peter Okpaleke’s resignation Feb. 19, Pope Francis chose not to take action against the clergy of Ahiara, saying they have since expressed repentance.
At the same time, Pope Francis appointed as apostolic administrator sede vacante et ad nutum Sanctae Sedis of Ahiara Bishop Lucius Ugorji of Umuahia.
Bishop Okpaleke’s resignation letter was sent to the Vatican Feb. 14.
Okpaleke was appointed Bishop of Ahiara in December 2012 by Benedict XVI. However, the Ahiara diocese is dominated by the Mbaise ethnic group, and as an outsider from the nearby Diocese of Awka, Okpaleke was rejected by much of Ahiara’s clergy and laity, who wanted one of their own to be appointed bishop over them.
The Mbaise are among the most Catholic of Nigerian peoples, with 77 percent of the diocese’s population of 670,000 being Catholic. Nearby dioceses range between 19 and 70 percent Catholic.
However, Awka, Bishop Okpaleke’s home city, is located in the state of Anambra. Ahiara, on the other hand, is located to the south in Imo state. The Mbaise have often asserted that the Nigerian hierarchy favors Anambra.
Many members of the tribe resent what they call the “Anambranization” of the Church in southeast Nigeria, believing there to be corruption within the Church in Nigeria and a “recolonization” of the Mbaise.
The Mbaise also have a high number of priestly and religious vocations, many of whom end up serving as missionaries in Western nations. The diocese has seen at least 167 priestly ordinations since its establishment in 1987. Because of this, many had hoped that one of their own would fill the two-year episcopal vacancy in the Ahiara diocese.
After Bishop Okpaleke’s appointment, his Mbaise opponents blocked access to Ahiara’s cathedral for his episcopal ordination, forcing the prelate to instead be consecrated and installed outside his new diocese, at Seat of Wisdom Seminary in the Archdiocese of Owerri, May 21, 2013.
In July 2013, shortly after his election, Pope Francis named Cardinal John Onaiyekan of Abuja as apostolic administrator of Ahiara in a bid to resolve the problem; however, the effort proved to be unsuccessful.
In his letter of resignation, Bishop Okpaleke remarked that the situation in the Ahiara diocese “unfortunately … to the best of my knowledge has not improved.” He has remained in Awka since his espiscopal consecration.
“Most importantly, this has been threatening my spiritual life,” he wrote. He said that he thus believes that remaining Bishop of Ahiara “is no longer beneficial to the Church,” as his apostolate would not be effective “where a group of priests and lay faithful are very ill disposed to have me in their midst.”
“Exercising the ministry in a diocese where priests who are supposed to be my immediate and closest collaborators, brothers, friends and sons are at war with one another, with the laity and with me as their chief shepherd would be disastrous and a threat to the salvation of souls – including my own soul.”
The Congregation for the Evangelization of Peoples said in a Feb. 19 letter to Archbishop Ignatius Kaigama of Jos, president of the Nigerian bishops’ conference, that Pope Francis had received 200 letters of apology from clerics of the Ahiara diocese. The congregation responded to each priest who wrote.
The congregation added that with the appointment of a new apostolic administrator, Pope Francis “wants to point out that He continues to have a special and particular concern for the Diocese of Ahiara.”
“For the time being, the Pope does not intend to provide normal Governance to Ahiara and reserves the right to evaluate its spiritual and ecclesial progress before He makes another decision.”
In a Feb. 14 pastoral letter, Bishop Okpaleke characterized opposition to his appointment as a “Refusal to give the Holy Spirit a chance” and announced his decision to offer his resignation.
He included a call to repentance, saying he wanted “to invite those who have remained in permanent opposition to have an authentic ‘sensus Ecclesiae‘ (i.e. staying with the Church in love), to renew the spiritual bond and to refrain from being guided by ideologies, motivations and ideas that neither belong to Christ nor to the Church.”
Obedience is central to discernment, the bishop wrote, and “it involves trust that God is leading the Church.”
“I invite any dissenting priests to re-examine their initial motivations for becoming priests in the Catholic Church. Repentance and reconciliation are very urgent!”
