RELUCTANT MISSIONARIES

West Africans Preach the Word of God in New York City

By Brian Lyman

 

 Every second and fourth Sunday, Father Matthew Ugwoji gathers with fellow Nigerians at All Saints’ Roman Catholic Church to celebrate Mass in their native Ibo language. There are only 50 of his fellow countrymen in the overwhelmingly African-American parish in Harlem, so, he says, it isn’t necessary to have more than two such services a month.

Ugwoji, a 32-year-old Catholic priest who has lived in the United States for four months, looks forward to the Masses. "It gives me a chance to be united with my fellow countrymen," he said, part of the 50,000-strong African immigrant community scattered throughout New York City.

Neither Ugwoji nor his parishioners demanded that his parish provide the Mass. "I celebrate it because my pastor asked me to," he said of the Masses in Ibo. Nor does Ugwoji, working toward a theological degree from St. John’s University, feel that his skin color gives him a special incentive to serve the African-American, Trinidadian, Grenadian and Afro-Cuban members of All Saints’.

"Color is not one of the contents of my vocation," Ugwoji said.

That attitude may prove significant as African priests become a growing presence in New York's Catholic Church. With the ranks of the clergy thinning in the United States, African priests like Ugwoji and Akpabio, sent to here to pursue post-graduate degrees in administration and pastoral care, are being asked to bolster the lines. About 10 percent of the active Catholic clergy in New York City come from Africa (mostly Ghana and Nigeria), and their presence throughout the nation is growing. Their pastoral approaches, emphasizing unity in the face of adversity, however, clash with African-American Catholic clergy, who demand more politics from the pulpit, and confrontation with race matters - in American society and within the Church.

West African priests, confused and occasionally bewildered by American notions of race, do not feel they can bring such issues into their homilies without dividing their congregations - a sin in a religious tradition that emphasizes community. Father Felix Akpabio, a Nigerian based at St. Gabriel’s Roman Catholic Church in Queens, serves an overwhelmingly black, West Indian congregation, but doesn’t feel a mandate to address racial or economic challenges. "The question does not come up," he said.

African-American Catholic clergy are much more willing to raise issues of race themselves. "The clergy of African descent makes an extraordinary effort to be universal," said Brother Tyrone Davis, director of the Archdiocese’s Office of Black Ministry, which serves the diocese’s 300,000 black Catholics. "Sometimes it’s at the expense of a part of their nationality."

Catholics in West Africa are still a minority (in Nigeria, they make up 11 percent of the population), but the Church there is gaining numbers and influence. Cardinal Francis Arinze, archbishop of Nigeria, has worked for reconciliation between Christians and Muslims in his country, and Church observers consider him a possible successor to John Paul II.

Arinze’s church also boasts more priests per capita than the American church. Vocations in the United States have plummeted 16 percent since the late 1970s; in Queens, only about 30 men are studying for the priesthood at a seminary in Douglaston. Nigerian seminaries, however, count enrollment in the thousands.

More men in Nigerian seminaries, though, mean a need for professors of theology and administrators. Ghanian and Nigerian priests, usually in their 30s and 40s, are sent to Europe and the United States for graduate and doctoral work. The nearly 100 African priests in New York are graduate students sent to earn master’s degrees and Ph.D.’s.

Most of them leave upon completion of their studies, said Monsignor John Brown, director of priest personnel for the Diocese of Brooklyn. But the need for priests in American dioceses, dovetailing with the Nigerian archdiocese’s demand for better-educated priests, keeps the ranks of West African priests in the local dioceses constant.

Most of those priests are eager to leave the United States. "Are you kidding?" snapped Akpabio, when asked if he might consider staying. "It would be an abomination."

Father Celestine Anyanwu, a 48-year-old vicar (assistant pastor) at St. Gabriel’s Roman Catholic Church in Jackson Heights, is not as emphatic as Akpabio, but he shares the feeling. A Nigerian, he held a rural pastorship in his native land, serving parishioners scattered over 60 miles of villages and bad roads. But the reception he received at those rural Masses was warm. "They were joyful, even though they were poor," he said. "They give you more."

Here, he said, Catholics focus on their watches and treat Mass as a chore. They are too individualistic - too concerned about their own needs, too unwilling to put their community ahead of themselves.

And there is the problem of race. "Once you’re black anywhere in the world," Anyanwu said, "you’re in trouble."

Still, it’s very hard for these priests to square American conceptions of race - or its resonance in their parishioners’ lives - with their vocations. The church in Nigeria and Ghana emphasizes unity, not dissent, and priests from those countries don’t like bringing politics into the pulpit.

Anyanwu avoids bringing up racial issues "unless the readings suggest it." But even then, he is wary. "If you bring up divisions," he said, "you divide the people of God."

That is not the approach favored by the 2.3 million African-American Catholics, who have been historically isolated from the predominantly white clergy. Though African-American Catholicism dates to the founding of St. Augustine, Fla., in 1565, black clergymen were not ordained in American churches until the middle of the 19th century, and have never been populous in the American church.

American bishops were chiefly to blame, said Father Cyprian Davis, author of "The History of Black Catholics in the United States." "The Holy See pushed U.S. bishops to change the situation of black Catholics," Davis said in a telephone interview from his abbey in St. Meinrad, Ind. "And there was a concerted effort, at the turn of the century, to assemble black Catholic congresses."

