20/02/2024
A Welcome Address by Most Rev. Lucius Iwejuru Ugorji, Archbishop of Owerri and President of the Catholic Bishops’ Conference of Nigeria (CBCN), at the Opening Session of the 2024 First Plenary Assembly of the CBCN at the Catholic Secretariat of Nigeria Resource Centre, Durumi Abuja on 18 February 2024.
1. I have the pleasure and privilege to warmly welcome you all to Abuja for the first plenary assembly of the Catholic Bishops’ Conference of Nigeria (CBCN) for the year 2024. We thank and glorify God for bringing you all here safely, despite the great challenges of travelling these days in our country on account of insecurity, high cost of transportation and the poor state of our highways. This gathering offers me the much desired opportunity to wish you a happy New Year. May the year 2024 bring us rich divine blessings!
2. As I glance at this great assembly of eminent Cardinals, Archbishops, Bishops, Priests, Consecrated Men and Women and highly esteemed lay faithful, my heart overflows with joy and I am moved to repeat the words of the Psalmist: “Behold, how good and how pleasant it is for brothers to dwell together in unity” (Ps 133: 1). Given that “the joy and hope, the grief and anguish of men of our time, especially those who are poor or afflicted in any way, are the joy and hope, the grief and anguish of the followers of Christ” (Pastoral Constitution on the Church in the Modern World, Gaudium et Spes, no 1), as we gather in unity as the family of God in Nigeria, nay as a people bound together by baptism as one in our relationship with Christ and one another in our Catholic faith, we are closely drawn in solidarity to millions of our people, who groan with anguished hearts, as we pass through a dark period in our national history.
3. If we cast a cursory glance at the present state of our nation, we are inclined to conclude that this seems to be the worst of times for our country in the areas of security and the economy. Despite the huge sums of money appropriated monthly as security votes, our communities have continued to experience persistent insecurity. Recently, there is an upsurge in kidnapping for ransom and increasing incidents of senseless blood shedding across the nation. Unarmed citizens are brutally slaughtered on our highways, in their homes and even in the sacred precincts of places of worship. Killer herdsmen, bandits and unknown gunmen seem to be on the rampage. Many communities across the nation have been taken over completely by criminals. Families have lost their ancestral lands to armed invaders and land-grabbers. The social and economic lives of communities have been paralysed on account of insecurity. Schools have been shut down and children can no longer continue with their education. Farmers are unable to access their farms out of fear of either losing their lives or being kidnapped. Businesses have closed down. Many displaced families have no sources of livelihood and are daily afflicted by hunger and starvation.
4. The reform agenda of the present government has added to the plight of Nigerians. With the withdrawal of fuel subsidies and the unification of the foreign exchange market, there has been a sharp increase in the pump price of petroleum products and a steep decline in the value of the Naira. Indeed, there is a free fall of the national currency. High spiralling inflation has made it very difficult for the average Nigerian to access basic commodities, including food items and medication. As a result of government’s reform agenda, millions of Nigerians have been reduced to a life of grinding poverty, wanton suffering, and untold hardship as never before in our national history. In the bid to survive, an increasing number of the poor have resorted to begging. With more than 80 million Nigerians living under the poverty line of less than two dollars a day, our country, according to the recent disclosure of the World Bank, is the world’s second-largest poor population, after India. While many impoverished Nigerians continue to suffer and die as a result of the hardship caused by government’s economic reforms, the president has continued to urge the populace to make even more and more sacrifices with the assurance that brighter days lay ahead.
