African parishes growing

The continent is becoming a source of priests for Western nations.
By ANDREW MAYKUTH
MCCLATCHY NEWSPAPERS
KONTAGORA, Nigeria -- Dressed in holiday finery, 500 Nigerian Catholics gathered on Palm Sunday last year at St. Michael's Cathedral, the central church in a traditionally Islamic corner of Africa's most populous nation.
In much of the world, Catholics commemorate Jesus' triumphal entry into Jerusalem with a public parade. But in Kontagora, the faithful confined their procession inside the compound's 10-foot walls out of respect for -- or fear of -- the city's Muslim majority.
"We don't want to do anything to provoke the people," said the Rev. Isa Emmanuel Saliu, a local priest.
There was good reason to be wary about public exhibitions of Christian faith. Kontagora is a principal city in Niger state, one of several Nigerian jurisdictions in which Islamic law has been decreed. In a country where Christianity and Islam meet like great tectonic plates, Kontagora lies directly on the fault line.
Tension breaks out
Occasionally the tension erupts, as it did a little more than four months ago amid worldwide protests over cartoons depicting the Prophet Muhammad.
On Feb. 23, Muslim gangs forced their way through St. Michael's steel gates. Igniting tires and gasoline, they burned the cathedral and destroyed the priests' residence. One parishioner fled to a nearby Protestant church, where he died when it was burned. Nine churches were attacked in Kontagora that night, and 10 people were killed.
The bloody week in Nigeria -- more than 120 Christians and Muslims died in protests, reprisals and counter-reprisals -- is only a sample of the sectarian conflict that underlies this oil-rich nation of 132 million, cobbled together by British colonialists from rival ethnic groups and perpetually in danger of splitting apart.
Despite instability, Nigeria and much of Africa represent a growth opportunity for major religions because a substantial number of people still are animists who hold ancient tribal beliefs in spirits and demons. Not only Roman Catholicism but also most Protestant denominations are here; their leaders vie aggressively for Nigeria's unclaimed souls. Islamic radicals have also taken aim at the country; Osama bin Laden declared it "ripe for liberation."
Growth area
For the Catholic Church, which is losing ground in Europe and Latin America, Africa is the promising frontier.
In 1950, 4 percent of Catholics worldwide were Africans. Today, the continent's 140 million members make up 12 percent.
In Nigeria, which dominates West Africa economically and politically, the church grows at 4.7 percent per year, one of the fastest rates in the world.
Although Catholic clerics say their evangelistic efforts in Nigeria's hinterlands are aimed at animists, in truth many converts are Muslims. Partly for self-protection, the clerics do not advertise Islamic conversions. Where sharia law is enforced, Muslims face reprisals and even death for leaving the faith.
But it's clear that Christians measure their progress in comparison to Islam, which migrated across the Sahara in the Middle Ages and set deep roots in what is now northern Nigeria.
"Islam had been here for over 1,000 years," said Onaiyekan. "Christianity came here in the last 100 years. Now Islam and Christians are about equal" -- 66 million and 53 million, as estimated by the CIA.
A Nigerian Islamic leader said Christianity is compatible with Islam, as long as followers of the former do not insult Islam or Muhammad.
"We don't have a religious crisis in Nigeria," said Amin Igwegbe, director of administration for the Supreme Council for Islamic Affairs of Nigeria, and a convert from Catholicism at age 12. "What we have is a political crisis, an ethnic crisis and a tribal crisis. Politicians just use religion as a cover-up.
"The real problem here is poverty. A hungry man is an angry man, whether he is Christian or Muslim."
The Catholic Church operates in two distinctly different spheres in Nigeria.
Kontagora is a vicariate, twice the size of New Jersey, and was established 10 years ago with the aim that Irish missionaries would develop it into a full-fledged diocese. In places such as this, where most of the clergy are dispatched from the Society of African Missions, the church fits the Western stereotype of outreach: a patriarchy led by white priests and nuns evangelizing an underdeveloped population, often in the face of hostility.
But such outposts in northern Nigeria serve only a tiny minority of the country's Catholics.
'Reverse missionaries'
By far the most impressive concentration is in the southeast, where missionaries established Catholicism a century ago. The church claims as much as 80 percent of the population in some dioceses.
It also produces an indigenous clergy seen as a source for the next generation of Vatican leadership. A Nigerian cardinal, Joseph Arinze Nwankwu, was a leading contender to succeed John Paul II as pope.
Bigard Memorial Seminary in Enugu is said to be the largest Catholic theological school in the world. Its enrollment -- upward of 1,000 on three campuses -- is nearly five times that of America's biggest Catholic seminary, Mundelein, near Chicago.
Nigeria is regarded as a source for priests in Europe and the United States, although the Vatican officially discourages a brain-drain to the West.
At the National Missionary Seminary of St. Paul near the central town of Gwagwalada, students prepare for work overseas, including in America. The competition for admission is intense -- of 2,800 applicants last year, 17 were accepted.
"I think there's going to be a growing dependency of the Western church on Africa," said the Rev. Raphael Asika, who heads the Missionary Society of St. Paul's office in Houston, where he supervises about 30 priests working in America as "reverse missionaries."
