A Nigerian diocesan bishop has warned that the “moral authority” of the Church in Europe has been undermined by the “embrace of secular power”.
Missionaries were once sent from Europe to Africa, but now the relationship is a two-way street with African clergy often having to assist European dioceses due to lack of clergy numbers amid a more general decline of the Faith in the West.
For Bishop Matthew Hassan Kukah of the Diocese of Sokoto in northern Nigeria, the Church must recall the Apostolic days and the spirit of the first bishops. “We should continue to ask ourselves why and how a group of eleven frightened and largely uneducated men would have taken the gospel to the ends of the earth as the apostles did?,” he said during a recent interview with Catholic World Report.
