Adichie Explains Alienation from Catholicism, Alleges Harassment of Women

Funmi Ogundare

Award-winning novelist, Chimamanda Adichie has explained why she separated herself from Catholicism even as she alleged the church harasses women.
Adichie revealed this in an article titled, “Dreaming as a Single Family” published in the latest edition of the L’osservatore Romano weekly bulletin, released on Friday.

Adichie had, in January 2021, explained why she stopped attending Catholic churches in Nigeria. She had also criticised the community’s activities as being “too much about money, fundraising, and thanksgiving”.

In her latest piece, however, Adichie wrote: “I was raised Catholic, on the campus of the University of Nigeria. We attended a love-filled church run by the Spiritan congregation.

“As a teenager, I wore my Catholic identity like a favorite dress, joyfully and reverently. I was a self-styled Catholic apologist, arguing passionately with the Protestant children in defense of such subjects as the Blessed Virgin Mary, tradition, and transubstantiation.”

The award-winning writer, who is popularly known for her feminist views, attributed her first sign of alienation to the treatment of females in the church.

“Years later, something changed. My pious passion withered. I remember my first moment of recoil from the church, when a gentle and devout couple was banned from communion because their daughter had married an Anglican.
“It felt to me not only uncharitable, but unnecessarily so, as did other subsequent incidents, such as poor people who were refused burials because they owed money to the church.

“This happened in my ancestral hometown, in a provincial parish far from the university campus where I grew up. But after the Spiritans left, an uncharitable chill also descended on my university church,” she said.
Adichie claimed women were often harassed and made to feel uncomfortable.

She said: “Women of all ages were often harassed, men baring 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.

“My alienation deepened; I had become a person in a place that my spirit had outgrown. Even if I attended Mass from time to time, it brought no meaning. And I’ve come to believe that meaning is what makes life worthwhile.”