Alleged unholy sex: Catholic bishops back Burke
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Commentary on the story below:
It is a shame that our Nigerian bishops can tell blatant lies. In the story below, the Archbishop Felix Alaba Job, the Archbishop of Ibadan, arranged a fax paux conference to attempt to cover-up a known fact regarding the circumstances that led to the recent resignation of Archbishop Richard Burke, SPS, as Archbishop of Benin City, and administrator of Warri diocese (which he relinguished at the end of March, 2010), with that diocese now having its own bishop.
Archbishop Job and his colleagues, most of whom, like the notorious sexual exploiter of Nigerian nuns, Archbishop John Olurunfenmi Onaiyekan, attempted to create the impression that the reasons that led to Archbishop Burke relinguishing his position is unsubstantiated. It smacks the imagination as to whom they are fooling. Christ, our Lord and Savior, told us to always tell the truth (Matthew 5: 37) and that the truth shall set us free (John 8:32).
Archbishop Burke, himself, has greatly acknowledged his sexual indiscretions and misconducts, though he continues to deny the charges of sexually abusing a minor against him made by one Delores Atwood, a Nigerian and now Canadian resident. Burke never denied his indiscretions, so why is Archbishop Job trying to do the dirty job of a devil's advocate, ending up become more filthy than the swine?
The reason here is simple. Archbishop Alaba Job and his coterie of Nigerian bishops are highly corrupt. Not only do they get funded by corrupt politicians, but the ilks of Archbishop Onaiyekan, has crafted a crafty theological reasons to justifying colluding with politicians in receiving their stolen and blood tainted money. These men are full of corrupt practices such as nepotism in the way they appoint bishops, and undue interferences in the operations of dioceses within their metropolitan jurisdiction or outside of it, in trying to place their favoured candidates, often one who will not expose their heavy corruption, especially unaccountable, wreckless, and irresponsible usage of church fundings. Therefore, it is not surprising that these folks who will suppress credible and meritorious candidates for their own preferences, often sadistic and egoistic, without regards to the fate of local churches, devoid of conscience and moral probity, can go to great length to cover up anything that is detrimental to their own images.
Their current efforts to burnish the image of Archbishop Richard Burke, is not because they really care for him. Rather, it is that if they sound loud enough, there would be saved from the palpable anger and possible scrutiny of themselves. Unfortunately, no matter how much they try, the die has been cast. In a free world with easily accessible information, we know that the church has its weak nodes, and the human imperfections are evidently apparent, and the blot and spots of its misconduct is evident. The happenings in America, Ireland, Europe, New Zealand, Australia, and elsewhere is not hidden from the human eyes.
True, we would go against media offensive that inordinately tries to taint the Holy Father and the teaching dogmatic and ethical authority of the Catholic faith, as has been pursued by some sections of the western press. But, we are courageous enough that the church does have her problematic issues that needs to be resolved appropriately. Denials and incessant attempts to dump the toxic bye products of these issues in a way that is truly insulting to the public imagination, to the teachings of Christ regarding the truth, and to arrogance that is rooted within a clerical culture of deceit and fraud, would not help the faith.
In this regard, in spite of having to pay the price, we want to appraise the fact that Archbishop Burke, owned up, even if partially and apologized for his misdeeds. Herein, even while paying the price for his own acceptable flawed actions, he showed he is capable of reform and hopefully entering into the grace of renewal, in seeking true reconciliation with God, the church, and the victim especially whom he so dearly pained and exploited. In fact, Archbishop Burke, though unfortunate, is the not the only bishop of late who has violated the public trust reposed in him, and lived lies and presented a false and hypocritical face to the people of God. Only God will ultimately judge him.
Here, Archbishop Burke is in the good company of the Zimbabwean Archbishop Pius Ncube, and even the former Nigerian bishop of Okigwe, Anthony Ilonu, who was accused of impropriety by a Nigerian nun, Sr. Paschaline Aligweke, and other bishops such as the Austrian Cardinal Groer, the two bishops of Palm Beach, Florida, U.S.A., who molested young males.
It is instructive, therefore, that the Nigerian Catholic Church continues to live in utter falsehood, playing up one lies against another. The hierarchy of the Nigerian Catholic Church need to be thoroughly investigated. The Vatican can no longer continue to delude itself with reports that the Nigerian church is growing and that all is well. It is time for an apostolic visitation to take stock of some of the rubbish muddied under the carpet.
For instance, one of the way the Nigerian bishops intend to ensure a priest incardinated, and who by law is their corporate responsibility, is dealt with in the face of abuse, is to such send an irritant priest to his family. It is one of those most phony ways of dealing with issues of such significant, and it attests to the intellectual deftness that sometimes regretably defines the thinking of the Nigerian hierarchy- as a result of mediocre choices of episcopal candidates. Sad!
