“This workshop will empower them and allow them to be able to integrate properly into their work so that they don't get frustrated and so that they will be happy missionaries and also so that they can bring that good news to the people they are working with,” Fr. Okoli said.
Established to prioritize first evangelization contexts, marginalized individuals and groups, and “places where the Church has difficulty in finding workers,” the Spiritans pioneered Catholic evangelization in Kenya. The first missionaries arrived in the coastal town of Mombasa in 1889.
Credit: ACI Africa
Claude François Poullart des Places, a native of France who gave up the practice of law to study for the Priesthood founded a community for youthful men with the wish to become Priests in 1703. He dedicated the community to the Holy Spirit, calling it the Congregation of the Holy Spirit.
Some 150 years later, François Marie Paul Libermann, a converted Jew, established another religious family also in France, bearing the name, the Congregation of the Immaculate Heart of Mary, thus the official name of Spiritans, the “Congregation of the Holy Spirit under the protection of the Immaculate Heart of Mary”.
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As of April 2024, there were 2,714 Spiritans across the globe. These included 532 Spiritans, were continuing with their initial formation; they were from 62 circumscriptions, according to the Superior General, Fr. Alain Mayama.
Sharing the statistics in his Pentecost 2024 message, Fr. Mayama reported that for every 10 Spiritans, seven “come from 25 circumscriptions in Africa”, comprising 1,906 members (70.23%).
Credit: Holy Ghost Fathers/Nairobi
The first African Spiritan Superior General also reported that for every 10 Spiritans in initial formation program, nine were from Africa.
He added, “Perhaps more striking is the fact that of the 532 professed scholastics, 480 come from Africa (90.23%); 1 from Europe (0.19%), 10 from the Indian Ocean (1.88%); 1 from North America (0.38%); 9 from South America (1.69%); 8 from the Caribbean (1.50%); 22 from Asia (4.14%)” and none from Oceania.
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The native of the Central African nation of Congo-Brazzaville, who was elected the Spiritan Superior General during the three-week 21st General Chapter of the Spiritans held in Bagamoyo, then in Tanzania’s Catholic Diocese of Morogoro from 3 October 2021, noted that “while ‘mission lands’ no longer know borders, northern circumscriptions have in turn become mission lands.”
“A new phase in the Spiritan mission has begun. Approximately 235 confreres, working in the Northern Hemisphere, come from Africa, Asia, the Indian Ocean, the Caribbean and South America,” he said, adding, “We welcome this novelty, which is a gift from God, with faith and hope.”
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In the May 28 interview with ACI Africa, Fr. Okoli recalled the impact of the Spiritan capacity building initiative of the Spiritan General Council, which he said has been going on for the last three years.
“I've had the opportunity to move around to give this workshop and there are many success stories. One of them would be Tanzania,” he said, and explained, “We gave this workshop last year and as I'm talking to you now, we feel that there's a lot of improvements in the work they do both in the area of project writing, project implementation and also in the area of advocacy.”
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Referring to the protracted controversies around the eviction of a section of the Maasai community from what the Tanzanian-based tribe considers its ancestral land, but which is in Wildlife Conservancy Areas in the Northern part of the East African nation, Fr. Okoli said the Spiritans in the East African nation were actively participating in advocacy initiatives in favor of the Maasai thanks to the Spiritan capacity building programs realized in the country last year.
“You will have heard recently about the whole issue about Maasai people being chased away from their land. We are happy that our Spiritans stood by Maasai people and through their knowledge of advocacy, they are able to help the Maasai people to articulate their own challenges to the higher authority even up to Rome and up to the United Nations,” he said.
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Asked to share his thoughts about the need for capacity building in project management, implementation and ways of addressing sustainability challenges in Institutes of Consecrated Life and Societies of Apostolic Life (ICLSAL) in Africa, Fr. Okoli confirmed the reality of gaps in a section of ICLSAL and the need and possibility to realize trainings of their members.
“Many of the missionaries have this gap and many are also far ahead better than us. But what we have noticed is that these gaps can be filled,” the Coordinator of the Spiritan Central Development Office told ACI Africa.
