Religion

Cameroon authorities are assembling Muslim leaders in the capital, Yaounde, to teach them how to identify and denounce promoters of the Islamic State group's radical ideology. The effort comes amid reports supporters of the Nigerian terrorist group Boko Haram have dropped their arms and are now preaching "extremism." Boko Haram earlier this year announced its adherence to the Islamic State group. Cavaye Yegue Djibril, speaker of Cameroon's national assembly, traditional ruler and Muslim spiritual guide, said Boko Haram fighters have dropped their guns and are now preaching Islamic State ideology.

He said the Boko Haram terrorist group, though in agony after joint forces attacked its strong holds, are now spreading a demonic religion that can led to social unrest. He said he is calling on the Cameroonian people to be vigilant and is also warning whoever collaborates with Islamist State ideology that Cameroon is solidly one and indivisible. Yaounde-based Cleric Nouri Dine said many Cameroonians, especially unemployed youths, have been converted and now secretly share the extremist group's ideology.

He said he is praying that God should help Cameroon eradicate the Boko Haram terrorist group and its ideology and establish peace, security and stability. He said God should open the eyes of people and give them wisdom to quickly detect the strategies being used by the enemies of progress, propagators of Islamic State ideology who want to destroy Cameroon.

In March this year, the Nigerian militant group swore allegiance to Islamic state, which claims a self-declared caliphate in parts of Iran and Syria. The group's leader, Abubakar Shekau, in a video posted online, promised to endure being discriminated against but never to dispute sovereignty with those in power he described as infidels. Chieck Nsangou Mama of the Union of African Muslim scholars, who together with Cameroon's Islamic cultural association organized the training to detect and denounce extremism, said the groups have been educating Muslims on how to identify people spreading Islamic state ideology.

"People who say that they want to implement Islamic State at all cost and by all means are very sensitive about issues that are not important and are forgetting about the fundamentals of Islam. They try to be very difficult and very rude against others. The solution is to go back to these teachings, to understand them the way the prophet understood them and the way he taught them to his companions," Mama saod. Cameroon has a history of inter-religious tolerance and peaceful coexistence with other denominations. But Dr. Moussa Oumarou of the Islamic Cultural Association of Cameroon said people should be watchful over a psychological warfare dividing Cameroon's Islamic sects that promoters of extremism are using to further divide them.

He said Sunnis make up the majority of Muslims in Cameroon, but that there are also Shiites and there is no objective reason to exclude them because all of them are part of the bigger Islam family. He said they have educated all Muslim leaders in Cameroon to take the message to their localities so that this year's period of Ramadan fasting should begin in peace and understanding as they jointly pray against the Boko Haram plans to destabilize their faith.

Within the past five years, Boko Haram, which means western education is a sin, has been recruiting people and attacking schools, mosques and churches on Cameroon's northern border with Nigeria. Nigeria's new president, Muhammadu Buhari, while addressing the 25th assembly of heads of state and governments of the African Union in Johannesburg, said the criminal campaigns of Boko Haram bear testimony of his region under siege and promised to work with Cameroon, Chad, Niger and Benin to eradicate the scourge under the supervision of the African Union.

 

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Ngwa Bertrand

17.Jun.2015

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Pope Francis took the biggest step yet to crack down on bishops who cover up for priests who rape and molest children, creating a new tribunal inside the Vatican to hear cases of bishops accused of failing to protect their flock. The initiative, announced Wednesday, has significant legal and theological implications, since bishops have long been considered masters of their dioceses and largely unaccountable when they bungle their job, with the Vatican stepping in only in cases of gross negligence. That reluctance to intervene has prompted years of criticism from abuse victims, advocacy groups and others that the Vatican had failed to punish or forcibly remove bishops who moved predator priests from parish to parish, where they could rape again, rather than report them to police or remove them from ministry.

The Vatican said Francis had approved proposals made by his sexual abuse advisory board, which includes survivors of abuse as well as experts in child protection policies. The proposals call for a new mechanism by which the Vatican can receive and examine complaints of "abuse of office" by bishops, and bring them to trial in a Vatican tribunal. A special new judicial section, with permanent staff, will be created inside the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith "to judge bishops with regard to crimes of the abuse of office when connected to the abuse of minors," a Vatican statement said.

