April 25, 2009
African clergy, nuns bring missionary spirit to ministry in diocese
By Denise MacLachlan
Herald staff
Sister Anne Egem, left, Sister Rose Ereba, center, and Sister Helen Umejesi, all members of the Handmaids of the Holy Child Jesus, engage in humor on the front steps of their convent in south Sacramento just before Easter. Cathy Joyce/Herald photo
Father Ambrose Ugwuegbu, parochial administrator of St. Dominic Parish in
Colfax, describes the African-born priests serving in the United States
today as “the seeds planted by the Irish missionaries in the 1880s.”
“The Irish missionaries brought the church to Africa, and now we proclaim the Good News to the world,” he says.
Father Ugwuegbu is one of six African-born priests currently serving in the Diocese of Sacramento. Four priests, including Father Ugwuegbu, were ordained in Nigeria; two were ordained in Rwanda.
There are between 1,200 and 1,400 African clergy and religious currently serving in United States, according to Sister Joanna Okereke, a program director in the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops’ Secretariat of Cultural Diversity in the Church.
“Each year we get more coming,” she told Catholic News Service in a March 19 article.
Sister Okereke is a Nigerian-born member of the Handmaids of the Holy Child Jesus, the first indigenous order in Nigeria for Catholic women and a congregation represented in the Sacramento Diocese by five sisters living in community and ministering in the diocese.
Father Ugwuegbu and several other African priests and religious spoke recently with The Herald about their vocations and ministry in the diocese, as well as their observations of Catholic life in Africa and in the United States.
“We have a vocations boom in Nigeria,” explained Father Ugwuegbu, who describes himself as being “on loan” from his native diocese.
He said that Catholicism in Nigeria is practiced with great joy and energy. Sunday Masses last two to three hours and make up the central event of the day, he said. “We get involved in the Mass, with a lot of singing and celebrating,” he added. “We are joyful to be at Mass.”
Sister Rose Ereba, a member of the congregation of the Handmaids of the Holy Child Jesus who is a parish minister at St. Joseph Parish in Sacramento, described the energy in a Nigerian parish after catechumens complete the Rite of Christian Initiation for Adults.
“In Nigeria, people don’t disappear after RCIA ends,” she said. “They become part of the community.” The newly-baptized neophytes join a group at their parish, she explained, and continue to be closely involved in parish life.
The parish churches are filled with these groups, she explained. People choose a group whose saint they like, she said, and they meet with the other people in the group after Mass or during the week, to pray together, to talk, and to help the parish with some task that needs doing. Sometimes they make clothes that match, like uniforms or laypeople’s habits.
The African-born priests and sisters note that responses to their ministry in the United States have been almost universally positive.
Father Polycarp Ndugbu, chaplain at Folsom State Prison, is also from Nigeria. Before taking the assignment in the Sacramento Diocese, he studied in Belgium for several years and taught philosophy at a Nigerian seminary for nearly two decades.
Reflecting on his current work in the prison, Father Ndgugbu says that curiosity draws the prisoners to him.
“Many black prisoners come to my Masses because they do not expect a black chaplain to be Catholic,” he said. Some are Muslim, or planning to be Muslim. Many have no faith at all. He welcomes all of them.
“When they come, they are surprised by what they learn about Catholicism,” he said. “They learn that what they have been hearing about the Catholic Church is not at all true, and they become enlightened.”
Two other Nigerian-born priests in the diocese, Father Hippolytus Njoku and Father Alban Uba, are members of an indigenous Nigerian missionary religious order, the Sons of Mary, Mother of Mercy Congregation.
Both priests serve currently as chaplains in hospitals: Father Njoku is chaplain at UC Davis Medical Center in Sacramento while also serving as parochial vicar of St. Charles Borremeo Parish in Sacramento, and Father Uba is chaplain at Mercy San Juan Hospital in Carmichael.
Both priests minister to people who face matters of life and death. Both care deeply about being present to people who are often isolated.
“In the hospital, when you are sick, your family comes and goes, your friends come and go, and you stay in the hospital with the illness,” Father Njoku said. In Nigeria, he said, after a couple of days of treatment in a hospital, the family will take a patient home, where he or she is surrounded by family members throughout the illness, day and night.
As chaplain, Father Njoku sits with patients, responds to their spiritual needs, and facilitates communication among patients, their families, and the hospital staff. Mostly, he said, he tries to be present and responsive to them as Christ is present to them, even when they are angry and afraid.
One of the bemusing facts of life for African priests serving in the United States is that many Americans lump all African countries together. While most of the African clergy and religious serving in the diocese come from Nigeria, a large sub-Saharan country on the West coast of the continent, two priests come from tiny Rwanda, a mountainous country more than a thousand miles to the east.
Father Innocent Subiza, parochial vicar of St. Teresa of Avila Parish in Auburn, and Father Bernardin Mugabowakigeri, parochial vicar of Our Lady of the Snows Parish in Westwood and St. John Parish in Quincy, entered the diocesan priesthood in their native Rwanda.
Both priests are survivors of the war and genocide that spilled over the border from Uganda’s civil war in 1990 and killed more than 600,000 people in Rwanda.
“Rwanda used to be called the ‘Switzerland of Africa’ before the war,” recalled Father Mugabowakigeri, “because it was so beautiful and peaceful. It was a small paradise.”
Father Subiza, too, recalls the times before the war as idyllic. He described the Sunday Masses of his childhood as the central event of the day, just they are in Nigeria.
All of the Catholics in his village would walk together to the church, he said, which was several miles away. And since most people were Catholic, he observed, this meant that the entire village would walk to church together.
He recalls his boyhood Sundays as joyful events, with adults and children walking together, singing and visiting on their way to Mass and on the way back.
Since the war, the families of both priests are scattered. Father Subiza, who has been assigned to the Sacramento Diocese since 2004, phones his mother frequently in another African country.
Father Mugabowakigeri, who is now a priest of the diocese, has a brother living in Sacramento who teaches at American River College.
Both priests say that their experiences in the war strengthened their faith.
“I am so thankful to God for all of the love that he has shown me and all of the love that I see around me,” Father Mugabowakigeri said. “How can I not be joyful when God’s love is so great?”
