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An African Roman Catholic clergy serving with the Upper Bavarian municipality of Zorneding has resigned. Rev. Father Olivier Ndjimbi-Tshiende obtained five death threats in recent months and was fed up with xenophobic utterances from a prominent CSU local politician. The 66-year-old cleric had "die nase voll haben". Father Ndjimbi-Tshiende announced his resignation during a morning sermon. The community expressed shock at the news. He had been repeatedly threatened with open murder and violence.
The former deputy CSU local chairman, Johann Haindi had called the priest who hails from the Congo in an interview as a "negro". Another senior CSU official Sylvia Boher wrote in the local party Handout that Bayern will virtually be overrun by migrants from Africa. Mayor Piet Mayr (CSU) has expressed concerns over allegations that CSU is partly responsible for the resignation of 66-year. Ndjimbi-Tshiende had been in the parish since 2012. The spokesman of the Archdiocese of Munich and Freising, Bernhard Kellner said “We regret that very much and are at his side.” On April 1, the priest would take up a new position in the diocese, Kellner said.
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- Elangwe Pauline
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Reports in both Nigeria’s This Day and New Telegraph newspapers have chronicled the impact The Synagogue, Church Of All Nations (SCOAN) has had on Nigeria’s tourism industry, noting the negative affects the local community has felt since the tragic incident that befell the church in September 2014 and the resultant legal battle with the government:“Operators of tourism enterprises in Ikotun, a Lagos suburb have sent a Save-Our-Soul appeal to the Federal and Lagos State governments over the current plight of the Synagogue Church of All Nations and its leader, Prophet T.B. Joshua.
According to them, as a result of the impasse, they and their dependents are facing serious hardship. They said they are finding it difficult feeding and taking care of their families. Among those that spoke were members of the hotel owners, cab drivers, food vendors, hair stylists, commercial motorcycle operators and others.
One of the hotel owners in Ikotun, Chief Jerry Omorodion, who spoke on the issue, said it was unfortunate how the situation has degenerated. “Our discomfort is that the issue is not being treated as an accident in a tourist destination that welcomes thousands, if not millions of tourists, both local and international, annually. It is important that the state government should be mindful of the role the church plays in the spiritual lives of people. Millions of people flock here for solution to their physical ailments and spiritual craving. The state government, I am sure, are aware of the role the church plays in the lives of the people of Ikotun. We depend on these pilgrims and religious tourists for our livelihood.
“We saw what happened in Saudi Arabia where close to 2,000 persons lost their lives. There have been tragedies in tourist destinations like Kenya and Paris. But they moved forward. The government should do its job but the destination and what brings people there should not be made victims and they should remember that we and our family members are facing difficult times. We have no other means of livelihood outside the ancillary services we offer to pilgrims visiting Ikotun.“There have been accidents in many tourist destinations in the past. In these climes, knowing the importance of tourism and such destinations in the lives of these host communities, while investigating and getting to the root of the accidents, the governments did not create the impression they want to destroy these destinations. Look, by destroying a destination, you are destroying millions of lives that depend on it for survival.
“Look at me; I am a retired civil servant but I am finding it difficult, as the schools have just re-opened, to pay the school fess of my children. My hotel has been empty. I invested in the hotel, as a fall back, after my retirement. It is mostly on weekends that we have a little bit of improvement in our occupancy. Many of my colleagues that had initially converted their houses to hotels are changing them back to residential areas due to lack of patronage.”
He pointed to about three storey buildings around the vicinity: “There are hotels that were springing up before the unfortunate incident. Since it happened, work has stopped in the hotels. Most importantly, in this period Nigeria is trying to diversify the economy; you can’t kill a destination because of an accident. Tell me, in the whole of Africa, which other single destination is capable of attracting such large and diverse number of tourists from all over the world like The Synagogue, Church of All Nations? Nigeria should be proud of this and it should not be destroyed.”
“Look I doubt whether there is any individual alive that in Nigeria, indeed Africa that can attract people to a particular country as Prophet TB Joshua does. There is no church or religious event in the country that has the capacity to attract tourists like the Synagogue. Some may not like the founder while others do, this is understandable. However, the incontrovertible fact remains that he is the biggest tourist attraction to Nigeria. If anybody has a contrary opinion, let the person say it. I think he has done much for this country and does not, in my opinion, deserve what he is getting.”