Sooner, than later, the church would pay for its shortcoming, if it refuses to deal with this issue now than later.
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From NWABUEZE OKONKWO, Onitsha
The Sun (Nigerian newspaper) Thursday, June 3, 2010
Catholic bishops in Nigeria , under the aegis of Catholic Bishops Conference of Nigeria (CBCN) have expressed their sympathy for Archbishop John Burke of the Benin Archdiocese over what they termed unsubstantiated sexual allegation levelled against him.
They said that such an unfounded allegation has created confusion not only among the lay faithful but also the entire people of Nigeria.
Addressing newsmen yesterday at the Basilica of the Most Holy Trinity, Onitsha , the President of CBCN, Archbishop Felix Alaba Job stated that Burke was still one of them because he only resigned from his administrative post as Archbishop of Benin and not as a priest or a bishop.
Flanked by Archbishop John Onaiyekan of Abuja , Archbishop Valerian Okeke of Onitsha , Archbishop Ukpo of Calabar and Bishop Michael Okoro of Abakaliki, Job contended that the enemies were always out to destroy a house of God.
Okeke, in his own reaction, echoed Job’s response and advised Nigerians to shun rumour mongering and false information.
Meanwhile, the CBCN has condemned the kidnap of three students of the Catholic Veritas University, Abuja from a female hostel located in Obehia, Abia State.
Job said that four days after the kidnap of the female students on May 28, 2010 their whereabouts remained unknown, adding that the kidnappers were demanding N150 million from the university.
“We, the Catholic bishops of Nigeria, are saddened by this horrible incident. While we condemn it, we pray for a change of heart by those involved. We, therefore, appeal to the kidnappers to release the three innocent students unhurt and without conditions.
“We also use this medium to call on the Federal, State governments and the security agents to do more within their power to guarantee the security of lives and property of law abiding citizens of our great nation,” he stated.
Meanwhile, soldiers, policemen and other security agencies numbering over 500 have been drafted to the Basilica of the Most Holy Trinity in the Onitsha Catholic Archdiocese to secure participants at the ongoing two-day event marking the national closing ceremonies of the special year for Nigerian priests.
The ceremony began on Wednesday with the arrival of the President of the CBCN and Archbishop of Ibadan Catholic Archdiocese, His Grace, Most Rev. Felix Alaba Job and the President of National Association of Diocesan Priests, Monsignor Cletus Gotan and the registration of other participants.
According to the programme of events released by the Onitsha Catholic Archdiocessan secretariat, bible enthronement and vespers/benediction commenced by 6 p.m. yesterday, followed by exposition/unveiling of the Blessed Cyprian Michael Iwene Tansi and Gala Night.
At 7 p.m., Monsignor Gotan presented a paper on St. John Vianney, while Monsignor Nwosu presented a paper on Tansi, followed by a drama presentation by the Catholic Youths Organization of Nigeria (CYON), dances, songs and cultural displays.
It is expected that a eucharistic celebration, which is the main event of the ceremony, would commence at 10 a.m. today at the Basilica Square, after penitential rites and exposition of the Blessed Tansi between 6 and 9 a.m.
During the eucharistic celebration, 20 deacons drawn from different parts of the country would be ordained priests, after which the bishops would declare the Blessed Tansi as patron of Nigerian priests.
Also lined up are finals of football match between priests from Abuja and Okigwe dioceses, presentation of trophies and prizes to various winners and rosary pilgrimage to Aguleri, the home village of Tansi with a courtesy call on the traditional ruler of Aguleri, Eze Christopher Idigo.
Meanwhile, no fewer than 20 bishops and 50 priests arrived Onitsha as at yesterday afternoon for the occasion.
The Director of Communications in the Onitsha Catholic Archdiocese, Rev. Fr. Pius Ukor and the Press Secretary to Archbishop Valerian Okeke, Rev. Fr. George Adimike, who confirmed the arrival of the bishops and priests to Daily Sun yesterday afternoon, said the president of CBCN, Job would officiate at the con-celebrated pontifical high Mass.
Friday, June 4, 2010
Thursday, June 3, 2010
Nuns shortage: Merger of Orders and the American Catholic Church
By PATRICK CONDON, Associated Press Writer Patrick Condon, Associated Press Writer – Wed Jun 2, 4:44 pm ET
ST. JOSEPH, Minn. – Sister Mary David Olheiser and Sister Helenette Baltes professed their vows together in 1936 as two of the 21 new sisters to join the Sisters of the Order of St. Benedict that year. At the time, their central Minnesota Roman Catholic monastery was overflowing with youth and energy.
Sixty-two years later, the classmates and old friends are together again. St. Benedict is taking St. Bede back into its fold. The smaller group is facing demographic realities by closing its Wisconsin monastery and moving 29 remaining sisters back to Minnesota.
