NEWS FEATURE: African men, women flock to seminaries

c. 1999 Religion News Service IBADAN, Nigeria _ Grace Ngozi Agboifoh was attending a Catholic grammar school in the Delta State of southern Nigeria when she got the call from God. Now 22, she is a novice studying at Our Lady of Apostles convent to be a missionary nun. “It’s a beautiful thing to have […]

c. 1999 Religion News Service

IBADAN, Nigeria _ Grace Ngozi Agboifoh was attending a Catholic grammar school in the Delta State of southern Nigeria when she got the call from God.

Now 22, she is a novice studying at Our Lady of Apostles convent to be a missionary nun.


“It’s a beautiful thing to have a family and your own children,” she said softly. “But my desire was to live for God.”

Raphael Imoni, a student leader at Sts. Peter and Paul Major Seminary, said he began to be drawn to religious life when he was a 7-year-old Catholic school student.

“As God would have it, we had missionaries in my city,” he said, “and I got the inspiration to do what God told me to do.”

Like the 1940s seminaries and convents of the Western world, Africa is graduating huge numbers of young Catholic priests and nuns, even as the supply of men and women pursuing religious life in America and Europe has dwindled.

“There is a boom in the faith,” said the Rev. Benjamin Etafo, rector of the seminary 60 miles north of Lagos. “If we create more spaces, there are many, many more waiting to join us here.”

As Etafo spoke, construction workers behind him mixed cement for a two-story concrete-block building expected soon to house a computer room and additional students. Already 375 seminarians attend the school, and 50 of them expect to be ordained to the priesthood this year.

In all, there are 18,156 Catholic seminarians in Africa. By comparison, there are 3,386 students in the United States, a number that actually rose slightly last year for the first time in decades. (The U.S. figure is somewhat misleading, because it includes numerous foreign-born priests recruited to study in America.)


Nigeria is home to the largest seminary in the world, a school of more than 800 young students in the eastern city of Enugu. And only Africa and Asia are providing disproportionately more men to the priesthood than their share of the total Catholic population.

“The influx of vocations in Nigeria and all over Africa is happening because the spirit of God is in us,” said Lagos Archbishop Anthony Okajobe.

Like other candidates for religious life interviewed here, Imoni and Agboifoh are conservative by American standards. They bemoan what they view to be an erosion of the faith in America, the move toward secularism.

The Rev. Richard McBrien, a widely known liberal theologian at the University of Notre Dame, said as products of a younger church, these young priests are more apt to repeat the more conservative party line that emanates from the Vatican.

He also believes difficult living conditions and limited opportunities may have something to do with young candidates’ desire to join the ranks of the religious.

“In certain in parts of Africa today, entering the priesthood is a way of gaining a social status,” McBrien said. “I’m not saying that is why they become priests, but it can’t be discounted as an incentive.”


Jude Odiaka, a 29-year-old Nigerian candidate for the priesthood who has studied in the United States, said he resents it when Westerners question his motives.

“You have to realize that most people who study for the priesthood here are very bright, so they would be making it,” he said. “I’m not exactly climbing the economic ladder, and I had to give up a lot of things. I can’t help my parents.”

Many diocesan priests are in a position to help family members, however, doling out jobs and church offerings. In a culture where children are expected to take care of older parents or even siblings, a parish priest with access to a car, hiring decisions and other influence often finds himself in a position to help.

Much poorer than in the West, the Catholic Church in Africa has itself felt the financial strain of educating the world’s largest seminary class, but Catholics in the West have been more than willing to chip in.

Most of the cost of training seminarians is borne by the Society for the Propagation of the Faith, an arm of the Vatican that raises money worldwide for distribution to seminaries in the developing world.

Last year, Catholics in the United States and Europe donated $114 million to house, feed and turn young Catholics in Africa, Asia and Latin America into soldiers of the faith. Catholics in those areas contributed another $10 million to the coffers.


In recent years, the mission of support has taken on a greater urgency, as vocations in the West have dropped precipitously.

The number of Catholic priests in the United States fell from 59,620 in 1969 to 49,071 in 1996, with their average age being 59. The decline in the number of nuns was more dramatic, falling from 167,167 in 1969 to 89,135 in 1996.

In the same time period, the number of priests in Africa rose from 16,541 to 24,679, according to the church’s Center for Applied Research in the Apostolate in Washington. The number of nuns rose from 32,338 to 48,693.

Because the Catholic population is growing so rapidly in Africa, tripling in three decades to 110 million, the priest shortage actually is more acute in Africa than in the United States, with priests serving huge congregations, by U.S. standards. But the large crop of seminarians has captured the attention of American bishops trying to keep their numbers up.

Many U.S. bishops have active efforts to recruit priests in the developing world to their seminaries.

Sister Mercy Egbeji is one 14 Nigerian nuns doing mission work in the city of Newark, N.J. A member of a missionary order founded in Nigeria, the Daughters of Mary Mother of Mercy, Egbeji has been in the archdiocese since 1996, when the order was invited to help fill positions in area Catholic schools.


“We were asked to come teach in the schools, because they don’t have vocations anymore,” Egbeji said. “The nuns who are here don’t wear their habits, so the children don’t know they are sisters. We attract attention, and some may wish to be like us.”

That position is echoed by the American hierarchy, which has taken the position that the reason more young men aren’t joining the priesthood is that they aren’t being asked. Reform groups say it has more to do with the celibacy requirement _ which they want to see abolished _ and broader employment opportunities.

In the meantime, the overseas recruitment efforts by American bishops are starting to change the face of the U.S. priesthood.

One-quarter of the priests ordained in the United States this year were foreign-born. Only 1 percent of the new diocesan priests and 4 percent of those ordained to religious orders this year were born in Africa, but experts said the number is on the rise.

Dean Hoge, a professor at Catholic University of America in Washington who studies seminary classes for the church, said bishops are increasingly tempted to recruit eager young candidates from the developing world. But he said language and cultural barriers could discourage bishops in many parts of the country.

“Every Catholic is thrilled to hear about a growth in vocations,” he said. “The next question is whether we should have them come over here. We’re in need, but there is the difficult problem of suitability.”


Other church leaders, both in Africa and the United States, said the influx of priests from the developing world can make up for shortfalls elsewhere.

“It is the mystery of the universal church,” said Bishop William J. McCormack, U.S. national director for the Society for the Propagation of the Faith. “Over the years, this country sent many missionaries overseas. Now we are benefiting from these foreign missionaries, just as we did when the U.S. church began to grow 100 years ago.”

IR END CHAMBERS

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