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Reflections of Faith

Reflections of Faith

No Rest, No Self-Care: African Catholic Priests Must Pay Attention to Their Wellbeing

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During a current self-care formation for African priests, leading African Catholic psycho-spiritual expert, Fr. Collins Okeke, reiterated the need for a proactive response to the complex challenges facing Catholic priests in Africa today. Basing his research on the well-being of Catholic priests in the United States, he advised the Church in Africa, particularly considering recent deaths by suicide among priests and religious. At the same formation program, Archbishop Fortunatus Nwachukwu shared a sobering fact from his home diocese of Aba, Nigeria, where the diocesan cemetery is filled with priests under 50. Younger priests, he said, are dying not of persecution or old age, but of preventable and treatable illnesses, the slow harvest of an unsustainable lifestyle: no rest, no exercise, no regular medical checkups, no outlet for stress, no one to whom they can honestly say, \”I am not well.\” If the American data is a warning about burnout and psychological exhaustion, the graves in Aba are a warning about something that is frighteningly real and tragic. Self-care for the African priest is not simply a lifestyle preference. It is, in the light of emerging evidence, a matter of life and death. What the data shows Research from Georgetown University’s Center for Applied Research in the Apostolate (CARA) reveals a troubling pattern beneath priestly life. While 89 percent of priests identified overwork as a problem, 78 percent identified loneliness and isolation, and 73 percent identified burnout, only about a third believed these concerns were being adequately addressed. The 2025 National Study of Catholic Priests deepens this paradox. However, American priests report high personal well-being, 8.2 on a ten-point scale; 39 percent experience at least one symptom of burnout. Diocesan priests are particularly vulnerable, with 7 percent experiencing high burnout compared with 2 percent of religious priests. Perhaps most revealing is the gap between personal and communal flourishing: priests rate their own well-being at 8.2, but the well-being of their diocesan community at only 5.7. Priests, it seems, may be personally resilient even as ecclesial environments struggle to flourish. \” A priest can love his vocation, remain faithful to prayer and ministry, and still be exhausted, lonely, emotionally depleted, or psychologically vulnerable because of an unhealthy ecclesial environment.\” -Stan Chu Ilo The message is important: a priest can love his vocation, remain faithful to prayer and ministry, and still be exhausted, lonely, emotionally depleted, or psychologically vulnerable because of an unhealthy ecclesial environment. Data from the Greater Good Science Center at the University of California, Berkeley, stress the impact of healthy relationships, social connection, and a sense of belonging regarding human well-being and proper adjustment. These findings resonate with Kenneth Pargament’s extensive work on religion, spirituality, coping, and resilience, particularly his emphasis on the relational, communal, and spiritual resources that sustain people through changing seasons. For priests serving in ecclesial settings governed by hierarchical authority, group dynamics, and inherited patterns that often presume normalcy, conformity, and order, the environment can at times become deeply alienating and disempowering. Such