The other day I had an online conversation with a young seminarian, studying here in the States, who comes from Nigeria and hopes to have his writing published. He’s about to become a deacon and if all goes well, will be ordained next year.
He’s not been home for four years, an ache.
“We read of what’s going on there for Catholics,” I said. “That is so hard, and so sad!“
“The new statistics came out this morning. I can’t even look at them,” he replied.
(As of a year ago, 62,000 Nigerian Christians had been murdered since 2000).
“A friend of my brother, also a priest, was recently found dead, executed, in his car. To be a priest in Nigeria means the willingness to be a martyr.”
It brought me up short. My Lenten observances suddenly seemed paltry and superficial.
“The persecution does not extinguish our faith; it strengthens it,” added the seminarian.
In fact, despite the terrible risk of practicing one’s Christian faith, Nigeria has one of the highest Mass attendances in the world.
How would someone who lives in a country where simply being a priest—or attending Mass—may be a death sentence look at my life, my “faith?” How eager would I be to sit before the tabernacle if I could be tortured and killed for it?
“It is useless to speculate what we might do in such circumstances; only God knows that,” observed Gerald Vann, OP, in The Pain of Christ, a book first published in 1947 that’s been on my shelf forever and that I’m re-reading.
“What we can do is prepare.. We have seen how the disciples fled because they were unprepared; how our Lady was with her Son to the end because she was prepared; she had understood, as they had not, how the Cross is the way to the Kingdom, how death much precede resurrection, how it is out of the darkness that light is born”…
“You remember some of the ‘harsh’ sayings of our Lord: Let the dead bury their dead, Unless a man hate his father and his mother, Sell all thou hast: what are they telling you if not the same thing: you cannot serve God and Mammon, you cannot be at the same time a Christian and a self-complacent egoist, you cannot claim to follow Christ if you give only half of yourself to Christ. There is no way to life except through death and re-birth: that re-birth in the Spirit means a full surrender of will, through love, to the will of the Spirit.”
Let’s try not to be self-complacent egoists. And let’s pray for our seminarian, and for the people of Nigeria.
Leave a Reply