Details must still be worked out, including possible punishments and the statute of limitations to determine whether old cases of negligence by bishops dating back 20 or 30 years can now be heard. The congregation currently reviews all cases of priests who have abused minors and the statute of limitations is 20 years, though the congregation can waive that limit. "I sincerely believe this is a real step forward," commission member Marie Collins, herself a survivor of abuse, told The Associated Press in an email. "Time will tell the effectiveness of the new measure, but I am hopeful."

The main U.S. victims group SNAP was more cautious, noting that bishops currently in office have delayed reporting abuse and yet no punishment has ever been meted out. "In the face of this widespread denial, timidity and inaction, let's be prudent, stay vigilant and withhold judgment until we see if and how this panel might act," said SNAP's David Clohessy. The sex abuse scandal exploded decades ago in the U.S., Ireland, Australia, and elsewhere in large part because bishops and heads of religious orders moved pedophile priests around or sent them off for therapy, rather than report the crimes to police or conduct church trials as canon law requires. Their aim was to prevent scandal and hold onto their priests at almost any cost.

In 2001, the Vatican required all bishops and religious superiors to send abuse cases to Rome in a bid to crack down on the abusers. Thousands of priests were sanctioned and hundreds defrocked, but the bosses who enabled them to continue abusing were never punished. The Vatican had long argued that the pope had little power to sanction bishops when they botched cases of abuse, citing the decentralized structure of the church and the theological concept of a bishop's relationship to Rome. That argument served the Vatican well in the face of U.S. lawsuits seeking to hold the pope ultimately responsible for abusive priests, with the Holy See insisting that the pope doesn't exercise enough control over bishops to be held accountable when they covered up for priests who rape children.

A new tribunal that could enable the pope to essentially fire bishops, and not just passively accept their resignations, would seem to undercut the Vatican's argument of a hands-off pope as far as bishop accountability is concerned. In April, Francis accepted the resignation of U.S. bishop Robert Finn, who had been convicted in a U.S. court of failing to report a suspected child abuser. It was a sign Francis was cracking down on bishops, but that was a resignation that Finn offered, not a forcible removal. The Vatican's initiative comes as U.S. prosecutors are seeking to hold the church hierarchy responsible for failing to protect children from harm. In recent charges brought against the Archdiocese of St. Paul and Minneapolis, prosecutors said church leaders "turned a blind eye" to repeated reports of inappropriate behavior by a priest who was later convicted of molesting two boys. The archdiocese is facing a fine of a few thousand dollars if convicted. No individuals were named.

The Vatican said Cardinal Sean O'Malley, the head of Francis' sex abuse advisory commission, presented the tribunal proposals to Francis' cardinal advisers this week and they were unanimously approved. Francis also approved them and authorized funding for full-time personnel to staff the new office, the Vatican said. The announcement came as the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops was holding its mid-year meeting in St. Louis, Missouri, and quickly became a topic of discussion among participants, who included Archbishop John Nienstedt, head of the recently charged Archdiocese of St. Paul and Minneapolis. Bishop Christopher Coyne of Burlington, Vermont, said U.S. bishops were not alerted ahead of time about the announcement, and learned of the plan from news reports. He said the new tribunal would bring welcome clarity to any Vatican review of bishops' actions.

"This new board ... provides a structure in which to address issues that may arise involving questionable behavior or inappropriate responsibility regarding the reporting of child abuse by a bishop," said Coyne, who was spokesman for the Archdiocese of Boston from 2002-2005 when the U.S. clergy sex abuse crisis erupted there then spread nationwide and beyond. Terrence McKiernan, president of the online resource BishopAccountability.org, said the new tribunal was "a promising step" and that it was particularly significant that the Vatican was allocating senior staff and funds to it. But he said there were already several well-known cases of active bishops and cardinals who failed in their duty to protect children. "This system will be coping with the complex interactions of enabling and offending that we see in cases involving bishops," he said in a statement. "Priests abuse children and so do bishops - bishops who offend are inevitably enablers, and the commission's plan must confront that sad fact."