In the last 20 years, Ikotun, a Lagos suburb has seen a tremendous growth both in its economy and as a tourist destination. From being an obscure suburb, Ikotun was transformed into a renowned global tourist destination for Christian pilgrims who throng to the place from all over the world. Annually, about two million local and inbound tourists visit the place. The tourists from all over the world come to worship at the Synagogue Church of All Nations. The pull to Ikotun is also to have an encounter through Prophet Temitope Balogun Joshua (Prophet T.B. Joshua). Due to this influx of tourists, many residents of the area quickly latched on to the business opportunity the huge influx of tourists to the area creates.
While the church has accommodation facilities for inbound tourists who came under organised tour, with the huge influx of religious tourists, hotels and guests houses started springing up around the Ikotun. Most of these hotels are not luxury or branded hotels, but they offer decent accommodation for tourists who were not on leisure trip but to find both physical and spiritual fulfillment for their ailments.
Some owners of residential houses also quickly converted their houses to guest houses to accommodate visitors to the church. Fast food joints and food vendors were also not left out in this economic boom to the area. With the large number of hotels and guests houses that sprang up, there was a need regulate the services offered. The operators came together to form an association known as the Pilgrim Hotels Owners Association.
This new found source of livelihood was suddenly faced with a difficult time when on September 12, 2014, a hostel facility owned by the church came crashing down. About 115 pilgrims, mostly from South Africa, lost their lives in the tragedy. Since the incident, the church and the Lagos State government have been in court. While the court case drags, it has negatively affected activities in and around Ikotun as the large number of local and foreign tourists
has drastically gone down. Most of the ancillary services that depend on activities around the church for livelihood are seriously being affected.
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- Rita Akana
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The controversial South African pastor, Penuel Mnguni of End Time Disciples Ministries during sermon at the weekend, summoned members of his congregation who needed deliverance and stepped on them as if he was walking on a bare floor, DailyPost reports..
It will be recalled that the controversial pastor, who had in the past given his members snakes, grass and fabrics to eat as part of his deliverance session, says he heals the sick by stepping on them.
During his sermon last Sunday, Penuel was pictured stepping on his followers who came forward for deliverance and reports have it that the followers responded by saying they felt no pain afterwards.
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- Rita Akana
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The 2nd century Letter to Diognetushas this beautiful and challenging description of Christians: “The difference between Christians and the rest of men and women is neither in country, not in language, nor in customs. They dwell in their own fatherlands, but as temporary inhabitants. They take part in all things as citizens, while enduring the hardships of foreigners. Every foreign place is their fatherland, and every fatherland is to them a foreign place (…) To put it briefly, what the soul is in the body, that the Christians are in the world. The soul dwells in the body, but it is not of the body; and Christians dwell in the world, though they are not of the world. Christians are seen, for they are in the world; but their religion remains invisible” (LD, 97). What this says in effect is that it is in the nature of the Christian to be a resident alien everywhere in the world. It does not imply passivity on the part of Christians to country, to politics, the economy, the world of culture and all that defines daily life.
The Second Vatican Council certainly provided a proper hermeneutical framework to the stranger-identity of Christians when it made the observation in its now famous Preface to the Pastoral Constitution on the Church in the Modern World that “the joys and hopes and the sorrows and anxieties of people today, especially of those who are poor and afflicted, are also the joys and hopes, sorrows and anxieties of the disciples of Christ, and there is nothing truly human which does not also affect them” (Gaudium et Spes, 1). Christians certainly belong to the concrete world of the here and now. To affirm the contrary could open the door to a skeptical idealism that will eventually lead to a radical inability to access the challenges of the here and now. It could reduce Christianity to an innate idea that removes the Christian from the responsibility of building the Kingdom of God in the here and now. The Christian takes up a permanent posture in Plato’s Cave, with no hope of ever seeing things in the light of the sun! And imprisoned in the Cave, there is always the possibility of sliding further into the comfort of the radical subjectivism in which because we have here no lasting city (Hebrews 13:14), every person is his or her own world, setting up the measure of what it means to live in this world which has no enduring foundations. More importantly, we can view from a distance the challenging novelty posed by the Incarnation: “For God so loved the world that he sent his only begotten Son” (John 3:16). While we have here no lasting city, it is also true that it is this “no lasting city” that elicited the radical move of God’s Son, at the fullness of time, to take up human flesh (Galatians 4:4).