conditions may create unexpected saturation points of pain, loneliness, isolation, and helplessness. The paradox is particularly painful as the very ecclesial and relational structures instituted to provide belonging, fraternity, and support can at times become sources of isolation, friction, rivalry, envy, resentment, and tribal and clannish cleavages that become exclusive rather than inclusive. Profound spiritual struggles stem from such experiences. When ecclesial structures fail to adequately hold a priest’s pain or support his holistic growth and personal integration, healthy and life-giving relationships go beyond desire; they become essential. Trust and compassion in spaces where a priest can share without judgment, but rather with guidance and care, are needed for healing and resilience. Five dimensions, one neglected whole Even though these data are from research in the U.S., they also speak to the African context given the recent spike in the number of African priests and religious dying by suicide, and the number of younger priests and religious in Africa dying so young. These data point to a more holistic understanding of priestly health, built around at least five mutually reinforcing dimensions: psychological and emotional well-being; spiritual rootedness; relational and fraternal connectedness; sustainable patterns of work, rest, exercise and physical health; and healthy relationships with ecclesial institutions and leadership. Neglect in one dimension inevitably places pressure on all the others, and in Aba diocese in Eastern Nigeria, it seems the neglect of the fourth dimension is proving catastrophic. A distinctly African weight I find this disparity in overall general health among priests highly personal. I currently direct the African Catholic research component of the Global Formation Project on the spiritual maturity of pastoral agents, an international and ecumenical research initiative led by psychologist David C. Wang of Fuller Theological Seminary and supported by the Templeton Religion Trust and other Templeton foundations. The project studies the human and spiritual formation of Christian leaders across cultures and traditions. Its earlier North American phase followed more than 1,500 seminarians from 18 theological schools over three years, including the extraordinarily stressful period of the COVID-19 pandemic, using more than fifty validated measures of emotional well-being, relationships, vocation, resilience, and the capacity to cope with stress. How can we use this research intentionally? One lesson from this body of research is especially important for priests and religious today: spiritual commitment does not immunize anyone against the psychological consequences of trauma and prolonged stress. Research on religious leaders predating COVID-19 found roughly one-third reporting work-related post-traumatic stress symptoms above clinical thresholds, with more than half falling into a range warranting clinical concern. COVID-19 then provided an extraordinary real-life laboratory for observing how crisis, uncertainty, isolation, loss, and sustained responsibility affect those preparing for religious leadership. This challenge carries a distinctly African weight. Our cultures often place enormous expectations on priests and religious: to be spiritually strong, endlessly available, financially generous, emotionally composed, and able to carry the burdens of entire families, parishes, and communities on their own shoulders. Clerical culture reinforces the dangerous assumption that vulnerability is weakness. Priests