5. As government demands additional sacrifice from the struggling masses, one would expect to see a drastic cut in the cost of running government at all levels. On the contrary, it is worrisome to watch top government functionaries living by the sweat, toil and tears of the poor. They continue spending huge public funds on ostentatious and luxury lifestyles, and seem incapable of feeling compassion at the outcry of the poor. It is no less worrisome to note that the level of corruption among many public servants has gone beyond scale and measure. Corruption is a very complex reality, involving moral rottenness, defilement and loss of integrity. In Nigeria, it spans a very wide spectrum, ranging from book-cooking, foreign exchange (FX) arbitrage, over-pricing, over-invoicing, to embezzlement, money laundering, forgery, all sorts of manipulation, etc. Every day, outrageous and spine-chilling stories are told in the media about different public servants, who have stolen staggering amounts of money from the public coffers in a country where millions of citizens live in deep and debilitating poverty. We cannot easily overlook the sordid roles of many fraudulent politicians and Bank Executives in fleecing the whole nation and destroying our national economy through the dirty game of corruption, causing untold hardship and untimely deaths across the nation.
6. The situation is worsened by the high level unemployment rate in the country. Many of our youths are deeply wounded and degraded by unemployment and poverty, which make them feel rejected by the very society into which they were born. Consequently, thousands of them seek relief in drugs and alcohol, and eventually end up in violent crimes. In search of greener pastures, many others try to migrate to foreign lands, where hard times often await them. Regrettably, an extensive brain drain continues in this way in our nation, where manpower is needed to revamp the ailing economy and foster national development. In the midst of the frenzy to “japa” abroad for better job opportunities, many young Nigerians fall easy prey to human traffickers, who traffic them abroad for sexual exploitation, cheap labour or organ harvesting.
7. No doubt, government is trying its very best to fix our battered economy and security outfits. If we have to be very frank to ourselves and not to wallow in self-delusion, we must admit that we are faced with a case of where a therapy is worse than the disease. Government’s reform agenda is turning out to be counterproductive. Despite the efforts of government to boost our economy, our nation has continued to sink economically deeper and deeper into a bottomless pit.
8. In withdrawing the “fuel subsidy”, government assured Nigerians it would be saving a lot of money to be injected into other sectors of our national development. Rather than give evidence of money so far saved from the withdrawal of subsidies for which Nigerians are being afflicted with untold hardship, all we hear is government’s accumulation of more and more foreign debts to balance its budgetary deficit, thereby mortgaging the future of our nation and generations yet unborn. This has led many Nigerians to conclude that all the big talks on “fuel subsidies” may turn out to be mere fairy tales. Nigeria owns four refineries, two in Port Harcourt, one in Warri and one in Kaduna. How can we explain that these four refineries have remained moribund for years despite Turn-Around-Maintenance efforts, which have continued to gulp huge sums of money? After all the pledges by successive oil ministers, including President Muhammadu Buhari, to restart, revamp and expand these refineries, it is puzzling to understand why they are not yet operational so as to end the regime of fuel importation and so save scarce foreign exchange.
9. No matter how one looks at it, government’s reform efforts to rejig the security architecture of our country have woefully failed to plug the many loopholes in the system. They have remained non-proactive and ineffective in checking oil-theft, kidnapping, and senseless bloodshed across the country. The recent massacre of over 200 citizens in Plateau State and the rising incidents of kidnapping across the country reveal how fruitless government’s reform efforts have being in securing its citizens. In the face of increasing violent crimes, the country stands at the brink of anarchy, and so government should take urgent steps to rise to its primary responsibility of securing the life and property of its citizens. Government does not need to reinvent the wheel in this matter, since it can easily learn from what other nations do to provide adequate security for their citizens. It goes without saying that there cannot be any meaningful development in any country without adequate security. It will be belabouring the obvious to state that security in our country will remain a tall dream, if there is mass unemployment among our youths.
10. We must also be frank to admit that government’s efforts to fight corruption in the country have remained prostrate and as a result Nigeria is rated as one of the most corrupt nations in the world. The crusade against corruption needs to be more proactive. Adequate cheeks and balances need to be put in place in our public financial management to prevent dishonest and greedy public servants from stealing public money with ease and impunity. There is no doubt that a financial management and accounting system, which allows fraudulent government officials to freely loot huge sums of money from public coffers without detection, needs total overhauling. Although the Independent Corrupt Practices and Other Related Offences Commission (EFCC) has been able to recover billions of Naira from corrupt government officials, so far it has failed to win the majority of its cases before the Court of Justice due to poor investigation and presentation of corruption cases. Unless and until our anti-corruption institutions are able to successfully prosecute and jail corrupt government officials, corruption will continue to thrive in our country.
