African Catholic Priests: Confronting an Identity Problem

Introduction

ix Introduction The 5 May 2001 edition of the English Catholic periodical, The Tablet, editorialised on the priesthood, with these proposals: ‘Ultimately, it will be necessary to hold a council on the issue of the identity of the priest for today and tomorrow, and the means to train clergy and support them, including notably the place of the laity in the mix. The present formula appears no longer to be working. Vatican I considered the role of the Pope; Vatican II that of the bishops; a Vatican III could reflect on the priest’s role within the people of God.’1 Laurenti Magesa one of the leading African theologian, echoes that, ‘however, we in Africa cannot afford to wait for it (Vatican III). Let us reflect now on the identity of the priesthood in our fast changing society’ (Magesa 2001). The African Catholic priesthood now more than ever faces a crisis of identity. In some African areas Catholic priests are equated to foreign aspects of Westernization and Americanization (Green 2003:57). Their academic level, their life standard and their behaviour seems to some people to contradict with what their African roots represent. Many priests are considered to be ignoring their African background. Directly speaking, the identity of priests is ambiguous. According to Maia Green, ‘On the one hand they are people who have privileged access to both divine and material power. On the other, they are the self-interested representatives of an institution which is foreign because it was brought by foreigners and because it stands, at moments, in opposition to local practice’ (Green 2003:57). Donald B. Cozzens opinions that, ‘At the core of the priest’s crisis of soul, then, is the search for his unfolding identity as an ordained servant of Jesus Christ’ (Cozzens 2000:9). Perhaps the most telling voice that speaks of African priests’ identity to be at crossroads is that of Chukwudum B. Okolo who considers that, ‘The African priest, after years of rigorous academic and spiritual training usually finds himself helpless in the face of the real problems of people. He quickly knows that he has been trained to fit the “ideal Pattern” of the seminary text-books x and retreat masters but is incapable of adequately serving his people in their integral needs. He then realises that he needs to be retrained and, perhaps, “reafricanized” to truly serve and understand Africa and her peoples’ (Okolo 1997:16, 17). As the African Church encounters a changed situation today, there is a need to look afresh at the African Catholic priesthood to examine if it is adjusted to fit with the model of the Church as Family of God it is destined to serve. The priesthood we have inherited from missionaries functioned in a top-down model and looked at the lay faithful as being at a lower grade in the Church, indeed like children. The Christian faith was preached to the Africans by members of Religious Congregations like the Benedictines, the White Fathers, the Franciscans and the like. The African converts were not informed to identify the Diocesan and the Religious priests as having different life orientation. Among the Benedictines for example, the African Diocesan priests they trained were integrated to their order as oblates. Being a priest in African context meant everything attached to the Religious priests; communal prayer, communal meal, dependency on the superior, and many of such practices. The idea of a Diocesan priest who can own personal belongings and manage his livelihood by making use of his own talents, as someone who can count on his people as a treasure for the local Church has still a long way to go before it is fully actualized.2 For a number of years the expatriate missionaries and the local priests looked abroad and depended on their subsistence living from donations which came from Europe and America. The training of native priests at major seminaries to these days depends mainly on the subsidies from Rome and Church donor agencies. As the African Church shapes its communities around the idea of “Church as Family of God,” there comes a necessity to provide a definition of a priest in a changed context. This is necessarily so because among the crucial questions the African indigenous priests asked themselves when the expatriate missionaries were gradually handing over the administration of the Church to their native counterparts, wrestled on the issue of identity xi...