“Brace up for impact”: Newly Ordained Priests in Nigeria Cautioned against Secularism

In the text of his homily that he shared with ACI Africa, Fr. Ehusani further says that the five Deacons who were being ordained Priests were beginning their ministerial Priesthood “amidst the growing scourge of crass materialism, senseless consumerism, an unprecedented degree of vanity and vainglory.”

Decades ago, the Abuja-based member of the Clergy of Nigeria’s Lokoja Diocese says, “the global environment” had some “sense of spirituality and transcendence,” and that the Nigerian society was very religious.

“The powerful purveyors of global culture have today become increasingly secular, aggressively antireligious and vengefully anti-clerical,” Fr. Ehusani says, and reiterates his message to the newly ordained Priests, “So, brace up for impact I say.”

The Nigerian Catholic Priest who founded the Psycho-Spiritual Institute (PSI), a Catholic entity that specializes in psycho-trauma healing also urges the five new Priests to be vigilant amid what he termed a “new age” of Christian persecution.

He explained, “It is not party time at all. We are at the threshold of a new dark age and a new era of Christian persecution, when truly committed agents of the Gospel of Christ will be challenged to embrace martyrdom that will come from different directions, including even from within.”

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“You are soon to commit yourselves to the ancient evangelical counsels of poverty, chastity, and obedience, at a very difficult and inauspicious time in human history, when an increasing number of men and women, even among those who call themselves Christians, are rejecting the true gospel of Christ, and instead they are choosing to dine with the devil and to give themselves over to the most reckless forms of debauchery, self-indulgence and moral depravity,” Fr. Ehusani said.

He also alerted the five Nigerian Clergy about “many ignorant but arrogant, fun-seeking, power-hungry, enemies of God and enemies of Christ”, who he said are present in God’s vineyard.

“In this kind of degenerate dispensation, you must consider yourselves as being sent out like a flock of sheep among a pack of wolves,” the Catholic Priest who serves as the Executive Director and Lead Faculty of the Lux Terra Leadership Foundation that deals with leadership training said.

Besides the challenges in the contemporary world, Fr. Ehusani said that it is “a privilege, an honor, and a grace to share in the Priesthood of Jesus Christ.”

“I hereby declare my belief that the priesthood in the Catholic Christian tradition is one of inestimable, ineffable, and indescribable dignity,” he said during his September 1 homily, in which he also cautioned Christian parents and young people against celebrities with questionable morals, including “drug and alcohol addicts” and  “serial polygamists”.