Following the dissatisfaction openly expressed by the radical Catholic priest, Rev’d Fr. Ejike Mbaka, over his transfer to serve as assistant priest in another parish, erstwhile Special Adviser to then President Goodluck Jonathan on Media and Publicity, Dr. Reuben Abati, has advised the Catholic church to transfer Mbaka to the Boko Haram-infected Sambisa forest.
Reaching this summation in an article entitled “Mbaka: Priest, politician or renegade?” published on Friday, Abati asserted that the church should do this if the priest should as much “as whimpers again”.
Mbaka, had lamented, while moving out of Christ the King Parish, GRA Enugu, where he served for 20 years to Our Lady of the Rosary Parish, in a suburb in Enugu, that he was going to suffer in his new place of assignment as he will be living in a room instead of the duplex building he had to himself in his former parish.
Abati quoted him as whining thus: “I’m going to suffer because I have no place to put my head. I am going to suffer because I have no place to keep the Adoration Ministry’s assets…The Adoration Ministry is passing through suffering right now even though I’ve accepted that it is the will of God. Is the will of God through suffering? It is a mega suffering. The quantum of the assets of the Adoration Ministry is the only thing I am bothered about for now. Where am I going to keep them? I am going to stay in one small room that has only one small bed, one small table, little toilet and bathroom. So where am I going to keep all the Adoration assets?”
Abati, who observed that one would think the priest had been sentenced to a jail term with the manner Mbaka whined and appealed to sympathy, lampoons further: “This priest is certainly special. He objects to suffering even if the Lord Jesus Christ, whose disciple he is, is the embodiment of sacrifice and suffering. He talks about assets in a capitalistic sense, and yet his reputation rests on his commitment to the poor.”
The former presidential spokesman, who described his subject as an all-round entrepreneur in church garments, observed that he is far ahead of his bosses within the Catholic hierarchy.
He concluded the essay by writing that Mbaka’s “transfer to a smaller parish should remind him of the essence of his priestly vows: humility, simplicity, obedience, sacrifice, as well as commitment to the good of the church rather than individual heroism, values which can truly make him a priest in the Order of Melchizedek.
“Let him therefore, suffer if he must, and let his suffering be a blessing upon the poor and the Church, and if he as much as whimpers again, let him be posted post-haste to Sambisa forest, where the poor are in urgent need of miracles.”
It would be recalled that the fiery priest with large following in the South-east and parts of the South-south had predicted ahead of the March 28, 2015 election that Abati’s principal, Dr. Goodluck Jonathan, who he accused of bad governance, was not going to win the election.