11. We must also sincerely admit that the Declaration, Fiducia Supplicans (On the Pastoral Meaning of Blessings), issued on 18 December 2023 by the Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith, has added to our pains. While this document prohibits liturgical blessings for “same-sex” couples, it recommends at the same time “spontaneous” pastoral blessings for couples in “irregular situations”, including the blessing of “same-sex couples” and stresses that such pastoral blessings should not be imparted “in concurrence with the ceremonies of a civil union, and not even in connection with them. Nor can it be performed with any clothing, gestures, or words that are proper to a wedding.”
12. Given the ambiguities in the Declaration, the document quickly aroused mixed reactions of acceptance, sceptical reserve and outright rejection from Episcopal Conferences and individual bishops across the world. Documents from the Holy See should normally foster unity and communion among Bishops on matters of doctrine, morals and liturgy. Unfortunately, Fiducia Supplicans tends to hurt the unity and catholicity of the Church. With the media hype that ambushed the text, its publication generated shock, outrage and disbelief among the faithful in our country as elsewhere in Africa and other parts of the world. Many devout Catholics in our communities seriously wonder how a priest could bless same-sex couples, who live permanently in a sinful union, without causing confusion and scandal.
13, In the midst of this confusion and pushback, we must, as pastors with the pastoral task of safeguarding the deposit of faith in its purity and integrity, uphold the teaching of the Church, based on Holy Scripture and Tradition. In the New Age we find ourselves, where the protagonists and sponsors of post-modern secularist ideologies use the powerful opinion-shaping instrument of the mass media to spread a permissive culture in the name of freedom and human right, we should be able to properly discern and differentiate between the “voice of God” and the “voice of the world”. In this regard, St. Paul in his Letter to the Romans 12:2 challenges us when he says: “Do not be conformed to this world but be transformed by renewing your minds, so that you may discern what is the will of God – what is good and acceptable and perfect”.
14. In line with our earlier Clarification and the Declaration of SECAM, we must continue to teach our faithful that there is no possibility of blessing same-sex couples or same-sex unions in the Church in Africa. For homosexual acts are acts of grave depravity, which are intrinsically disordered and, above all, contrary to natural law (cf. Catechism of the Catholic Church, No. 2357). In furtherance of our pastoral and prophetic mission, we must also continue to stress that God loves the sinner unconditionally and calls him to repentance so that he might live. As sinners, we are all encouraged to emulate the Prodigal Son, who abandoned his sinful past and returned to his father’s house (cf. Lk 15:11 – 32).
15. Let me end on a note of joy and hope. We are heartened to note the steady growth of the Church in Nigeria, leading to the creation of new Dioceses and the appointment of new Bishops. Since our last plenary assembly in September last year, the following have joined our ranks with their elevation as Bishops: Most Rev. Haliba Dabo, Bishop of Zaria, ordained on 14 December 2023; Most Rev. Gerald Musa, Bishop of the newly created Diocese of Kastina, ordained on 12 December 2023; Most Rev. Simeon Nwobi, Auxiliary Bishop of Ahiara, ordained on 19 December 2023; Most Rev. Anselm Lawani, Bishop of Ilorin, ordained on 2 February 2024 and Rev. Msgr. Thomas Obiatuegwu, Auxiliary Bishop-Elect of Orlu, who is billed to be ordained on 20 March 2024. I am delighted to welcome them to the Catholic Bishops’ Conference of Nigeria (CBCN). While looking forward to their contributions to our Conference, I wish them a fruitful Episcopal ministry.
16. In conclusion, I renew my words of welcome and entrust you to the powerful intercession of the Blessed Virgin Mary, Queen of the Apostles, during the course of our deliberations at this meeting. While thanking you for your attention, I consider it a privilege to declare this plenary assembly open.
Lucius Iwejuru Ugorji
Archbishop of Owerri
President, CBCN