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Understanding the Scope of the Church’s Mandate: Embracing a Pilgrim Consciousness for our Times

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Pilgrimage is not just a spiritual praxis of self-awareness; it is also a sociological mode of being connected with the world beyond a person’s particular context. A pilgrim is also a student. She explores the world that opens up to her in a particular manner with such intensity and a naivete that allows her to soak in the experiences that open up to her senses as she traverses new social terrains. This naivete is grounded in a radical openness to the power of the Holy Spirit who orients the pilgrim to new encounters, awareness and consciousness to allow for new meanings and a sense of purpose to arise in the life of the pilgrim. The experience of the pilgrim is radically a human condition even if one does not ground oneself in the domain of the spiritual. As social beings, each human person is inherently a pilgrim being. As a pilgrim being, the human person navigates the world by being open to all that the social world brings to its consciousness. This is the case even when the human person is opposed to the external influences from social stimuli surrounding her. To reject God or to see God as something to be curious about does not deny the fact that one is inherently a pilgrim being. Only through the curious wandering as a pilgrim does a person become aware of the richness of the life she is called to live and to embrace as part of the constituent marker of her existence. To be a pilgrim is to embody two modes of existence – belonging and not-belonging. By entering the new social world, the pilgrim brings gifts from distant lands and cultures to the society she wanders into. Yet, because the vocation of a pilgrim is to embody a type of existential restlessness that refuses to be held captive by the orthodoxy of sameness, she must embody a not-belonging type of identity that allows her to delink from the orthodoxy of sameness that defines the already encountered world while linking at the same time to new social worlds that open up in the new horizon of encounters. It is these double modes of existence that defined how ancient Romans understood the pilgrim. According to Joan Watson, “Peregrini were those who lived among citizens of Rome but were not citizens themselves. They were protected but did not have the scope of rights accorded to citizens. They lived among citizens easily and usually unpersecuted but still set apart.”1   \” To be a pilgrim is to embody two modes of existence – belonging and not-belonging.” — SimonMary Asese Aihiokhai But what does being a pilgrim have to do with being a church, especially for our times? In response to this question, permit me to invite us to reflect critically on what being a discerning church means from a pneumatological grounding. In His famous work, City of God, Saint Augustine begins by positioning the Christian community – the City of God as a community that “journeys as a pilgrim among sinners and lives by faith”(City of God, Book 1).2 . Augustine’s insight and the general understanding of a pilgrim have hidden qualities that define the pilgrim which are worth exploring. While the focus on a pilgrim within the Christian tradition may tend to shed light on turning away from the sinful realities of the secular world, the pilgrim must first embody a strong sense of discernment to see clearly and truly the world itself before she can decide to set her gaze on the new world that arises in and through a vision of the risen Christ. It is this grounding of discerning consciousness that is attained by the deployment of the senses as the Christian community encounters the world that instantiates the pneumatological turn in the faith life of the community. Furthermore, this entire process serves as the core of being church in the world by the followers of Christ. This point needs further explication. \” The pilgrim must first embody a strong sense of discernment to see clearly and truly the world itself before she can decide to set her gaze on the new world that arises in and through a vision of the risen Christ.” — SimonMary Asese Aihiokhai Christian truths do not fall from the sky. Rather, they develop over time. As John Henry Newman would rightly note, “an idea not only modifies, but is modified, or at least influenced, by the state of things in which it is carried out, and is dependent in various ways on the circumstances which surround it.”3  For Newman, doctrines develop over time and they are shaped through the mediation of human experiences and discernments. This does not mean that doctrines slip into the domain of relativism. Rather, it means that the discerning tool of the Holy Spirit plays out in the concrete context of lived human experiences. An example would suffice here. Belief in Jesus Christ as God did not arise from an abstract domain. It simply arose from the embodied encounters the first followers of Jesus had with Him and through their reflection on those experiences, they embraced the conclusion that only God can manifest what they have experienced in Jesus Christ. Something is worth stating further about human experiences as it pertains to encountering God. Experiences do not arise from the domain of being static. Rather, they arise from embodied encounters that play out in the concreteness of being social beings in a social world. Pilgrimage also resides in this domain of sociality. Consequently, human experiences are intricately linked to being a pilgrim being. Only as a pilgrim person can one speak of experiences that define one both as a being that belongs and as one who does not-belong. In a similar manner, experiences are always having the capacity of linking one to a community or a place or even an identity. They also have the ability to delink one from a community, a place, and identity and orient one