In a Feb. 19 statement, the Congregation for the Evangelization of Peoples confirmed that in their letters expressing “obedience and fidelity”, some of the Ahiaran priests who wrote to Pope Francis also said they would have “psychological difficulty” in collaborating with Bishop Okpaleke after years of conflict.
The congregation urged each priest involved to “reflect on the grave damage inflicted on the Church of Christ” and voiced hope that in the future, they would never repeat such “unreasonable actions opposing a Bishop legitimately appointed by the Supreme Pontiff.”
“The Holy Father, who accompanies with prayer this new phase in the life of the Church in Ahiara, hopes that, with the new Apostolic Administrator, the local Church will recover its vitality and never again suffer such actions that so wound the Body of Christ.”
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A disaster, and a disgrace for the West. The conservatives about to take control in Washington are, if anything, worse than Biden on this issue of protecting Christians and our Christian sacred sites in the Middle East. Compare Trump’s callous disregard for these our true interests with his brutal support for the ethnic cleansing and imperialist expansionism of Tel Aviv. The West has nothing to say. And Trump’s priorities for the U.S.? Deport Catholics by the million and replace them with Hindus and Sikhs. The West has nothing to say.
Rubbish.
Israel is the reason we can visit Christian Holy Land shrines in the first place. How likely might that be under a caliphate and how many would still be standing?
God bless Israel and may He protect and guide Donald Trump. 🙏
Well said, Mrscracker. You are very correct. Thank you.
Wow, the pure garbage about “ethnic cleansing and imperialist expansionism” pretty much tells us anything you have to say is worthless.
You did hear about the muslim attacks on civilians, women and babies on October 7th, didnt you? Muslim countries 20 times the size of Israel surround them so how you assert the Jews are imperialists is totally delusional.
There’s no excuse to so clueless in the year 2025.
The propaganda horror stories about October 27th have been debunked many times.
Very easily. They have been colonising the lands occupied since 1967, which even the United States recognises are integral parts of other countries. This colonising involves the expulsion of those not assimilable: ethnic cleansing of Christians (as well as Muslims), just like that occurring in Europe so many times. Nineteenth-century European nationalism is the model for this stuff.
Christians have been leaving the Holy Land in droves under Tel Aviv’s rule. They had put up with centuries of Muslim rule (a quarter of the Middle East’s population was still Christian in 1918), but the last couple of generations of Tel Aviv domination has been the last straw. Bethlehem in 1947: majority Christian. Bethlehem today: 5% Christian. A disaster for our interests. Priests living in Jerusalem get spat on every day (not by Muslims), and Israeli police look the other way. What a wonderful place.
Israel is indeed a wonderful place and the great majority of Israelis are just as disgusted by the actions of an extreme splinter group as we are by the actions of the Westminister Baptists.
I have a family member who visited Israel last year and trust me, if you walk through the wrong ultra orthodox neighborhood in Jerusalem on the Sabbath you don’t have to be a member of the Catholic clergy or even a non Jew to have shoes hurled at you. Most Israelis find that extremely obnoxious behavior.
You are right Miguel, but you know is not easy.
Going back to the past no longer make sense. The october 7th seems, without doubt, induced zionist government did by desesperated mad (the 50,000 dead in gaza a truth induced by the genocide zionist government. Among them many Christians. But Muslims don’t make it easy if they don’t soften their positions).
How about a Jerusalem open to all three religions? It cannot be other thing, not belonging to any one. Remember, whoever holds the crown of Spain, holds the crown of Jerusalem. Catholic. Friend of all. Never with extremists. Two states solution now! or freedom and justice for arabs in Israel, in any case end or askenazi apartheid!
There are no conservatives in Washington, and nobody is going to risk their career to protect Christians.
True. No brave christians. I don’t know why the Western (USA and Europe) elites don’t defend the descendants of Jesus friends, Apostles, that are the Catholic Palestinians… Maybe because what you say.
My guess, Miguel is a a leftist plant who enjoys spewing ridiculous comments. Frankly it is sad, but that is the world we live in.
Regarding Christians in Syria, we in need to pray them, for both their physical protection and spiritual courage.
Rubbish guess ad rubbish if no guess.
The facts are undeniable and the “October 7” missive doesn’t straighten out anything.
Very well put LJ. Thank you.