"It's just a blessing," said Helenette, 94, of her reunion with the 92-year-old Mary David.
It also reflects the massive changes in the lives of nuns in their lifetimes, as once-flourishing orders merge or close. A 2009 Georgetown University study for the National Religious Vocation Conference found the median age in Catholic women's orders to be in the mid 70s, and that 34 percent of religious women's orders surveyed had no new candidates for the sisterhood. About half of those orders with new candidates had at most one or two in the pipeline.
When 83 nuns including Sister Helenette departed for Eau Claire in 1948, they left about 1,200 Benedictine nuns at the monastery in St. Joseph. Today there are about 250, a number that drops by about a hundred every 10 years. But it's enough to make it the biggest Benedictine women's order in the United States. The median age at St. Benedict is 77, the youngest nun there 39 years old.
"In the larger church, vocations to religious communities tend to rise and fall, and right now in most of the world there is a decline in young people entering religious life," said St. Benedict Prioress Nancy Bauer, 57. "I would say there's numerous factors. It's just how it is."
Helenette and Mary David are typical of the women once so common to sisterhood. Helenette was born in 1915, the seventh of 12 children in Sleepy Eye, where her father had recently moved the family after landing a job at a dairy.
A new Catholic Church had just opened there, and when the family couldn't find a house, the priest offered room in the old church. "So that's where I was born, right there in the church," Helenette said. By her teen years, various relatives were urging Helenette to join a convent.
Mary David was born in 1918 in Dickinson, N.D., the third of five children; her mother died when she was still a girl. "I was the middle child, with the middle child psychology — I was the assertive one," Mary David recalled. She devoured books and loved learning, and took strongly to the Benedictine nuns who taught her at school.
By the time she was 14, Mary David informed her father she wanted to attend the Benedectine-run boarding school next to the monastery in St. Joseph. By 17 she was a novice, after she convinced the nuns who ran the school to bend the rules that she was supposed to wait until she turned 18.
Mary David and Helenette took their vows together in 1936. Soon after, Mary David left to work in a Benedictine monastery in Washington state, where she would remain until 1950; she's spent most of the rest of her life in St. Joseph, where she was a dean at the College of St. Benedict and a canon lawyer for the nearby Diocese of St. Cloud. "Only because I was in a religious life could I have done all that," said Mary David, who at 92 is still fit and sharp.
Helenette spent the next dozen years in St. Joseph, teaching music and playing the organ, before she decided to join the group that was headed about 170 miles southeast to start a new monastery in Wisconsin.
"That was a very difficult decision, the attachment to the convent where I made my vows," Helenette said. "But the holy spirit led me there."
The group started from scratch, building first a monastery that won architectural awards, then a secondary school and a health care center. By the mid-1960s the monastery reached a high point of 115 sisters.
Then the numbers started to fall. The group closed its school in 1978 and converted it to a retreat and conference center that the sisters operated until earlier this year. Those facilities are now up for sale.
In recent years, leaders of St. Bede's began to discuss their options in the face of what Prioress Michaela Hedican called "some basic sociological shifting." The dwindling group last took on a new member in 1995.
The group approached several larger monasteries, but the historic connection to St. Benedict made it a good fit. The sisters of St. Benedict voted last August to absorb St. Bede. "We really felt it was a gift, to get that sort of infusion of new members all at once is something we haven't experienced for many years," said Sister Kara Hennes, 63, the St. Benedict treasurer.
Recent years have seen mergers by numerous religious orders around the country; Sister Michaela called it "the wave of the future." So far, six sisters of St. Bede, Helenette among them, moved to the Benedictine long-term care facility in St. Cloud; by August, most of the rest are scheduled to move into the monastery in St. Joseph, after which St. Bede will be formally "suppressed" in a mass at the St. Benedict Chapel.
The Washington, D.C.-based National Religious Retirement Office started tracking the merger of Catholic orders in 1989, and in that time reports that about 130 female orders have merged and are now operating as about 45 orders, director Sister Janice Bader said.
Mary David, who still lives at the monastery in St. Joseph, said she can't wait to spend more time with her old friend. "Pretty soon I'll probably be joining her there," she said.
Of the 29 returning St. Bede sisters, 11 were from the original group that moved to Wisconsin in 1948. Besides Helenette, another was Sister Therese Roth, who at 94 moved into the St. Scholastica care facility in Minnesota a few weeks ago.
There, in her new home, Sister Therese died on May 22, and the number of remaining St. Bede sisters dropped from 29 to 28.
___
ST. JOSEPH, Minn. – Sister Mary David Olheiser and Sister Helenette Baltes professed their vows together in 1936 as two of the 21 new sisters to join the Sisters of the Order of St. Benedict that year. At the time, their central Minnesota Roman Catholic monastery was overflowing with youth and energy.