Canon law already does provide sanctions for bishops who are negligent in their duties, but the Vatican was never known to have meted out punishment for a bishop who covered up for an abuser. The Vatican spokesman, the Rev. Federico Lombardi, said that with the new proposals there is now a specific, defined process by which the Vatican can do so.

 

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Ngwa Bertrand

11.Jun.2015

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At the Second Vatican Council, Catholicism gave itself a hermeneutic that certainly marked a profound shift regarding Church-world relations. This is what the Council said:  “To carry out such a task, the Church has always had the duty of scrutinizing the signs of the times and of interpreting them in the light of the Gospel. Thus, in language intelligible to each generation, she can respond to the perennial questions that men and women ask about this present life and the life to come, and about the relationship of the one to the other. We must therefore recognize and understand the world in which we live, its explanations, its longings, and its often dramatic characteristics” (Gaudium et Spes, 4). The key notions here are that of signs of the times and intelligibility. The Church must observe what is happening around her, and after that, speak to men and women in a way that is intelligible and meaningful to them, from the treasury of the Gospel that she has received from Jesus Christ. Talking about intelligibility, it might be helpful to recall the distinction found in the writings of the Fathers of the Church, between ratio, that is, mere reason, and intellectus, that is, reason that is open to spiritual discernment, going beyond mere reason.

To speak about culture in the singular is a risky path to take, especially in the context of a world that prides diversity and pluralism. Different cultures are found across the globe. The culture one has in mind here is the culture that has emanated from the Enlightenment, trends that are most dominant in the Western world with obvious implications for other parts of the globe, granted the dominance of the West in shaping global imagination. The Enlightenment culture has a proud confidence in science. It places the individual over the collective. Parochialism is the dominant ethos. Regarding the Christian religion, one notices a systematic emptying of the figure of Jesus that began in liberal protestant exegesis and has found a confortable home in Roman Catholicism. We must reconstruct the historical Jesus: the Jesus of the individual of von Harnack; the existential Jesus of Bultmann; the futuristic Jesus of Moltmann that must dehistoricized the idea of God; et cetera. Within the African context, what became dominant was the figure of Jesus as the liberator, meant not only to usher in economic and political liberation, but to free Africans from the spiritual colonialism that came with the missionary effort of the late 19^th and early 20^th centuries. Helpful gains notwithstanding, it is difficult not to notice that these “signs of the times” are basically the subjective preferences of the individuals that are but reflected in the “times.” In effect, the signs of the times do not constitute a neutral sociological category. They are the product of the dominant patterns of reasoning and the philosophical presuppositions at work in any given society.

As the walls continue to close in on the Church, it is helpful to recall the manner in which our ancestors in the faith faced such challenges at the start of the life of the Christian Church. The main challenge today for the Church, especially in the Western culture, is the eclipse of God from the worldview of the contemporary Western imagination. The culture tells us God must be removed from the world, because God is interfering with our freedom to do as we please. God is the great poisoner of the well of human happiness. With a weakened figure of Jesus that followed the so-called quest of the historical Jesus, the person of the Christian God has suffered a similar emptying. The only God that Western Christianity seems to be able to cope with is the God that makes no demands on humans, a God who can only approve our choices and lifestyle, but cannot call us to repentance and conversion. God must maintain a relationship of “I Am OK” – “You Are OK” with us if God is to remain relevant.

Such a weakened notion of God comes with the democratic principle of approaching biblical morality. We can now vote and decide for ourselves what we can accept and what we cannot in the laws of God. This mentality has certainly generated a new scenario in the internal life of the Church, what John Paul II once referred to as the battle between the Church and the Anti-Church. The battle is not just being fought between the world and the Church. The new field of action is the sanctuary. The God of the Bible, the God who spoke through the prophets, the God who at the fullness of time sent His only Son (Gal. 4:4), must now cede place to those who know better, as they enthrone themselves around the high altars of the Church. Now is the time for the priesthood of the faithful to offer the sacrifice, according to the recipe prescribed by the editors of the New York Times, the Economist, the Boston Globe, BBC, CNN, and the rest. Will the small boat of Peter withstand the huge media and financial power of the lobbyists and militant secularists governments?

