CATHOLICS IN KENYA REBEL AGAINST CELIBACY VOW FOR PRIESTS
NYERI COUNTY, Kenya - He was a priest just out of seminary. She was a nurse. They were both from the slopes of Mount Kenya, but their paths improbably crossed in Rome.
He became unshakable in his desire to marry her, even though he had taken the Catholic Church’s mandatory ow of celibacy for priests.
hen he returned to preach in enya, eter ogu was shoc ed when fellow priests told him that many of them had bro en that ow, marrying and ha ing children. n hushed tones, they spo e of their secret families,’’ ept hidden in distant homes. he thought of doing so pained him.
As the Catholic Church goes through a global crisis brought on in part by the re elation of widespread se ual misconduct by its clergy, self proclaimed ishop ogu belie es he has figured out how to sa e Christianity’s largest church from its own sins et priests marry and raise families.
ogu’s brea away faction, the enewed ni ersal Catholic Church, is Catholic in every way e cept in ha ing optional celibacy for its priests.
ts growth in enya is rooted in opposition to the practice of eeping secret families but re ects a growing worry among some Catholics that the celibacy re uirement to many a nonnegotiable tenet of the priesthood creates a harmful culture of se ual secrecy.
he atican has shown no interest in ree amining the issue for all priests, and ope rancis has called celibacy a gift to the church.
ut the pontiff has also signaled that he is open to ordaining married men in remote parts of the world with a se ere shortage of priests. ore radical voices in the church have called for the church to rescind the re uirement altogether.
ost of our members are e Catholics, ogu said. hey are tired of the hypocrisy. ome of our people call us the Church of the uture.’
early priests and more than , parishioners ha e joined Njogu since 2011, he claims, mostly in the towns
and illages that dot the fertile slopes of ount enya, the , foot high e tinct olcano right in the centre of this country.
ow that ’ e come out, these other priests tell me, he problem with you is you went public,’ he said on a recent unday after celebrating ass. nd say, am not the problem am the solution. oin me.’
o his oc , he said his is where you find your freedom from all that hypocrisy.
he church in the hilltop illage of achatha where ogu preaches his reformation is a far cry from a cathedral. he pews, pulpit, and church itself are all made of wooden plan s nailed together. he oor is sawdust atop dirt. n a clear day, the ice capped pea of ount enya glimmers through a glassless window.
While Catholicism has declined in numbers in some former bastions in the est, such as reland, it is growing more rapidly in frica than anywhere else.
fricans ma e up nearly a fifth of the world’s Catholics. ogu’s sermons har bac to Catholicism’s pre celibacy era while appealing to the faith’s future in frica, where he belie es it will ha e to reconcile with local customs as it grows.
o one in the atican understands the frican soul. hey do not understand that for the frican man, priest or not, the worst sin is to lea e this world without siring a child, ogu said. andatory celibacy is thus the root of priestly sin, but they pretend all is well while their house is burning to the ground.
he Catholic Church e communicated ogu after he defected for alleged “unbecoming beha iour, including buying land and spea ing openly about his intention to marry Berith Kariri, who remains his wife.
hese priests are not sincere, they are pursuing personal interests, said ather Daniel Kimutai Rono, general secretary for the enya Conference of Catholic ishops. here is nothing about frican ness’ or uropean ness.’ ’ he ow of celibacy, he said, is about the vocation, about the call to serve od and the sacrifice which entails in ser ing od.
Do ens of ogu’s followers said in inter iews that they left the mainstream church because they doubted their former priests’ de otion to the ocation.
s a parent, had to fear that a priest would impregnate my daughter if too them to my old churches, said argaret imondo, who was one of ogu’s first con erts. n front of the altar they may loo one way, but at night, you don’t e en want to hear those stories.
hilip uiga, , had been a Catholic priest for decades before oining the enewed ni ersal church last year.
ne day met a priest in the street who ha e nown for a long time, and he was drun , he said. hen went home and loo ed at myself in the mirror, ust saw dar ness. could not ustify continuing to call these men my colleagues.
ono, who represents the Kenyan Catholic Church, denied any sort of systemic abuse or e istence of secret families but admitted a global churchwide trend of infidelity to the priestly ocation and said priests should a oid any ind of co erup. he atican deferred to its enyan representati es for comment.
Celibacy has been e pected of Catholic priests since its origins in the first century after esus Christ’s death, but the th century imposition of a celibacy ow was prompted primarily by a priesthood that had begun using the church as a family business, said Chris ellitto, a professor and church historian at ean ni ersity in ew ersey.
riests were handing their parishes along to their illegitimate sons as if they were training them as cobblers, who inherited your shop and tools when you died. his complicated the integrity of the sacraments what if the son didn’t ha e a ocation or disposition as a spiritual leader and the independence of the church, since the bishop was supposed to be naming parish priests, ellitto said.
ut the ow always seemed at odds with certain parts of the ible’s teachings, leading many within the church to uestion its purpose. ogu’s faction is certainly not the first to try charting a new course without the celibacy ow, said im aines it en, a historian of early Christianity at Cornell ni ersity.