The crucial question then becomes, not whether Christians should participate in world politics, economics, culture, et cetera. That is a pragmatic given. What is crucial is to identify what is distinctively Christian in a world stage of so many conflictual voices demanding attention and followership. What is it that makes Christian discourse in the public sphere unique? In other words, what distinguishes the voice of a conference of Catholic Bishops from that of a parliament or congress? What is the difference when Pope Francis and Barack Obama both use the word “freedom” from the podium of the United Nations? Given a contemporary world suffering from a toxic of the surficial, serious Christians can no longer take this distinction for granted, for we are increasingly witnessing a world in which because Christians believe in everything, they end up believing in nothing! To pose the question of difference in meaning is certainly not an exercise in political theology. That might be a simple solution masquerading an escapist attitude that does not do justice to what is at stake. It will be an egregious dismissiveness.Consequently, the argument being made is that what underlies the radical difference in vocabulary and meaning amounts to the question about the nature of the Church, of this body of resident-aliens. And the Second Vatican Council once more takes central stage, not necessary as a solution to the problem of the indistinguishability of the Christian grammar and self-understanding of life and the world.
In a now-famous blistering Address to the Roman Curiaon December 22, 2005, Benedict XVI forcefully pointed out regarding the question of the nature of the Church, that “(…) The Fathers had no such mandate and no one had ever given them one; nor could anyone have given them one because the essential constitution of the Church comes from the Lord and was given to us so that we might attain eternal life and, starting from this perspective, be able to illuminate life in time and time itself.” In effect, when the Church goes to the public sphere, she is not going owing to a Bill of Rights or any Declaration of Independence. Put differently, the Church does not reinvent the will of her life and mission, but simply lives out what she has received. Her self-understanding, nature, mission and identity are not a product of some wise theologian. That is, central to the life of the Church, and the life of every Christian is not what we imagine and desire to be, but something else, more precisely, someone else! It is within this context of giveness, or receiving that which has been delivered to the saints (Jude 1:3), that Benedict XVI could see the reforming impulse of the Council as being served by a hermeneutic of continuity and reform, rather than a hermeneutic of discontinuity. Accordingly, the relationship between faith and science and between the Church and the modern state ought to be recast from a radically different perspective, which moves the question from the nature of the Church to something else,that is, to the question of God! Ecclesiology cedes place to Christology. And this makes all the difference and explains why the serious Christian must always be a stranger in a strange land here on earth.
Take the example of the meaning of freedom cited above. For Barack Obama and the followers of the freedom of the Enlightenment - seen in the EU, UN, US and other multinational NGOs -, freedom has come to imply in its multiple forms of radical rationalism and idealism, from Plato to the modern likes of Kant and Descartes, the autonomy of the subjective self. Since we can only know that we cannot know, the possibility of God, the Soul and Freedom can no longer be understood with the aid of metaphysics. We must close the door to knowledge in order to make room for belief. Religion is not out rightly rejected. This freedom of the Enlightenment is too smart for that. After all, the people must always see the Prince as religious, advised Machiavelli. We must assert human rights with the aid of natural law. We must say that while error has no rights, the person behind the error has rights. And eventually, by asserting the inviolable rights of the person and his or her freedom, a new understanding of freedom takes central stage – the freedom to do what I want to do. And this freedom is tied to the pursuit of happiness, to the extent that I must do whatever makes me happy. After all, what is the purpose of life if not my subjective bliss? The Weltanschauung underlining this freedom is readily evident: Anthropology with political and economic power. The human being is now at the center of human existence. Humans have finally eaten of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil without any retribution from God, because God no longer has a place. God no longer has anything to say. God is jealous of human freedom. God does not want us to become like God, who does whatever He wants. The measure of our human nature is the freedom we have from God. The image of God as the great oppressor is enthroned. The next logical step is to overthrow such an oppressor. Why should we allow for such a dictator? And hence, secularism is born: No more God in the public sphere! And if God must be in the public sphere, God must know that he can no longer have the final say. We now know and have alternatives that are more life affirming and life-enriching. God must know that God is only one amongst many. The particularity of God is unreasonable dogmatism. The ancient questions of the one and the many and the universals are back. We must be free, as Bacon says, to force nature to give up its secrets without any restrain.
This sober picture shows why Christians today must not only actively live out a different kind of life, but should refrain from adopting concepts that have a radically different meaning from the Christian worldview. Language has spirituality and a philosophy, and Christians must know that distinctions make all the difference in an age of the eclipse of God. Returning to the example of freedom: To the UN, EU, US elite class and to many Western university establishments, freedom means to do what I want, in as much as it harms no one. And the law must be changed to accommodate this understanding of freedom. However, for the Christian, freedom is not about the self. Freedom points to something deeper, to someone, to God, who frees me from sin, through the saving work of Christ (John 8:36). Freedom is freedom to live righteously. Christian freedom is to live as I ought to live, an oughtness spelled out by God’s grammar made known in Revelation. In the final analysis, freedom for the Christian is freedom to live for God. At the center of freedom for the Christian is not Anthropology but Christology.