We must ask ourselves: What is the source of our life as a Church? The early Christians give us the answer: Jesus Christ. When the early Christians undertook the mandate to proclaim Christ to the Greco-Roman world, they were certainly in a much more vulnerable position than we are today: the hierarchy was its in embryonic form; the canon of scripture was still developing; there were Christological controversies at the turn of every corner; they had no financial and intellectual guarantees and above all and very much like today, the political establishment was violently opposed to their presence and mission. Martyrdom was not uncommon in the life of the early Church.

Consequently, the early Christians could undertake the mission to bring the gospel to the Greco-Roman world precisely because they were convinced that something had happened in the history of the world in the life, death and resurrection of Jesus of Nazareth. They were convinced that Jesus was not just a good man like Socrates, but was God’s own Son, who, by entering history, transformed the vision of the world. Jesus had established his Kingdom in the world because he had remained faithful to the mission entrusted to him by the Father. Even when he was enticed by the Tempter to adopt the path of power, to prove that he was the Son of God by throwing himself down from the temple pinnacle or by coming down from the Hill of Calvary, Jesus had remained faithful, knowing that true faith is not about testing God, but about following God and being faithful to God. The resurrection was therefore, God’s response to the godly fear of Jesus, who in his days on earth, “offered up prayer and entreaty, aloud and in silent tears, to the one who had the power to save him out of death” (Heb. 5:7). The resurrection was the supreme vindication of the Weltanschauung of Jesus by the Father. It is only after the resurrection that Jesus could say, “All power in heaven and on earth has been given to me” (Matt. 28:18). Then he went on to commit his abiding presence with the community of his followers, the Church, which will forever embody the Christological presence in the midst of the world.

Today, again and again, the Church is called upon to offer a different gospel. She must prove herself, if she is the Church of Christ. One clearly notices the presence of an Anti-Church, the voices that call on the Church from within to change her teachings so that she can be relevant to the times. We are told that the Church is outdated. She has to modernize her teachings in order for her to be intelligible. If Jesus Christ was a Socrates, then the Church could update his philosophy so that it becomes acceptable to contemporary patterns of thought. However, if Jesus is the Christ of God, then what we have is a completely different game all together. In the final analysis, the Church must not only confess to the world that she is simply the mission of the Christ of God, and that she too is ready to accept the path of suffering and rejection which comes wit identifying with the Christ of God. It is only by accepting rejection that she can rise on her own Easter morn with her Alleluias, when many would have given up on her, thinking her dead and buried.

 

 

 

 

 

 

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Ngwa Bertrand

10.Jun.2015

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Do you remember the joke about the Irish brewery worker who drowned in a vat of suds? “Poor Sean,” the new widow said upon learning her husband’s fate, “He didn’t stand a chance.” “Oh, I wouldn’t say that, Mrs. Reilly,” replies the foreman. “He did crawl out three times to use the bathroom.” The Republic of Ireland has just voted by a commanding and unprecedented popular vote to establish “gay marriage” in its territory. The world, and the Irish themselves, who generally look at themselves from the viewpoint of the foreigner in a sad kind of “double consciousness,” will not fail to read the message: “Catholic Ireland’s dead and gone, it’s with De Valera in the grave.”

The coverage of the vote holds it up as an occasion of joy, of national pride, of a new era in an old country. I am sure there are some who use these expressions sincerely. Modern westerners usually think of life in this world in therapeutic terms. Matters of what is sometimes called “private” morality are decided entirely in terms of the question, “How will this make me feel?” while matters of “public” morality are submitted to a utilitarian calculus the numbers of which are usually undefined or unsatisfactory, boiling down to something like, “How will such-and-such a measure affect public health?” These are the only questions one can ask, if one inhabits an impoverished world where goodness and truth, happiness and justice, are taken for mere “subjective” projections onto the wandering atoms of the universe. But this diagnosis is not my interest today, because it cannot wholly explain the queer elation in Dublin.