Correction: The 2003 invasion was only a “coalition of the willing” and was not the occasion of a 15-0 U.N. vote, probably a later vote to lift sanctions. I am mistaken.
Somewhere on CWR a reader repeated that the second Iraq war was patently unjust, and opined that the new regime in Syria is simply biding its time before persecuting the Christians. Hussein was said to tolerate Christians. To which, my earlier comment somewhere, as here corrected:
Yours truly does not know enough to conclude whether or not “this new regime in Syria is biding its time to eradicate the remnants of Syrian Christianity,” nor whether we should revere Iraq’s Hussein because he tolerated/protected Christians—while also eradicating 182,000 Kurds and deporting even more, including the use of weapons of mass destruction (the 1988 Halabja attack https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Halabja_massacre).
Three points and a Question:
FIRST, as an amateur from the back bleachers, my focus often turns too much on apparent details that, as possible pivot points, tend to get lost in later hindsight. “For want of a nail a shoe was lost, etc.” Example: a few altered details in Muhammad’s personal life in the 7th Century, and sectarian Islam in the 21st-century Middle East, would not even exist. Nor would ISIS.
SECOND, following are a few nails and horseshoes…
My recollection from sparse news accounts at the time are that the Iraqi scientific community had destroyed the weapons of mass destruction (WMD) because they feared Western actions, but they also feared to inform Hussein whose recent history and uninformed bluster seemed to confirm the continued existence of WMD. A commitment by a “coalition of the willing” that was discounted by Hussein because of probably a dozen earlier U.N. proclamations that were followed by inaction. And, later that a key Iraqi informant, claiming the WMDs existed, was simply gaming the United States into supporting his side in local an regional intersectarian strife. And, that the overall strategy to invade Iraq was designed to conclude quickly—to prevent intersectarian eruptions and what eventually became ISIS….But, the strategy was crippled by removal of the northern half of the pincer attack, by President Erdogan who only a week before the invasion withdrew his permission to cross through Turkish airspace (internal Muslim/sectarian politics?).
THIRD, in retrospect we see an unjust “preventive war,” rather than what might have been (yes, no, maybe?) a more defensible but deceived and overly complex “first strike”. The horror of it all, especially for little people in huge numbers who are always the collateral damage to the Law of Unforeseen Consequences.
The Honore de Balzac got it just about right, “bureaucracy is a giant mechanism operated by pygmies.” Likewise, the compact, technocratic, tripwire, and modern geopolitical world. Missing is sound prudential judgment (a principle of the Catholic Social Teaching) which can be a bit less certain in practice than quoting the Gospel as policy.
QUESTION: As has been said, “while one does have the right to offer non-resistance to the knife, one does not have the right to offer the necks of one’s family and others to the assailant.” With imperfect information and in an imperfect world, how are overly-weaponized nations to navigate better between moral absolutes, and the calculus of consequences for their actions and for their inactions, both?
ISIS/ISIL/Al Sham -promise to conquer Rome. By some arrangement they went and got a sort of national legitimization in Syria. Who did that?
‘ Bin Laden viewed his terrorism as a prologue to a caliphate he did not expect to see in his lifetime. His organization was flexible, operating as a geographically diffuse network of autonomous cells. The Islamic State, by contrast, requires territory to remain legitimate, and a top-down structure to rule it. (Its bureaucracy is divided into civil and military arms, and its territory into provinces.)
We are misled in a second way, by a well-intentioned but dishonest campaign to deny the Islamic State’s medieval religious nature. … There is a temptation to rehearse this observation—that jihadists are modern secular people, with modern political concerns, wearing medieval religious disguise—and make it fit the Islamic State. In fact, much of what the group does looks nonsensical except in light of a sincere, carefully considered commitment to returning civilization to a seventh-century legal environment, and ultimately to bringing about the apocalypse.
And …..
And …..
And ….. ‘
See the CWR report by Carl Olson.
https://www.catholicworldreport.com/2015/02/17/the-atlantic-magazine-isis-is-very-islamic-apocalyptic-and-avowedly-genocidal/
https://www.breitbart.com/national-security/2015/02/15/isis-beheads-21-christians-promises-to-conquer-rome-by-allahs-permission/