African Catholic Bishops to Chart a Path of Hope and Renewal in Kigali
African bishops in Accra, Ghana, in February 2025. Credits: Vatican News This week marks a historic gathering as African bishops convene in Kigali, Rwanda, for the 20th Plenary Assembly of the Symposium of Episcopal Conferences of Africa and Madagascar (SECAM). Over 250 participants including presidents of 54 national episcopal conferences, theologians, and global partners are […]
Beauty and the Priest
One of the most influential novels of the past two centuries is Fyodor Dostoevsky’s The Idiot. In that novel, there is an intriguing exchange between Ippolit, a terminally ill and deeply cynical character, and Prince Myshkin, a man of deep goodness and saintly innocence. Ippolit mockingly asks: “Is it true, Prince, that you once said, […]
Benedict XVI as I Saw Him: Reflections on the Life of a Baobab of Faith from a Simple African Priest
I woke up on the morning of the 31st of December 2022 in good cheers. After all, it was the last day of the year, and I was excited and hopeful about the New year. Still, I had a very heavy heart. A day or two before, Pele the great soccer player had just passed […]
“All are welcome”: The tempting heterodoxy of today?
Today, we find ourselves dancing to the drumbeats beckoning us into the infernal circles wherein are normalized, as approved human behavior and dispositions, the ideologies of transgenderism, homosexuality, and the unprecedented deification of autonomy, the so-called freedom to say, think, or do whatever the human spirit defends as fitting, right, and doable. The question of […]
Etsi veluti Deus non daretur (As if God does not exist) …
In the lines that follow, I share with whomever would give it a thought some reflections on the realities facing today’s Christian. This is inspired or framed around the liturgical readings of Friday of the 26th Week in Ordinary Time, Cycle I, namely, Baruch 1:15-22 and Luke 10:13-16. These scriptural texts invite us to ponder […]
Hail to the Cross of our Salvation! Hail to the Crucified King! Reflecting on the Feast of the Exaltation of the Most Holy Cross
In the homily which the then Cardinal Ratzinger delivered during the Mass before the Conclave of 2005, during which he was elected as Pope, he begins by noting that the grace and mercy of God are not cheap. They have come to us at the cost of a dear price, the price of the crucifixion. […]
What difference does Jesus Christ make?
It is not uncommon to find persons that have been Christian for much of their life relapse from the practice of the Christian faith. Life can be very challenging, especially in the face of pain, evil, injustice, misery, and death. The Second Vatican Council in Gaudium et Spes fittingly explained the reality of death as […]
The Christian God and Culture in Africa – Part 5
Fortunately or unfortunately, most of Africa was evangelized by Latin rite missionaries. Which means that the way we worship God in the celebration of Mass and the sacraments is typically Roman, western or Latin. The church Catholic is made up of 21 sui iuris churches with 7 major rites (Roman, Byzantine, Alexandrian, Syriac, Armenian, Maronite […]
The Christian God and Culture in Africa – Part 4
At the crux of this dialogue is a theme which I evoked earlier on, the transcultural nature of Christianity. Pope Benedict XVI in the encyclical Deus Caritas Est captures this uniqueness of the Christian expression when he says: Being Christian is not the result of an ethical choice or a lofty idea, but the encounter […]
Father Ferdinand: My Parish in Pictures