What I want to consider is the specific conditions in Ireland that led up to this moment. My account will be somewhat hobbled; though for a number of years I resided in Dublin regularly, I have not visited the country since 2007, and so learned of some of the more recent and traumatic events in Irish life only from the newspapers. My days in Ireland began just after the peak of the so-called Celtic Tiger. The economy was expanding, the “ribbon effect,” or suburban sprawl was spreading out around Dublin and Galway, and the restaurants, bars, and hotels were staffed by immigrant workers, most of them from Eastern Europe.

My interest in Irish culture was incidental to begin with. I had fallen in love with the modern Irish poets, from Yeats to Mahon, for their formal dexterity. But I also loved God above all things, and viewed the love of country as little less sacred than the love of one’s father and mother. The Irish narrative of faith and fatherland, fought and died for, resonated with me and, I thought, provided an occasion to deepen my understanding of those loves. To study Irish literature, it seemed to me then, was to study the work of authors who lived and died for the sacred.

What I found in the Ireland of 2001 provided little occasion for dwelling on any of that “rubbish.” In the previous decade, the hierarchy of the Irish Church had been wracked with scandal. Its prestige had come to be viewed as hypocrisy and arrogance, its power as conceit and corruption. Regular Mass attendance had dropped from nearly 90 percent a few years prior to around 60 percent, and it continued to plunge in the years of my visits. If practice of the faith was plunging then, it has plummeted since. The churches were full on Sunday, then, now they sit empty, as if Dublin were Paris or New York.

I saw few signs of genuine piety, and the demeanors of the pious seemed passive and weary. The Irish saw well that prosperity had at last come to their land; it seemed to entail a giving up of both Irish folkways and the ancestral religion, and that was a bargain they were willing to make. The political elite in Ireland had long since come to have more in common with their counterparts in other western European nations than with the supposedly backward sensibilities of the people they ruled. They clearly saw the embarrassment of the Church as something to be capitalized on to advance the secularization of the country—its normalization, you might say, within the post-Christian mainstream. A prime minister brought his concubine to dinner with the Archbishop; it created a sensation rather than a scandal. Where Nelson’s Pillar had once stood—blown up in a symbolic act of nationalism by the IRA in 1966—the Irish government had erected a “millennium spike.” It is just as bad and stupid as it sounds. I wrote about it thus in my first book of poems, one inspired by the Belfast poet Louis MacNeice:

Where Nelson’s Pisgah pillar pruned, then plumed,
They’ve propped a sterile spike up like an altar
To pious E.U. secularity.

Irish society never fully recovered from the Civil War that humiliated it in 1922-23. The internecine conflict was, as Thomas MacGreevy once wrote, a last humiliation by the British Empire, disillusioning Irish nationalism just at the moment when it had achieved something like victory—a modest independence called “home rule.” In the subsequent decades, Irish politics was marked by a persistence of nationalist ambition to make Ireland in actuality what it has long been regarded as being: a distinctively Catholic republic that would stand outside the main tendencies of western Europe toward secularization, economic liberalization, and, later, the welfare state.

In this ambition, they succeeded. The Church enjoyed a central place in Irish public life; its charitable institutions served as a non-state agent to educate, heal, and care for the Irish people in lieu of public schools, hospitals, and other social services. The long-reigning Eamonn De Valera attempted a third-way economy—one founded on agriculture and autarchy, especially in regards to its powerful neighbor. This last was not a great achievement, though it was more successful than it would have been had the ranks of Ireland’s lower classes not already been emigrating in a continuous flow for most of the previous century.

The persistence of these nationalist ambitions should not surprise us, given the tremendous symbolic power generated in the decades before independence. Nonetheless, it was a waning influence from the beginning. In the 1950s, the Irish economy was liberalized and increasingly opened to the European market. That was sufficient to make most Irish conclude that their country was nothing special; it should rightly assume its place as a marginal junior player in the global economy. Economic liberalization led to secularization, or might have, were it not for a string of public controversies, including votes on abortion and divorce, that reminded many Irish of their distinctive self-image as a Catholic nation—much to the anguish of liberals, including the literati, who sought to show that the only thing distinctive about Ireland was that it was much worse than other countries.

