Chimamanda Reflects on Pope Francis Ideals on her Dream for the Nigerian Catholic Church

Award-winning Nigerian author, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, has called on the Catholic Church in Nigeria to key into some of the ideals of Pope Francis’s Encyclical ‘Fratelli Tutti’ on how to build human fraternity-social love, equality, solidarity, and citizenship.

In an in-depth article published in the weekly edition of the Vatican Newspaper, L’Osservatore Romano, Adichie laid out how she was once a “self-styled Catholic apologist,” how she started having doubts and how “years later, something changed. My pious passion withered”

Pope Francis’s new encyclical is a papal warning about a world going backward.

He suggests ways in which we can build a more just, peaceful world, one in which we recognise another other as brothers and sisters of one human family.

Adichie, who is one not to shy from her Catholic background, in one of her landmark novels: ‘Purple Hibiscus’, also explores the inner workings of the Catholic Church in South-eastern Nigeria. It teaches the consequences of fanaticism and its impact on the family and society at large.

Now Adichie has welcomed the Fratelli Tutti as an important contribution and advocates that it should spark a “change in the church’s relentless prioritising of law over love.

“Something deeply human in us awakens, and thrives, in the face of love and kindness, and that humanness is the route to the spiritual.”

Building on the social teachings of this important document from the Pontiff, the author cautions the Catholic Church in Nigeria to rethink its activities and disposition towards money, fundraising, and classism.

Adichie also advises that the gestures of the Catholic Church in Nigeria towards women should reflect clearly that women possess the same dignity and identical rights as men. This has not always been the case and she recounts instances where “On Sundays, women of all ages were often harassed, men barring their entry into the church unless they wrapped themselves in shawls to hide their shoulders and arms (which apparently would cause men in the church to sin.)

“Entire homilies were dedicated to the wiles and evils of women. How unsettling to sit through Mass feeling as though one, simply by being born female, had become inherently guilty of a crime.”

The writer’s article is a wakeup call to the church in Nigeria that without engaging some of these issues that women face and prioritising love over law, social friendship will fail the test of its own and lose out on a critical opportunity to recognise the dignity of all under the body of Christ.

According to her, “Nigeria society is deeply religious, easily superstitious and full of economic uncertainty. Because of these conditions, people will attend Mass from habit and from fear, but it is genuine social friendship that will bring those who attend simply from love, and it is those who will finally be able to dream as a single human family.”