Granted that serious Christians have become a minority, perhaps it is urgent today to remind ourselves that we are different from the world because while the subjective self is central to the freedom of the religion of secularism, God is central to freedom understood from a Christian perspective, and because Christianity is not about us but about the God of Jesus Christ, we have here no lasting city and are called to be different, to be salt and light in a nebulous world, so that we can live with God forever. To settle for this world, to settle for subjective freedom only is to settle for less. It is to lack the ambitiousness for that unending world that is the craving for life, and that gives this life its true depth, beauty and meaning. Perhaps this could very well be the great task of the Church of today, living out Christian freedom.
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- Maurice Ashley Agbaw-Ebai (AMDG)
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Australian Cardinal George Pell, the Vatican’s finance minister, has strongly condemned the Catholic Church over the way it has handled systemic child sex abuse by priests. “The Church has made enormous mistakes and is working to remedy those, but the Church in many places, certainly in Australia, has mucked things up, has let people down,” Pell said via video link to Australia’s Royal Commission into Institutional Response to Child Sexual Abuse on Sunday. The commission investigates sexual abuse by cases that involve priests and that occurred decades ago. “I’m not here to defend the indefensible,” he said.
Giving evidence in front of abuse victims in a Rome hotel room, Pell told the commission in Sydney that children were often not believed and abusive priests shuffled from parish to parish. Some 15 abuse victims and supporters traveled to Rome on the back of a crowd-funding campaign to see Pell give evidence after he said he was unable to travel to his native Australia due to heart problems. Seventy four-year-old Pell, although not involved in any abuse case himself, has twice apologized for the Church’s slow response to the allegations.
However, his failure to testify on specific situations involving particular priests due to poor memory, angered witnesses in both Rome and Sydney. David Ridsdale, who was abused by his priest uncle, Father Gerald Ridsdale, said Pell’s tone was more conciliatory than before but “we have a long way to get to the truth.” Father Ridsdale has been convicted of 138 offences against 53 victims. In Sydney, victims’ supporters gathered outside the Commission’s hearing rooms, holding hands in prayers and carrying signs reading “Pope Sack Pell Now” and “Pell go to hell.” Pell is scheduled to engage in more evidence-giving sessions over the next three days. Sexual abuse allegations first emerged in 2002, when it was discovered that bishops in the Catholic Church area moved abusers from parish to parish instead of defrocking them.
The Roman Catholic Church has been hit by numerous scandals in the past few years, involving allegations of covering up the sexual abuse of children by priests to protect pedophiles and the reputation of the Church. More than 4,000 priests in the United States have reportedly faced sexual abuse allegations since the 1950s in cases involving more than 10,000 children. Pope Francis, who was appointed in 2013 with a mandate to overhaul the Vatican, has warned that there will be “no privileges” for bishops when it comes to child sex offenses. The pontiff also promised more action in response to accusations of cover-up and excessive leniency by the Vatican.
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- Ngwa Bertrand
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Yesterday, Nigeria’s Supreme Court upheld Reverend King’s death sentencing as many Nigerians awaited the court’s decision with bated breath. Vanguard Nigeria reports that a seven-man panel of Justices of the apex court led by Justice Walter Onnoghen, confirmed the death sentence that was earlier handed to Ezeugo by the Lagos State High Court.
The verdict was delivered by Justice Sylvester Ngwuta. “This appeal has no merit. The judgement of the court of appeal is hereby affirmed. The prison sentence that was earlier handed to the appellant is no longer relevant in view of the death sentence passed on him,” he stated.
Before September 2006, when he was arraigned for murder after setting a few members of his church on fire, Chukwuemeka Ezeugo aka Reverend King was just a regular Nigerian pastor who shepherded the Christian Praying Assembly (CPA) located in Lagos. He was arraigned on September 26, 2006 on a six-count charge of attempted murder and murder but he pleaded not guilty to all the charges. However he was sentenced to death by the Lagos State High Court, Ikeja, on January 11, 2007 for the murder of Ann Uzoh and an Appeal Court sitting in Lagos upheld his death sentence in 2013.
Although Reverend King has been in prison custody for the past 10 years, several members of his church CPA, have kept a revered image of their pastor, marking his birthday in absentia and even continuing with services. In 2014, the Nigerian Monitor reported that CPA members bought spaces in Nigerian dailies to extol Reverend King’s virtues while hailing him as the light of the world.
Nigerians have reacted to the news of King’s renewed death sentence and some tweets on twitter show that regardless of the charge against him, some Nigerians do not approve of his death sentence for their own reasons.
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- Ngwa Bertrand
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