The American clergy still needs that push, Davis said. While Davis praised the late Cardinal O’Connor’s efforts for peace after the Amadou Diallo shooting, he feels that the New York church hierarchy does not address the needs of the 300,000 black Catholics in New York City. There have been incidents, Davis said, of segregation or attempted segregation between races in individual parishes. "The challenge, in general terms, is how do you live out your spirituality in a church that may not understand your cultural context," he said.

Like his West African brethren, Davis would prefer a more holistic approach to religion - a view shared by Father Theodore Parker, one of Father Ugwoji’s co-workers at All Saints’ Parish. "I know some African-Americans feel the culture is too individualistic," he said. "But the Church is never free of its cultural blanket. Faith doesn’t come from the air."

But those blankets can smother good will. "Over here, the language barrier is too much of an issue," said Father Michael Aggrey, 38, a vicar based at St. Anthony’s Church in the Bronx. Aggrey, who serves a predominantly Hispanic congregation, studies counseling at Fordham University but says he has a hard time relating to those in St. Anthony’s flock who speak Spanish, a language Aggrey hasn’t mastered. "If they don’t speak English, I can’t work with them,’’ he said. "My pastoral work isn’t fulfilling."

It is, however, physically easier than service in Aggrey’s native Ghana, or Akpabio’s Nigeria. Both men have taught in seminaries, and both have experience in pastoral work. Their journeys to the priesthood were slightly different; Aggrey chose the cloth in his adulthood after encountering "a very pious, holy man." Akpabio drifted toward the clergy in his Catholic high school, though he toyed with other professions. "My parents didn’t want me to be lawyer, because we had a sense of pride," he said with a laugh.

Both Aggrey and Akpabio, interviewed at different times, had similar memories of the African Catholic Church; parishes with no money, clergy burdened with excessive administrative and spiritual demands, and grueling rural assignments requiring constant travel over hard terrain. ("You would die," said Akpabio, who held a rural pastorship for five years.)

That life, though punishing, satisfied both men. In the United States, they feel pressures to conform their practices to American culture. Their two-hour homilies must be cut down to 30 minutes, and they must accept the fact that churchgoers in the United States do not emphasize the celebratory aspect of religion as much as they do.

"I know over there, priests spend a lot of time citing examples," said Father Aaron Appieh, 43, a Ghanaian priest based at Christ the King Church in the Bronx. "It seems people don’t worry about time."

Aggrey, for his part misses the two- to three-hour services in Ghana, especially the "common song," lengthy hymns sung by the entire congregation. "I find that sad," he said. "It’s not very fulfilling."

In fact, the attitudes of the American Catholic Church - seen as a dissident, disunited mob by Vatican officials, according to Time magazine - rub several of these priests the wrong way.

Here, Aggrey said, religion is colder. "We are not communitarian over here," he said. "We don’t care about other people."

The Nigerian clergy, Anyanwu added, tends to be more socially conservative than their American counterparts; Cardinal Arinze, for example, is a staunch opponent of abortion, contraception and the ordination of women. "They were slow in terms of fulfilling the Second Vatican Council," he said, referring to the modernizing church council of the 1960s. "They’ve been slow in giving more work to lay people, giving more work to women."

The urge for consensus, meanwhile, makes these West African priests reluctant to raise racial issues in their homilies, or discuss challenges faced by their congregations, dominated by minority groups.

The cultural background of the African churches contributes to their hesitancy. Appieh said that priests in Ghana speak about social justice in general terms. Anyanwu urged his Nigerian parishioners to vote when elections were being held but otherwise felt no desire from parishioners to address politics directly.

They have experience with multiracial communities; Aggrey, Akpabio and Anyanwu have warm memories of Irish and German missionaries who taught them in school. They are aware of racial discrimination. "When I came here - when a priest comes to the white man’s country," Anyanwu said, "it makes you diminish the love you have." And the assorted men say that they hear of racial discrimination from their parishioners, usually revolving around job issues.

Asked how they can address those issues from their pulpit, however, the priests fall back on homilies to love thy neighbor. "People haven’t embraced Christ with their whole heart," Anyanwu said.

Divisiveness is a sin to these men. Akpabio becomes irritated by race questions. He calls racism "hatred for humanity" but does not see how he can challenge racism, or even address it. "At this point, I can’t correct it," Akpabio said. "All I can say is love the person who hates you. Do good."

Aggrey will preach on racial discrimination to his Hispanic parishioners, but only if he sees an immediate need to speak out, such as in the aftermath of a police shooting. Other priests at St. Anthony’s, he said, have written homilies around the Diallo shooting, but Aggrey feels no desire to embrace a gospel that may offend some of his parishioners. "If the Bible talks about social issues, I will do it," he said, "but special issues can be addressed thematically."

The priests also cite their "purposes" as reasons for going back to their native lands, displaying an almost fatalistic view of their roles as Catholic priests - which comes in for criticism from Father Parker at All Saints’. "That’s a cop-out in way," he said. "It’s like saying, ‘You’ll put spinach before me but I’ll eat what the cook tells me.’"

The fatalism also means that the priests feel powerless to minister to fellow West Africans, one of the fastest growing immigrant groups in New York City. Ugwoji, shortly before talking about his Ibo mass in Harlem, said outreach to fellow West Africans "is not one of my prime missions."

Appieh shakes his head when the Ghanaian immigrant community in the Bronx is mentioned; it’s not his assignment. "They invited me here for a purpose," said Appieh, a graduate student at Fordham University, sent to earn a master’s degree in counseling and return to Ghana upon its completion. "When I’ve fulfilled that purpose, I’ll go back."