ACN Nigeria Project Visit – Day 10
As we come to this last diary entry for my Nigeria blog, I recall one of the most wonderful moments of our trip – the visit to the Good Shepherd Seminary just outside Kaduna. Against the backdrop of so much wanton cruelty against Christians and others in this part of the world, the story of this seminary is an inspiring note on which to finish. Archbishop Matthew was the first rector of the seminary and back then the Fr Matthew Man’Oso Ndagoso opened the doors to just seven seminarians. Now, just 25 years later, there are more than 250 seminarians. Aid to the Church in Need has been instrumental in the establishment and growth of the seminary. The charity has funded everything from the chapel to student accommodation blocks and Mass stipends for the rector and staff. Then there’s travel costs for students on pastoral placement in parishes dotted around the various dioceses which they one day hope to serve as priests.
Against that backdrop of exponential growth is an experience of suffering that refuses to go away. In early 2020 four seminarians were abducted. Three were duly released but the youngest, Michael Nnadi, just 18, was killed. The seminarians who survived the kidnapping experience explained that he had refused to stop preaching the Gospel to his kidnappers and had paid for it with his life. His grave is just outside the main entrance to the chapel and it has become little less than a shrine with many hopeful that the cause for his canonization will result in him one day being honoured among the Saints in heaven.
His legacy lives on in the current crop of students at Good Shepherd seminary. I really wanted to meet one of them and was given an opportunity to sit down with seminarian Pius Polycarp Benjamin. He explained that in his parish of Kaffin Koro, the parish priest Fr Isaac Achi was burnt alive in his presbytery when extremists descended. Pius and his family had been close to Fr Isaac and Pius as a boy used to run errands for him. The priest fostered in the young boy a vocation. Pius told me: “Since I was a boy, it’s been my heart’s desire to serve God through priestly ministry. I have seen the people who do these terrible things to us. I am no longer afraid to die. I know that God will save us.” Incredible words – all the more so, bearing in mind that if and when the 30-year-old makes it to ordination he faces the very real possibility of abduction and even death.
There are many more experiences I could share with you during the intense and very full days that I spent in Nigeria but suffice to say it was a transformational journey and necessarily so. As I touched down in Heathrow under the familiar grey skies of London, I knew that if I returned little changed from the person I was when I left then I would be compelled to admit that whole thing had been a waste of time. As it was, my mind was full of the people I had met on the journey, the things I had seen and heard and the struggle to make sense of it all. It is not possible to understand Nigeria without a profound sense of the religious sensibility innate to so many of the people who live there, one that has been weakened in so many parts of the West amid the relentless march of secularization. For so many people in Nigeria and elsewhere, to be free is to reach out to the God you seek to serve and love. The thread that runs through so much of what I encountered during the trip is that with one voice the people I met declared emphatically that if asked to give their life in defence of this freedom they would indeed be willing to do so. In the West, where the search for ‘meaning’, ‘eternity’ and indeed God have been sublimated – or silenced by – the media-led sirens promoting fame and fortune, Nigeria is a wake-up call, challenging us to ask what really matters in life. For us as Catholics, it is clear: to follow Our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ, who is indeed the Way, the Truth and the Life.