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Judas Iscariot: Betrayer, Catalyst, or Mirror of Ourselves?

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The Shadow in the Garden It was night in Gethsemane. The olive trees stood still, like silent witnesses. The stars, veiled by heavy clouds, withheld their light. In that darkness, a man kissed another man—a gesture of friendship turned into betrayal. The man who received this kiss had just fed Judas a morsel of bread dipped in rich soup—an act of love, honour, and intimacy—even as he knew Judas was already entangled in greed and deceit. That kiss has echoed through the centuries, forever tied to the name Judas Iscariot. To most of Christendom, Judas is the villain of the Passion narrative—the apostle who sold his teacher for thirty pieces of silver, the one who, realizing the weight of his crime, threw the money into the temple and hanged himself in shame. “It would have been better for that man if he had never been born” (Mark 14:21), Jesus said—words that have shaped how generations remember him. But is this the whole story? “Judas is not only the betrayer we condemn—he is the mirror we avoid.” — Augustine Anwuchie The Gospel of Judas In the canonical Gospels, Judas is portrayed in a grim light. He is the outsider among the twelve, the keeper of the moneybag, who—driven by greed or perhaps disillusionment—facilitated the arrest that led to the crucifixion. The traditional Christian understanding is clear: Judas failed not only in betrayal but in despair. Peter denied Jesus, too—but he wept, repented, and returned. Judas despaired and was lost. Yet a question remains: why did Jesus choose him in the first place? Could divine foreknowledge have overlooked Judas’s future? Or was he chosen because he would do the unthinkable? A Saint in the Shadows? Reframing Judas Among the most controversial interpretations in theological history is the idea that Judas may have been a necessary agent in the story of salvation. This view appears in certain Gnostic traditions, particularly in the Gospel of Judas, a 2nd-century Coptic text rediscovered in modern times. There, Judas is not a villain but the disciple who truly understood Jesus. Jesus tells him: “You will exceed all of them. For you will sacrifice the man that clothes me.” (Gospel of Judas, pp. 56–57) In this account, Judas’s act is not treachery but obedience—he alone carries the burden of initiating the events that lead to the cross. Without Judas, there is no crucifixion; without the cross, no resurrection. The Church, however, has never accepted this interpretation, maintaining that Judas acted in freedom and bears responsibility for his betrayal. Still, the question lingers: Could Judas have been the necessary shadow—the one through whom redemption unfolded? “Without Judas, there is no cross; and without the cross, there is no resurrection.” — Augustine Anwuchie Literature’s Reckoning with the Traitor Writers and thinkers have long wrestled with Judas’s legacy. Jorge Luis Borges, in Three Versions of Judas, imagines a theologian who argues that Judas was the true sacrifice—one who embraced eternal infamy as the ultimate act of self-denial. Nikos Kazantzakis, in The Last Temptation of Christ, portrays Judas not as a mere traitor but as a loyal friend who carries out a painful mission at Jesus’ request. These interpretations do not excuse Judas—but they complicate him. They force us to look again, not just at Judas, but at ourselves. The unsettling truth is this: Judas is not only a figure to judge. He is also a mirror. The Question of Betrayal We all betray—sometimes in small ways, sometimes in ways that wound deeply. We betray others, ourselves, and even what we claim to believe. Sometimes it is greed. Sometimes confusion. Sometimes fear. Sometimes a misguided sense of purpose. But the crucial difference is what happens next. Like Peter, we can repent and return. Or like Judas, we can let shame hollow us out until we no longer believe that mercy is possible. And when we are the ones betrayed, we face another choice: to remain trapped in bitterness—or to see even betrayal as part of a larger story, one that may yet lead to healing and renewal. The Unanswered Question Judas Iscariot remains a troubling figure—one we cannot fully explain or dismiss. His story refuses to stay in the past. It confronts us with the reality of freedom, sin, and grace. The question is not simply whether Judas was lost or redeemed. The deeper question is this: When we fall, do we still believe that mercy can reach us? Because in the end, the story of Judas is not only about betrayal. “The real question is not whether Judas was lost, but whether we still believe mercy can reach us when we fall.” — Augustine Anwuchie It is about the terrifying—and beautiful—possibility that even in our darkest moments, grace still waits.

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Did God Create Hell? Part II: A Call to Repentance and Return to God and Love