It was the expansion of the Irish economy and the sex scandals in the Church in the 1990s that brought this long developing contempt for Irish exceptionalism to a head. It seemed to vindicate every accusation of Ireland as a backward backwater of hypocrisy. But this contempt for the past was softened by the unprecedented prosperity of the Celtic Tiger. The young were too busy earning money and spending it to have children much less to attend to the dissolution of Ireland’s Catholic culture.

When the global economy collapsed in 2008, Ireland was among the handful of worst-hit small countries.  Emigration increased to highs not seen for decades.  The time had come for reprisals. Their hopes for prosperity dashed, the Irish had few political options, and a future of bailouts and austerity imposed from abroad.  Enda Kenny was elected Prime Minister on a European liberal economic platform, but it soon became clear that his power could only be enhanced by taking Irish society in a leftward direction.  Every confrontation he staged with the Church, he won.  He was called brave for taking on such a venerable but hidebound institution in the name of truth and progress; but, indeed, how much bravery could it require to fight a battle he could not lose?  The disappointments of Irish society were increasingly expressed as contempt for the Church.

Year by year, government inquiries into sexual abuse within Church-run institutions, the physical abuses of those in the care of nuns and priests, and finally the supposed unearthing of mass graves of children on the properties of homes for unwed mothers. The stories themselves were increasingly distorted in the press, but nobody cared; the outrage and contempt only increased. To present oneself as a faithful Catholic in contemporary Ireland would require far more bravery than, say, to present oneself as a practitioner of sodomy.

For more than a century, the Irish had been told, had told themselves, that they were something distinctive in the history of Christendom. A Catholic nation that had persisted in the faith despite domination by a Protestant foreign power, the service of country and of God seemed almost as one. But, for just under a century, a nagging doubt had haunted such convictions. Ireland was insignificant: its dream of itself consequently stood in the way of its simply getting on as one more country on a continent that had long since lost its faith but had embraced the mundane contentment afforded by a liberalized economy, the welfare state, and a far more immanent horizon of beliefs.

Some scholars tell us that the gothic genre of story-telling grew up as a response to the Catholic Irish. A society that saw itself as enlightened, rational, secular, and modern suddenly found itself haunted by some frightful other, a ghoul, a return of the repressed: an avatar of superstitious, atavistic, arcane Catholicism. The Irish and Catholic response to such tales of Whiggery was easy: Catholicism “returns” not as the ravenous claw of the past reaching up from the grave to strangle the present, but as the truth, which never goes anywhere. Truth always asserts its inescapable claim on every person.

But what is one to do when that claw represents not simply the past, but also the future, the Catholic nation that Ireland was meant to become, but never quite did? What is one to do when the gothic monster is not something intruding from the depths beneath one’s society, but is, if anything, the institution that seemed to represent the most distinctive virtues of that society? Kill it, of course. Kill it, and take joy in the sport.

The joy with which the “gay marriage” referendum is being greeted not only in the streets of urban Dublin but across the whole country must surely be a complex emotion. Insofar as the Irish are just like most of us westerners, they are celebrating a new freedom of the will to assert itself without any moral prohibition. But the therapeutic triumphed long ago, and didn’t need Ireland to cement its victory.

The reason the Irish—as Irish—are celebrating is that they have with this referendum delivered a decisive and final blow to their venerable image as a Catholic nation. They have taken their vengeance on the Church. They must relish the unshackling; they must love the taste of blood. But, finally, they take joy in becoming what, it seems, they were always meant to become. An unexceptional country floating somewhere in the waters off a continent that has long since entered into cultural decline, demographic winter, and the petty and perpetual discontents that come free of charge to every people that lives for nothing much in particular.

