Sometimes, looking at the Church from a new perspective can remind us of what it’s all about.
Wyoming Catholic College is unique among its peer institutions for a number of things, but one of them is that we breathe with “both lungs” of the Church, as John Paul II described the complementarity of the Roman and Byzantine Rite. About a year ago, we were down to one lung, Fr. David Anderson, our Byzantine rite chaplain. We had lost Msgr. Daniel Seiker back to the Diocese of Lincoln, and we were actively searching for a new Roman priest. Unexpectedly, through some of our friends in Indianapolis, we learned of a Nigerian priest who was on vacation visiting his friend Fr. Jude Nwaigwa. He was certainly not thinking of becoming the chaplain at a small college in Wyoming.
Two months later, without ever having returned home to Nigeria, Fr. Godfrey Okwunka was here in Lander, having gone through a visit to the college, interviews with the Bishop and Vicar General of the Diocese of Cheyenne, and an expedited visa process. He moved his few things (about as many as you would expect for someone on vacation) into his new home, where he began to negotiate a culture and a climate he had never experienced. We are most grateful to the Diocese of Issele-Uku and Most Reverend Dr. Michael Odogwe Elue for releasing him.
Nigeria is one of the world focal points for the Catholic Church. When J.D. Flynn of The Pillar spoke at WCC in May, he told the story of a priest captured and killed by Muslim terrorists in the dangerous northern part of the country, where attacks are commonplace. But the violence has crept southward. A year ago, an attack during Mass at Pentecost killed 40 people in Owo, a city in southwestern Nigeria. Several weeks later, a priest who had been a year below Fr. Godfrey in seminary, Fr. Christopher Odiah of the Catholic Diocese of Auchi in Edo State, was kidnapped for ransom but later killed, and just three weeks ago another priest was shot down by gunmen. With attacks like these, one might think that the priesthood in Nigeria would shrink, but the opposite is the case.
Vocations abound. When he was growing up, Fr. Godfrey never thought that any position of power or wealth was “of greater value than the priesthood.” In Nigeria, which has the highest rate of Sunday Mass attendance of anywhere in the world, people “love and value the Church. The religious spirit is felt in the liturgy, where people put all their being into worship. Everything starts from God—meaning the Church, because that is where you experience God. They are a religious people, and wherever they are, they express themselves religiously—for example, the missionaries all over Europe and America. In Nigeria, we worship with our being, everything, the whole body.” He is laughing as he says it. The difference between Nigerian exuberance and Western reserve could not be more evident.
Back home, as Fr. Godfrey told me, “Many young people want to be priests.” No wonder the screening process for admission into the seminaries is so intense. For 70 or so openings in All Hallows Minor Seminary in Onitsha, his hometown, as many as a thousand boys might apply for the interview. Those who graduate from minor seminary then have to be screened further to be accepted into the major seminaries, such as Sts. Peter and Paul Major Seminary in Bodija Ibadan. Then they must keep up their grades. Fr. Godfrey has stories of studying all night after lights-out: if you don’t study, you won’t make it, but if you’re caught doing it, you’re out. It reminds me of stories from ancient Sparta. Of his class of 25, only twelve were ordained. When he preaches about the “narrow gate,” as he did on Tuesday of this week, he might be thinking of what it took to become a priest in Nigeria. Only a few seminarians, after an intensive human, spiritual, and academic formation, make it through. Men with such qualifications are a gift to the world.
When I asked Fr. Godfrey what his greatest challenges have been this year, the first thing he mentioned was the weather. Like Burkina-Faso, where he served for eight years, Wyoming is landlocked, but in that Francophone, predominantly Muslim, West African country (where he first went without knowing either of the country’s languages), the lowest temperature ever recorded is 41° and the highest is 117°. I remember seeing Fr. Godfrey back in October when the temperatures began to drop. He asked me, very politely, if we perhaps had a coat for him? (COR Expeditions found one right away.) That same month, he saw snow for the first time in his life. By the Christmas holidays, in the worst winter Wyoming has experienced in 40 years, he was driving up over Togwotee Pass (almost 10,000 feet above sea level) to help out in Jackson near the Idaho border, and a little later substituting for a priest in Newcastle, seven miles from South Dakota. A week after New Year’s, he was up in the mountains with our freshmen on their winter trip (see the photo above).
Another other major issue was food. It’s hard to make foofoo from what’s available at Safeway or Mr. D’s. From the dinner that Fr. Godfrey hosted for a group of 20 or so on his birthday, I infer that stews with lots of okra traditionally go with foofoo, but otherwise I confess my ignorance on the score of cuisine. When my wife and I hosted three sessions on the Nobel Prize-winning Nigerian novelist Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart for the seniors back in the spring, we drew on Fr. Godfrey’s background to help us understand (among other details obscure to us) the emphasis on yams, which have been as much a traditional measure of wealth in Nigeria as animal herds were from the patriarch Abraham to the ranchers of the 19th century American West. His explanations of such things as the kola nut ceremony and the osu caste of “untouchables” greatly enriched the experience of the novel.
A challenge that he did not mention was learning the 1962 Missal (or Traditional Latin Mass), to which a number of our students and friends have a devotion. Latin itself was never the issue. He was the best Latin student in his seminary—but when would he ever use the language in Africa, where it has had no presence? He has mentioned a number of times how providential it was. He said a Novus Ordo Latin Mass on his first visit to the college, and this past fall, he spent a week with Fr. David Yallaly of the Canons Regular of St. John Cantius in Chicago learning the 1962 Missal. His gift with languages is impressive (at present, Igbo, English, Latin, French, and the native language of Burkina-Faso). I have learned a little Igbo myself. When I mentioned that my wife was going to Arkansas to help our fifth daughter with the baby expected early next month (our 25th grandchild), he laughed and said, “Omugwo”—the word for this kind of visit in Nigeria. He told me that the son-in-law always showers his mother-in-law with gifts.
Fr. Godfrey loves the academic environment at Wyoming College. He loves the liturgy, which reminds him very much of the seminary. His homilies, always rooted in the Scriptures for the day, have a complexity and insight that are personally affecting and morally demanding. But he always insists on the primacy of love, which radiates through his sincerity, his sense of authority, and his ready humor.
Republished with gracious permission from Wyoming Catholic College‘s weekly newsletter.
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The featured image is courtesy of Wyoming Catholic College.