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The Challenge of African Priests in America By Rev. Bekeh Utietiang
When in 2006, at the symposium of the American Academy of Religion, Andrew Greeley discussing the growth of the Church in Africa and other developing countries made a remark that, they will always “Take ideas from us”, I found his remark offensive. His statement assumed that that the African church lacks its own original ideas and can only succeed in its mission if it relies on the West for ideas.
It took me more than two years to realize that Greeley’s statement reflects the mentality of the Church in the West as it relates to the Church in Africa. This kind of thinking is ridiculous considering the fact that majority of the leaders of the Church in Africa have studied alongside their Western counterparts and competed well and in some cases outperformed them. That the Church in Africa is poor does not mean that it lacks ideas. Her pastoral plan is about the most successful in any part of the world. Every year, thousands of people join the Church in Africa while thousands of people leave the Church in the West. The Church in Africa has effectively been able to use lay organizations within the Church as instruments of evangelization and the catechists who do not even have the “privileged” Clerical rank of a deacon in the church have done a phenomenal job of not only teaching and bringing people to the sacraments but also leading the people in daily worship where there is no priest. Seminarians spend their summers not in parish rectories wondering what they may do but in intensive work of evangelization both in urban and rural areas. By the time of their ordination, they are men who have a deep care for the people and know that their primary responsibility is that of bringing people to Jesus Christ.
As I speak with many African priests who live and work in the West, their biggest frustration is a church that places no value in their genuine call to serve but see their priesthood or service in the West as merely for economic reasons. These priests are daily being stereotyped. For example, because one African priest does something negative, then all the priests from Africa are like that. While this is in itself very bad logic, the same logic is not applied to their Western brothers. Following this flawed logic one can argue that because about four thousand priests were involved in pedophilia in America, all American priests are pedophiles. Young men as myself who came to America to become priests are not here for economic reasons but because we believe that the Catholic Church is One and universal and if there is need in any part of the world, people must be courageous and willing to respond to this need. I see no gains in being a priest in the West rather than a sacrifice for the Church here.
Ministry should be a two-way stream – African priests learning and receiving from the Church in the West and in turn, the Church in the West learning from their African brothers and accepting the talents and treasures from the Church in Africa. In the most part, this has not been the case. While the Africans have strived to learn and receive from the West, the West is not interested in the gifts that are brought to them from Africa. It is the Africans who have to adjust to the Church in the West: learn to speak like them; dress like them; celebrate the liturgy in their own terms. Up until 1995, we still had Irish missionaries in my home parish in Africa because we were still considered a missionary territory. These faithful Irish priests brought us the gift of the faith from Ireland and we joyfully embraced and learned from them. While they made efforts to embrace our own local traditions, we did not impose our own culture on them. I cannot remember any of them speaking my local language and this means that, there was always an interpreter during the homily and majority of the people did not understand the rest of the Mass. However, we loved them and accepted them wholly. We in turn, learned so much from them that I today consider myself to be 1% Irish. There was mutual giving and receiving. The reverse is the case for the majority of African missionaries in the West where they can only be fully accepted if they embrace fully the culture of the West and in some cases, they have even been forced to embrace this culture by their respective bishops.
The beauty of the Catholic Church is that we are a One and Universal Church. We should worship freely in whatever region of the world we find ourselves. Every culture of the world has something to enrich the Church with and the Church in the West must be humble enough and open to receiving other cultural treasures that God is offering them.
Rev. Bekeh Utietiang is a Roman Catholic priest in the United States. He is the president of African Reads Books Inc., a 501 ( C) (3) Non-Profit Public Charity.
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