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Why are people not thinking of hell anymore as they did in the past? Lent is the season when the Church insists that we look steadily at the truth: the truth about our fragility, sin, death, eternity, and God. Lent does not invite us into morbid fear; it invites us into conversion. It calls us back from a life lived on the surface, back from a life that has forgotten eternity. We need to think of the fragility and temporality of life. My reflection on hell is not because I wish to frighten anyone, but rather because I believe that if we place eternity before us, we can never waste any single day. Having eternity before me reminds me of my human finality. It forces me to let go of pride and vain glory because we take nothing with us from this life, except, as we pray at every funeral, the good deeds that go with us. “Reflection on hell is the Church’s call to live responsibly before God in view of eternity.” — Stan Chu Ilo The contemporary forgetfulness of hell is not new. Already in the fourth century, John Chrysostom (c. 349–407), the great Archbishop of Constantinople known as the “Golden-Mouthed,” lamented that Christians of his own time were growing spiritually complacent. Though they feared poverty, illness, or public shame, they seemed indifferent to the eternal destiny of their souls. In his homilies on Matthew and Romans, he warned that people weep over material losses but do not even groan over the loss of their souls. He urged his hearers to keep eternity before their eyes, insisting that meditation on judgment and hell was not meant to terrify but to awaken. For Chrysostom, remembrance of hell was medicinal, a spiritual discipline meant to restore moral seriousness and lead to conversion. The problem, then as now, was not disbelief alone, but forgetfulness—that is, a loss of eschatological consciousness. Reflection on hell is the Church’s call to live responsibly before God in view of eternity. In this second part of my reflection, I examine how the New Testament and early Christian literature use the language of hell, asking whether it should be understood primarily as a serious warning about the terrible consequences of sin rather than as a detailed blueprint of the fate of the reprobate. It is necessary to clarify the key term “hell” as used in mainstream Catholic tradition. In 1979, the Sacred Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith published a brief text, On Certain Questions Concerning Eschatology, at a time when confusion about the last things was spreading in theological circles. Rather than offering speculative details about the architecture of the afterlife, the document reaffirmed the essential structure of the Church’s faith. It recalled that eternal life is communion with Christ, that human freedom has lasting consequences, and that the possibility of definitive self-exclusion from the vision of God cannot be denied without emptying moral responsibility of its seriousness. Hell, in this articulation, is understood above all as deprivation of the sight of God. Hell is a rupture that touches the whole being of the person. At the same time, the document distinguished clearly between this state and the purification of those who die in God’s friendship but are not yet fully conformed to God. Purgatory is ordered toward the beatific vision; hell is the tragic refusal to see God; it is the stubborn turning away permanently from God; the refusal of the human soul to submit to God’s will and ordination of all things. Hell is the state of those who reject God to the last moment of their lives—those who turn their back on God and on their neighbors, and those who cling unrepentantly to sin and evil to the final hour of life. “The doctrine of hell ultimately reminds Christians that love must be freely chosen.” — Stan Chu Ilo The theological balance here is important. The Church safeguards both divine mercy and divine justice. She resists sentimental universalism that dissolves judgment into inevitability, and she resists a crude literalism that imagines eternal punishment in merely spatial or material terms. The Church affirms the boundless love and mercy of God for all sinners. We are reminded that though our sins be as dark as scarlet, God will forgive us. As the prophet Isaiah proclaims:                                                                                                        “Though your sins are like scarlet, they shall be as white as snow; though they are red like crimson, they shall become like wool” (Isaiah 1:18). The only sin that cannot be forgiven is the refusal to admit one’s sins before God, for God cannot forgive what we have not confessed or repented of. As Scripture teaches: “If we confess our sins, he who is faithful and just will forgive us our sins and cleanse us from all unrighteousness” (1 John 1:9) But the one who refuses to acknowledge sin closes the door to mercy, for “Whoever conceals their sins does not prosper, but the one who confesses and renounces them finds mercy” (Proverbs 28:13). God does not impose forgiveness or mercy on us—ask, and you shall receive. Jesus himself reminds us: “Ask, and it will be given to you; search, and you will find; knock, and the door will be opened for you” (Matthew 7:7). For the Lord is always ready to forgive, but he waits for the humble heart that turns back to him. What is central is relational: communion with God or its loss. God does not coerce love, but neither does He trivialize freedom. As the late Archbishop Desmond Tutu once said: “God will freely allow you to go to hell rather than force you into heaven.” Eternity, therefore, is not a figure of speech; it is real. It is the horizon before which our choices stand. It is the opening into the boundless love of God, which is the fulfilment of friendship begun with God here on earth. Friendship with God, which is our vocation, never ceases with death. In the longer

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Lent Is All About Abundance: Embracing the Grace of Saturated Life

