It is not every day that you come across a judge with a delightfully wicked sense of justice and humour like Justice Anne Ong’iinjo of the Kenya High Court, in Mombasa.
Confirming a guilty verdict handed out by a lower court to a Catholic priest, Father Dominic Muli Nzioka, for committing an indecent assault with a 16-year-old girl (he touched her inappropriately and might have done worse but for the intervention of the girl’s mother), she nonetheless varied the sentence.
Justice Ong’iinjo set aside the priest’s seven-year prison term and substituted it with a three-year probation, during which he would educate the flock about the Sexual Offences Act, the same law under which he had been found guilty.
In more ways than one, it was an appropriate sentence for a Catholic priest. The Catholic Church has a long rich, contradictory and mystery-shrouded history, and even for bad Catholics like me, remains one of the most fascinating subjects.
A few days after Fr Nzioka’s scoffish sentence, the Vatican released the 2024 Pontifical Yearbook and the 2022 Statistical Yearbook of the Church, reporting on the numbers of bishops, priests, deacons and members of religious orders in the world yearly.
Roman Catholics
The figures show an increase of one per cent in the number of baptised Roman Catholics, from 1.376 billion in 2021 to 1.390 billion in 2022. The largest increase in baptised Catholics—of three per cent—was recorded in Africa. The Americas have the most Roman Catholics: 48 per cent of the total. Brazil has the highest number of baptised Catholics, at 180 million.
The number of priests has been declining, with the biggest drop—1.7 per cent—in Europe. However, the number of priests continues to grow in Africa and Asia. The number of professed religious Catholic women showed a 1.6 per cent drop. But there was an increase in the number of religious women in Africa and South-East Asia, though offset by significant falls in Europe, North America and Oceania.
All this raises the question of the future of the Catholic Church. For one, it is likely African, with most of its numbers rising in tandem with the continent’s booming population. Some say the church needs to elect an African pope so as to deepen its growth on the continent. There have been three, though in the early periods of the church, and all from northern Africa. It’s not clear from their history that an African pope would make a difference.
However, creating a “second Vatican” on the continent might help a little. If it were left to me, I would locate it in a safe small island nation like Seychelles, where 90 per cent of the population is Catholic (or Cape Verde, which has nearly the same proportion) to maintain some level of neutrality.
Allowing priests to marry
There is the view that allowing Catholic priests to marry would help the church to grow its brand in Africa and keep the clerics from preying on women. All other churches allow it, but there is no good evidence that matrimony is a boon for ministry. Simple common-sense progressive reforms might yield better results. For one, that old vexed issue of ordaining women priests is likely to bear more fruit because it would be a representation magnet and improve the prospects for retention.
Fortunately, the Catholic Church already has a good dose of benign permissiveness. Apart from celibacy, it makes few other demands of its priests. They can drink and go out partying. Not too long ago, there was a viral video of a priest in godly robes, apparently somewhere in Latin America, dancing with a beautiful woman and doing crazy things with her. There are many parts of Africa where he would have been arrested for “indecent dancing”.
At the end of last month, a congregation of Catholic nuns reopened a bar in an ancient sanctuary in northern Spain, “pulling pints of beer in the hopes of spreading the word of God to thirsty guests”, as the media reported it. The gospel can be lonely; sometimes, it needs a pint to escort it.
However, that liberal spirit needs to spread to issues like abortion, where the Church’s opposition remains trenchant.
Happily, the Catholic Church can be surprisingly forgiving. A while back, while living in Kampala, after neglecting my religious duties for over 10 years and being viewed as an ‘expired’ Catholic, the church came calling. It wanted support to fundraise and walk for a major educational project. “If you can’t do it for God, do it for Caesar,” they told me.
A friend, a Catholic-turned-atheist-and-hardline Marxist, also returned home to find an invitation, addressed with his Christian name that he hadn’t used since he left secondary school. He didn’t show up for the fundraising walk but sent in a small cheque. I raised quite a bit of money and turned up for the walk.
My priest friend, whom I had known in a worldly context, told me: “You are a pagan these days, but you are our pagan.” They have never let me go since. They might just survive.
Mr Onyango-Obbo is a journalist, writer and curator of the “Wall of Great Africans”. @cobbo3
