THIS CORN IS NOT OF MAIZE

I want to say a word about how uncatholic I find some Catholic positions (and some positions that are passed off in these parts as Catholic positions) - one of which I had been aware of, but whose import I had blissfully failed to realize until it played itself out at Mass earlier today.

At Mass this morning, the altar was resplendent in its Advent purple. The choir did justice to the solemn tunes that herald the coming of the long-expected Saviour. The mass servers looked innocent and dutifully holy, always punctuating their altar crisscrossings with low bows and deep genuflections. The woman who read the first lesson from the lectern on the right side of the altar seemed like she was drowning under the weight of her own gele - the elaborate headscarf that she had mounted on her head in a manner that strongly reminded one of a poorly mounted secondhand corn mill. The voice of the little girl who sang the responsorial psalm was outdone in its beauty only by her own visage. The second reader’s beard reminded me of, of all people, Saddam Hussein. The gospel was short. The sermon was long. Very long. The preacher pranced around Pentecostal-style, intermittently asking the bulletin- and Missal-wielding congregation to turn to this and that passages of their Bibles - Bibles which were most likely nestling cosily in their various homes while the Sunday bulletins and missals stood proxy on their behalf. He sounded intelligent. Many Catholic priests are. If the Church lacks anything, it is not brains. Ask Gregor Mendel. Look up Fulton Sheen. Read George Ehusani. Or spend a few moments with Okoye Anthony.

So all was going well, and I was going through the motions of the Mass, kneeling, sitting, standing, feeling contrite when I was expected to, and being joyful when the liturgy permitted it. I admit I was also thoroughly enjoying the smell of the incense that wafted upward from the thurible wielded by one of the mass servers, the very tall, very black one with a scar running down from just behind his left ear to his jawline, a scar that didn't look like it was acquired during a holy excursion. I was also, perhaps not so righteously, enjoying watching the young girls who were giggling, the young men who were looking at the preacher with a faraway look in their eyes, a look that seemed to see the English Premier League football match coming up later in the day rather than the steps to take on the march to heaven  as being pointed out by the preacher. I remembered not to forget to notice the elderly men who were nodding off at intervals and their elderly wives who were fanning themselves with their multipurpose Sunday bulletins, their beautiful handkerchiefs...the leisurely fanning probably more for show than for sweat, since the chill of the air conditioning was taking care of the latter.

Then the new converts to my Catholic brand of Christianity were called upon to approach the altar, their robes whiter than their hearts, their soon-to-be-baptized hearts soon to be whiter than their starched, white robes. They approached the altar, their hands clasped together and heads bowed in the universally accepted pose of Catholic sanctity. The priest then invited them to announce their names to us all. And then came the flurry of Ritas, Angelas, Stephens, Anthonys....

And then there was Okechukwu.

And silence.

Silence as the priest retrieved the microphone from the boy who introduced himself as Okechukwu, and, in no uncertain terms, chided him for introducing himself to God's people in God's house using an unchristian name. And then gave him back the microphone after instructing him to reintroduce himself to the community of the Lord’s faithful, as the catechist had taught him to.

In the single, low-pitched penitent word that followed, what was Okechukwu became Henry.

The priest apparently found Henry to be acceptable, to be Christian enough. On behalf of the people of God therefore, he congratulated the new convert who had been Okechukwu and who was now Henry, and he then went on to the next person. Welcoming her, and then the next girl, and the next young man, and the one after him - all of them Mary, Prisca, Raphael, Nicholas - into the fold of the one, holy, Catholic Church, world without end. Amen.

But while all that was going on, I began to reflect on how Okechukwu had just been robbed of his right to his identity, how he had just been made to become less African, at least in name, in order to be considered worthy of Catholicism, of redemption; how a young African’s soul was redeemable only so far as its owner first shed his African name.

I have been told several times since childhood that the Church “encourages” her faithful to adopt for themselves at baptism and confirmation names of canonized saints. I don't know to what extent this “encouragement” is persuasion, but today at Mass, it looked to me like compulsion.

If we all have to be Henry, John, Benedict, Lucy, Agnes, Perpetua….in order to become Christians, how will there ever be a time when the Church will have saints like Saint Somto, Saint Okechukwu, Saint Tinuke, Saint Hauwa? So that some American girl can also be someday encouraged at baptism to take on the name Folake because there is such a saint as Saint Folake? Perhaps being a saint is incompatible with being a black man - or having a name native to the black man. But how would I know? These things are beyond the reach even of extraordinary men...and I am but the most ordinary of the ordinariest men. I am just a man who hopes that when Blessed Tansi is canonized, he will be addressed as Saint Tansi, or Saint Iwene...and not be forced - even in posthumous sainthood - to go only by the baptismal Saint Cyprian.

But if the Church will be universal in reach, as well as universal in name, I think one place to start is to allow adherents universal reach in choice of their own personal names. I think it is instructive to remember that the only person whose name the Lord Jesus was recorded as having ever changed was Simon, the man he called Peter. And that was the one who became Pope, after first denying three times that he knew him. The rest of his disciples, from the one who betrayed him to the one who was portrayed as the one Jesus loved, all kept their names. Their original names. I think two brothers even kept their Zebedee surname and there was another whose surname was Alphaeus.

Okechukwu should not have become Henry. Okechukwu was robbed of his Okechukwuness and dressed in a Henryness that was not his in order to qualify to be Catholic. If we must accept Catholicism and Christianity as they are, I think Catholicism and Christianity should accept us as we are, and then make saints out of us sinners - whilst we keep our names.

Names like Okechukwu.

Image sourced from http://www.thecatholiccatalogue.com/