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An experience can have the epistemic power of disruption, allowing for a new way of seeing what has become familiar in our lives. This reflection offers some insights into an experience that has initiated a new way of seeing Lent, one that I invite you to explore with me. On the second Sunday of Lent, 2026, I had the pleasure of worshipping at Saint Brendan the Navigator Parish located in Cummings, Georgia. Walking into this beautiful church, one immediately notices its spaciousness. Everything looks new. Yet, what were most disruptive to the imagination were the following: that Sunday was the twenty-fifth anniversary of the parish. One of the auxiliary bishops of Atlanta, Most Reverend John Nhan Tran, along with two priests, including the pastor, and two deacons, served as the ministers at the liturgy. The ceremony had an honorary guard of the Knights of Columbus. The church was packed full. What was most interesting to observe was the number of children playing, crying, and speaking a language that only infants and God can understand. Observing the different generations of humans gathered, one notices a sense of abundance defining the space and season. Yet it was the second Sunday of Lent. How can abundance be associated with Lent? “Lent is never a reality that stands on its own; it points to a relationship of abundance with a God radically defined by saturated life.” — SimonMary Asese Aihiokhai Too often, we are made to think that Lent is all about letting go. It is about a turn to aridity, penance, sacrifice, and frugality as a source of spiritual connection with God. On the first Sunday of Lent, we are even confronted with the gospel reading that locates Jesus in the desert, enduring his symbolic temptations at the hands of the devil after a forty-day fast. With these in mind, one can easily conclude that abundance and Lent are two contradictory realities. But we forget to ask: what does Lent point to? Lent is never a reality that stands on its own. It points to a relationship of abundance with a God that is radically defined by saturated life. Two major motifs that Lent evokes reflect abundance. First, the desert, when viewed superficially, evokes a sense of aridity. A closer look at it reveals a place of abundance that manifests as the resiliency of life. The desert is spacious. It welcomes all who seek to enter it without discrimination. Creatures who live in the desert are radically defined by existential resiliency. They endure even in the face of hardships. Their existence is a reminder to all that life is always rooted in abundance when resiliency is embraced as an existential virtue. “The desert and the spring both reveal the same truth: life persists and flourishes even where scarcity seems to reign.” — SimonMary Asese Aihiokhai Second, it is not accidental that the Church locates the season of Lent within the natural season of Spring. Spring exudes life in abundance. Plants awake from the slumber of Winter. Animals emerge from the caves of hibernation. When one looks around one’s environment during Lent, one notices the beauty of life in all its manifestations. It is during this period that the Church invites itself to journey into a deeper realm of spiritual consciousness and solidarity with all in God’s world. This sense of solidarity is not intended to steal away from the abundance that nature reveals. Rather, it is to lean into it and to show that the sacrifices we embrace during this season are intended to evoke the solidarity of abundance with the God of abundance, who reveals Godself through the abundance inherent in nature. Returning to my experience at Saint Brendan the Navigator Parish at Cummings, Georgia, the tapestry of the community speaks to what God invites us to experience during Lent. We are invited to embrace a vision that is polyphonic, one that allows us to see not just that which we are familiar with. We are asked to see the unfamiliar; a vision that is intended to disrupt our imagination so that the saturated grace of life can be received and shared with all. The crying, playful, and sound-making children offered their own homiletic message along that offered by Bishop Tran as a reminder to us that all sermonic engagement with the Word of God ought to mediate a reminder of who God is – the God of saturated life. Children are a concrete expression of saturated life oriented toward many possibilities. Similarly, the Word of God mediates saturated life that orients its listeners to several pathways for manifesting that gift of God’s life in the world. Abundance not only links us to a saturated life but also disrupts our imagination. It has the capacity to evoke in us a consciousness of beauty. Just like the desert that invites us to embrace its own beauty, which is instantiated through a different pathway, in this case, it is through the resilient existence of all that lives in the desert, the spring season is saturated with beauty. Nature invites us to encounter its content through the dazzling and varied colors of all the creatures it nurtures. These two motifs, intricately linked to Lent, are reminders to us to see Lent as a time of practicing a way of living that exudes abundance. In this case, it is the grace of saturated life. “To receive the grace of saturated life during Lent is to awaken to solidarity with those whose lives are marked by violence, displacement, and suffering.” — SimonMary Asese Aihiokhai Saturated life as a gift that reflects abundance, which God makes possible, has an ethical grounding as well. As Christians who take the reality of Lent seriously, our embrace of life ought to evoke in us as well the consciousness of solidarity with all who may not be experiencing saturated life in their own social contexts. I am particularly conscious of the Palestinian People who have been rendered homeless due to the

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