Why the attraction?
The desire of Nigerians to enter the priesthood is partly economic. In a poor country where steady employment is scarce, it is a source of lifelong security and, in some cases, patronage for one's extended family.
But the attractions are more than material. Priests are held in high esteem, occupying a top tier of the social hierarchy.
"The priesthood is something nice, attractive, prestigious," said Peter Nnanga, 32, a St. Paul's seminarian. "In the village, when you have a priest in your family, you are seen as blessed."
Nigeria's deep spiritualism is reflected in the Mass. Infused with African culture, it is exuberantly musical, often with a choir and drum corps inducing gyrating parishioners to queue up to drop offerings in the collection box. Churches are full, sometimes standing room only.
The homily often lasts up to an hour. Some priests acknowledge borrowing the style of Protestant preachers, sermonizing while pacing back and forth at the altar, beseeching the congregation to join in with cries of "Amen!" and "Hallelujah!"
While its Masses are colorful and boisterous, the church is far less adventurous when it concerns the orthodoxy set down by Rome. The Nigerian tradition is conformity. There is little public pressure to liberalize the rules.
On a continent beset by AIDS, there are only muted calls to relax the church's ban on condoms. There are few calls to open the priesthood to married men or to women. Celibacy is hallowed.
Catholicism came to Nigeria in the 15th century with the Portuguese. But it was only at the end of the 19th, when Europeans engaged in a frantic scramble to colonize Africa, that missionaries made serious inroads.
Two orders were largely responsible for expanding the church here: the Society of African Missions and the Congregation of the Holy Spirit, commonly known as the Holy Ghost Fathers.
Animism to Catholicism
The British colonial government stymied their efforts in the north, ostensibly out of respect for Islam. But elsewhere in Nigeria, missionary schools spread and Western liberal education took root, particularly among the Ibo people.
Christianity was readily accepted by followers of African religions.
Although they had multiple gods, most animists believed in a supreme being as well as heaven, hell and sacrifice. Switching from mystical messengers and minor deities, such as the goddess of land, to angels, saints and the Virgin Mary was no great leap of faith.
"My father became a Christian at age 25," said Onaiyekan, the Abuja archbishop. "It wasn't as if he took on a new God. ... It was the expression of God through Jesus Christ that attracted him."
The Africanized Masses expanded the rolls. Catholicism now is the dominant faith in southeastern Nigeria. But with Protestant denominations bearing down, bishops are under intense pressure to open more parishes. To save time, they often use rented facilities.
"If you wait for a parish to build a house and if the priest does not come quickly, then the Catholics would be falling into the hands of the Pentecostal churches," said the Rev. John Okoye, the former Bigard rector.
Not the same story
It's a different story in the Kontagora vicariate in the north. Here the Catholic Church is the upstart and the leadership almost entirely Irish. Out of a population of 1.6 million, about 25,000 are Catholic, many of them Ibo traders from the south who live in Kontagora like migrant workers.
In villages where Muslims attempt to enforce sharia law, the church finds allies among women, as well as drinkers of homemade beer. Big business for many village traders, the brew is outlawed by Islam but tolerated by Catholics.
"The ban on alcohol was like a blessing in disguise," said the Rev. Malachy Flanagan, the vicariate secretary.
While the cathedrals of southern Nigeria are elaborately adorned with mahogany and spires, St. Michael's in Kontagora is a plain affair. It has concrete walls, a worn red carpet around the altar, a metal roof, fluorescent lighting, and ceiling fans that work when there is electricity. It has no stained glass; colored bottles embedded through the wall let in a spectrum of light.
The cathedral's lack of ornamentation proved a blessing in February when the Muslim mobs attacked. With so little to catch fire, the flames petered out. St. Michael's is still open.
Controversial mission
Perhaps the modern church's most controversial mission is its peace and justice work -- teaching Nigerians to confront local authorities over human-rights violations, from property confiscations to false arrests.
Otherwise, the strategy of Kontagora's Irish missionaries is much as it was a century ago, to provide basic services such as schools, clinics and literacy programs in a region the government has neglected.
The economic advantages of being Catholic are plain to Samuel Mayaki, 25, a farmer who converted from his parents' African religion after seeing the success of the Ibo traders.
"Knowing how to read and write," he said, "will bring us out of darkness."
One of the missionaries' bigger projects is a venture that has built more than 200 wells in the parched villages.
The Rev. Michael Fogarty, pastor of St. Teresa's Church in Galadima, supervises the construction. In the field, he keeps his affiliation low-key, wearing neither a cross nor a collar.
On a 112-degree day, his crew was digging a four-foot-diameter well in Manau, where villagers must walk more than a mile to scoop water from an intermittent stream.
Under a shade tree, Hakami Manau, the headman in a village of mostly animists, said he was unaware that Catholics were putting in the well. He said he was looking forward to a new source of clean water.
"We will drink this water," he said. "If there is plenty, we will feed it to the cattle."
Fogarty said he would speak of religion only once the project was done and if villagers asked.
"What we're doing here," he said, "is building relationships."