Behind its high spiked iron gates in this frenetic megalopolis of
anywhere between 11 million and 21 million, the church of Christ the
King is protector, feeder and healer.
In the 6 a.m. darkness, this working-class church is already filled with
parishioners in shirt-sleeves and T-shirts, a pool of hymn-singing
light in a blacked-out neighborhood.
Six Masses are celebrated here each
Sunday for up to 10,000 people, and 102 people were baptized last
Saturday. The parish priest, the Rev. Ikenna Ikechi, dreams of building a
multistory community center to accommodate his growing flock. “Our only
limitation is space,” he said.
The Roman Catholic Church’s explosive growth here and across Africa has led to serious talk of the possibility of an African cardinal succeeding Pope Benedict XVI, and clerics from Nigeria, Ghana and the Democratic Republic of Congo, which has the continent’s largest Catholic population, have been mentioned as top contenders.
With 16 percent of the world’s Catholics now living in Africa, the
church’s future, many say, is here. The Catholic population in Africa
grew nearly 21 percent between 2005 and 2010, far outstripping other
parts of the world.
While the number of priests in North America and
Europe declined during the same period, in Africa they grew by 16
percent.
The seminaries, clerical officials here say, are bursting with
candidates, and African priests are being sent to take over churches in
former colonial powers.
Untainted by the child sexual abuse scandals, the church here draws
parishioners, many in their 20s and 30s, who flock eagerly to services,
which can last hours, with no complaints.
“After work, a lot of young people come to Mass,” said Chinedu Okani,
29, an engineer in Lagos who was attending a service at the Church of
the Assumption in the Falomo neighborhood. “It provides a serene
environment.”
He acknowledges another attraction, too: that the church is a
functioning institution in a country that lacks them. “The welfare
system is not working here,” Mr. Okani said. “We find a way to make up
for it: the family, and the church.”
In Nigeria, at least 70 percent of the people live below the poverty
line, and 80 percent of the country’s oil wealth goes to 1 percent of
the population. The police do not respond to calls, and electricity is
spotty.
Outside Christ the King, on the dirt streets of the Mushin neighborhood,
there are armed robbers and no lights. It is little wonder that the
priest must gently shoo away parishioners lingering to read or chat in
the church’s arcaded meeting spaces under generator-powered lights.
“A lot of it is the challenge of living in Nigeria,” said Father Ikechi,
who was educated at Fordham University in New York. “We can’t rely on
the government for water, light, security. Whatever you want, you have
to provide for yourself.”
For his parishioners, he said, “what they face is huge. So they tend to
come to God as their last resort. You can’t go to the police. Who will
you go to? You will go to God. Some of them, where they sleep is so bad,
they just come to sleep here during the day.”
After a devastating bus accident recently the church paid parishioners’
hospital bills, the priest said. “Otherwise they would die,” he said.
In this way the church is fulfilling a role it played in its distant
European past, providing for the people where the state cannot, but some
question whether the African church’s growth and size can be sustained
as the continent’s institutions develop.
“When people say Africa is the future, I say, ‘Oh, isn’t it the past?’ ”
said the Rev. Thomas J. Reese, a senior fellow at the Woodstock
Theological Center at Georgetown University. “I see it as a repeat of
the past, what happened in Europe centuries ago. What’s going to happen
in Africa when everybody gets a television set, when modernity comes?”
For now, that question is largely academic here.
“Almost every system has collapsed,” said Bishop Matthew Hassan Kukah of
Sokoto, in northwestern Nigeria. “The entire architecture of governance
has collapsed. The church remains the only moral force.
“The church offers the best schools, social services, medicine. The God
talk in Africa is a mark of the failure of the economic, social and
political system,” Bishop Kukah added, “We are being called left, right
and center to mend the broken pieces of what are considered the failing
states of Africa.”
In a continent rife with corruption, the church also provides a singular
moral voice. Bishop Kukah, for example, has played a large role in good
governance and human rights commissions, including the investigation
into the 1990s military dictatorship.
In Congo, where the number of Catholics has more than tripled in the
past 35 years, Archbishop Laurent Monsengwo Pasinya of Kinshasa has
fiercely criticized the government, including the tainted election
results that secured President Joseph Kabila’s
re-election in 2011.
The Catholic Church deployed an extensive network
of independent observers during the December elections, and the bishops’
council later denounced the “culture of treachery, lies and terror.”
“It’s the church’s engagement on behalf of the Congolese people, the
promotion of the whole man, you’ve got to bring forth bread and the
Gospels,” said Bishop Bernard-Emmanuel Kasanda of Mbuji-Mayi in Congo.
“We have to be with the people. Moral authority, yes. This is what
pushes people towards us.”
In Nigeria, where over $5 billion was reported missing
from a minerals ministry on Friday, the latest in a series of seemingly
endless government scandals, the church offers an alternative to a life
mired in corruption, poverty and hopelessness.
Laurence Emeka, 30, who sells telephone accessories at an open-air
stall, rose at 5 a.m. last Sunday to attend Mass at Christ the King
before going to work.
The service gave him a kind of sanctuary.
“Peace,
satisfaction, confidence in God,” he said. “It helps me cope with the
circumstances of daily life.”