Sixty-two years later, the classmates and old friends are together again. St. Benedict is taking St. Bede back into its fold. The smaller group is facing demographic realities by closing its Wisconsin monastery and moving 29 remaining sisters back to Minnesota.
"It's just a blessing," said Helenette, 94, of her reunion with the 92-year-old Mary David.
It also reflects the massive changes in the lives of nuns in their lifetimes, as once-flourishing orders merge or close. A 2009 Georgetown University study for the National Religious Vocation Conference found the median age in Catholic women's orders to be in the mid 70s, and that 34 percent of religious women's orders surveyed had no new candidates for the sisterhood. About half of those orders with new candidates had at most one or two in the pipeline.
When 83 nuns including Sister Helenette departed for Eau Claire in 1948, they left about 1,200 Benedictine nuns at the monastery in St. Joseph. Today there are about 250, a number that drops by about a hundred every 10 years. But it's enough to make it the biggest Benedictine women's order in the United States. The median age at St. Benedict is 77, the youngest nun there 39 years old.
"In the larger church, vocations to religious communities tend to rise and fall, and right now in most of the world there is a decline in young people entering religious life," said St. Benedict Prioress Nancy Bauer, 57. "I would say there's numerous factors. It's just how it is."
Helenette and Mary David are typical of the women once so common to sisterhood. Helenette was born in 1915, the seventh of 12 children in Sleepy Eye, where her father had recently moved the family after landing a job at a dairy.
A new Catholic Church had just opened there, and when the family couldn't find a house, the priest offered room in the old church. "So that's where I was born, right there in the church," Helenette said. By her teen years, various relatives were urging Helenette to join a convent.
Mary David was born in 1918 in Dickinson, N.D., the third of five children; her mother died when she was still a girl. "I was the middle child, with the middle child psychology — I was the assertive one," Mary David recalled. She devoured books and loved learning, and took strongly to the Benedictine nuns who taught her at school.
By the time she was 14, Mary David informed her father she wanted to attend the Benedectine-run boarding school next to the monastery in St. Joseph. By 17 she was a novice, after she convinced the nuns who ran the school to bend the rules that she was supposed to wait until she turned 18.
Mary David and Helenette took their vows together in 1936. Soon after, Mary David left to work in a Benedictine monastery in Washington state, where she would remain until 1950; she's spent most of the rest of her life in St. Joseph, where she was a dean at the College of St. Benedict and a canon lawyer for the nearby Diocese of St. Cloud. "Only because I was in a religious life could I have done all that," said Mary David, who at 92 is still fit and sharp.
Helenette spent the next dozen years in St. Joseph, teaching music and playing the organ, before she decided to join the group that was headed about 170 miles southeast to start a new monastery in Wisconsin.
"That was a very difficult decision, the attachment to the convent where I made my vows," Helenette said. "But the holy spirit led me there."
The group started from scratch, building first a monastery that won architectural awards, then a secondary school and a health care center. By the mid-1960s the monastery reached a high point of 115 sisters.
Then the numbers started to fall. The group closed its school in 1978 and converted it to a retreat and conference center that the sisters operated until earlier this year. Those facilities are now up for sale.
In recent years, leaders of St. Bede's began to discuss their options in the face of what Prioress Michaela Hedican called "some basic sociological shifting." The dwindling group last took on a new member in 1995.
The group approached several larger monasteries, but the historic connection to St. Benedict made it a good fit. The sisters of St. Benedict voted last August to absorb St. Bede. "We really felt it was a gift, to get that sort of infusion of new members all at once is something we haven't experienced for many years," said Sister Kara Hennes, 63, the St. Benedict treasurer.
Recent years have seen mergers by numerous religious orders around the country; Sister Michaela called it "the wave of the future." So far, six sisters of St. Bede, Helenette among them, moved to the Benedictine long-term care facility in St. Cloud; by August, most of the rest are scheduled to move into the monastery in St. Joseph, after which St. Bede will be formally "suppressed" in a mass at the St. Benedict Chapel.
The Washington, D.C.-based National Religious Retirement Office started tracking the merger of Catholic orders in 1989, and in that time reports that about 130 female orders have merged and are now operating as about 45 orders, director Sister Janice Bader said.
Mary David, who still lives at the monastery in St. Joseph, said she can't wait to spend more time with her old friend. "Pretty soon I'll probably be joining her there," she said.
Of the 29 returning St. Bede sisters, 11 were from the original group that moved to Wisconsin in 1948. Besides Helenette, another was Sister Therese Roth, who at 94 moved into the St. Scholastica care facility in Minnesota a few weeks ago.
There, in her new home, Sister Therese died on May 22, and the number of remaining St. Bede sisters dropped from 29 to 28.
___
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