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Ngwa Bertrand

02.Jun.2015

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A Nigerian pastor was arrested at his church this week over an alleged attempt to export over $3 million worth of narcotic drugs to South Africa from a Lagos airport. "Prophet" Michael Raji, 60, the resident pastor of the Eternal Sacred Order of Cherubim and Seraphim at Agodo-Egbe in Lagos, Nigeria, was arrested by the National Drug Law Enforcement Agency (NDLEA) for allegedly being part of a wanted drug syndicate operating in Nigeria, Ghana and South Africa. Raji was taken into custody following the interception of the drugs at the Murtala Mohammed International Airport during pre-shipment examination. "I can tell you that this suspect is a smooth operator, but we have uncovered his bag of tricks. The drugs were brought to the airport for export to South Africa where it was detected. Investigation eventually traced the movement of the drugs to his church where he was arrested," said NDLEA Commander Hamza Umar.

The NDLEA also said that it recovered three international passports from Raji bearing different names. "The pastor had three international passports bearing his photographs. One of the passports bears the name Michael Raji, while the other two bear the name Kadigun Fatah Ola. It was equally discovered that the church premises where he ministers also serves as a warehouse for narcotics," authorities said. Raji told agents he was lured into the crime by the devil. "I received the drugs from my friend and I kept them in the church since October 2014. This is a great temptation for me and I pray to God to overcome it," said Raji, according to authorities.The seized drugs included about 183 lbs. of Ephedrine and about 200 lbs. of Methamphetamine with an estimated street value of N609 million, which is equivalent to $3,050,079.76.Authorities are currently working to apprehend accomplices.

 

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Ngwa Bertrand

26.May.2015

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In a typical Roman Catholic tradition, Boston College aka BC in the State of Massachusetts in the United States was the centre of a rallying crowd. BC is an independent village, with magnificent structures, shopping malls and medical units that cater for the needs of over 14,000 students. The atmosphere that marked the May 18^th 2015 ceremony was by every standard of measurement, highly academic and very and spiritual, as the entire laureates match pass to their various sitting positions in their academic attire. The presence of BC alumni, The President and the Dean of studies including Doctors and Professors added grandeur to the ceremony as all appeared in their academic robes. Among the graduates was Rev. Fr. Maurice Agbaw-Ebai, a priest from the Diocese of Mamfe who came to the end-of-course work after two years of intensive academic studies. Fr. Maurice remarked to Cameroon Concord that what was most unique about his experience at Boston College was that it was the first time in his academic career that he was engaged in a dual-degree program: a Master of Theology, issued by the United States government, and a Licentiate in Theology, issued by the Holy See. He wrote his thesis on: Joseph Ratzinger, The Word Became Love and Truth in the Church, a clear indication of his fondness for Pope Benedict XVI.

Asked how he felt about the graduation ceremony by Cameroon Concord US Bureau Chief, Father Maurice, who was visibly very happy, said he was grateful to God, who has been closer to him that he has been to himself, citing St. Augustine of Hippo. He also rendered immense thanks to Bishop Emeritus, Francis Lysinge, who sent him to Boston College. His thesis on Joseph Ratzinger is dedicated to Bishop Lysinge. Father Maurice also thanked his Bishop, Dr. Mgr. Andrew Nkea for the spiritual and moral support, and for his decision that he should do a doctorate degree in Dogmatic Theology. He thanked Bishop Andrew for the decision to send him to the University of Regensburg, Germany, as part of his doctoral research program, focused on The Question of God in the Theology of Joseph Ratzinger. He also thanked Bishop Andrew for creating the opportunity for him to meet Pope Benedict XVI this summer, in which he hopes to present a copy of his thesis to the Pope Emeritus. Finally, Father Maurice equally extended a big thank you to all those who have been very supportive of his stay in the United States, notably the pastor and parishioners of the Jesuit-run St. Ignatius parish, Boston, his immediate family members, the Stanton’s, his adopted family in the US, the members of the Cameroon Catholic Community of Boston, BIROCOL Exans of Massachusetts, the CWA of Boston, and all his friends and benefactors.

 

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Ngwa Bertrand

20.May.2015

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