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He added, “As you know, Africans are now becoming missionary to themselves. The aim of this project writing is not to continue relying on donors; we are aiming at sustainable development, a development that will allow African missionaries to be self-sufficient, to be able to look after themselves and reduce the whole impact of donors on us.”
Referring to the USAID cuts, which the U.S. President announced earlier this year, Fr. Okoli said, “It's a big lesson, an eye-opener to the countries in Africa but also for us missionaries to know that one day similar things can also happen.”
Credit: Holy Ghost Fathers/Nairobi
“Our aim now is that in the next four years, before our General Chapter, to encourage our confreres that we look at project sustainability,” the Nigerian-born Spiritan Priest said.
Paying attention on sustainability entails reflecting on some question, including, “How are these projects going to be sustainable? When this money no longer comes from Europe and America, how can we ourselves now be able to have projects that can be sustained” he said.
Credit: Holy Ghost Fathers/Nairobi
Fr. Okoli expressed optimism about sustainability among a section of Spiritan initiatives, saying, “It's happening; it's already happening in some places.”
“Like in Kenya, some Christian communities, some Parishes that are well-to-do are now helping those that are not well-to-do,” he said, referring to the initiative of twinning Parishes.
Credit: Holy Ghost Fathers/Nairobi
He lauded the annual Spiritan Family Day, a fundraising initiative in the Province of Kenya and South Sudan, saying that the “main aim” of the event scheduled for June 13 “is to target those who have so that what they have can be used for those who don't have and for our formation.”
Meanwhile, speaking to ACI Africa on the sidelines of the May 28 Spiritan workshop, Fr. Francis Selasi expressed interest in the capacity building initiative as an opportunity to grow skills that he can implement in his Parish ministry.
Fr. Francis Selasi. Credit: ACI Africa
Fr. Selasi said he looked forward to gaining skills in “successful” project proposal writing, and exposure to partners in carrying out projects.
Ministering in a Kenyan semi-arid context characterized with scarcity of water, the Ghanaian-born Spiritan Priest based at Katheka Catholic Parish of Machakos Diocese expressed optimism about operationalizing the skills from the project management and implementation training.
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The people of God at Katheka Parish, he said, are farmers who plant maize. Identifying and reaching out to partners, who can support irrigation would be helpful, Fr. Selasi said, adding that the people of God also lack safe drinking water.
“The world is all about development. So, knowing about development will help a lot to make the world move on in a positive direction,” he told ACI Africa, describing the one-day training as “a good initiative.”
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In the May 28 interview, Fr. Okoli explained his other mission in Kenya, which he said involved the official opening of the Spiritan Pipeline Apartments in the Eastlands area of Nairobi under Embakasi Constituency.
The Rome-based Spiritan explained that the apartment, which Bishop John Mbinda of Kenya’s Catholic Diocese of Lodwar, the first-ever Kenyan Spiritan Bishop, blessed on May 27 is an initiative of the Kenya and South Sudan Spiritan Province.
Credit: Holy Ghost Fathers/Nairobi
The apartment, he said, is “a project of self-reliance, a project of apartments that we earn some income to support our mission and to support our formation.”
Credit: Holy Ghost Fathers/Nairobi
“This project has taken us about three to four years now and we're happy that we're able to bring it to completion and very soon people will move in,” Fr. Okoli, who officially opened the eight-storey building comprising 58 studios and 12 one-bedroom units told ACI Africa.
Credit: Holy Ghost Fathers/Nairobi
In the May 28 interview, Fr. Okoli reflected on the transition from the late Pope Francis to Pope Leo XIV, highlighting some of the accomplishments of the former.
Credit: Holy Ghost Fathers/Nairobi
“God has been faithful to the Church. Pope Francis brought in new ideas to the Church. Pope Francis made the church become more relevant with his project ideas, his Encyclical Letters and other writings that opened our eyes to the plight of poverty,” he said.
The Rome-based Spiritan Priest particularly recalled the late Pope Francis’ 24 May 2015 Encyclical Letter on care for our common home, Laudato Si’, saying the document addressed the challenge of climate change, including “how climate can bring poverty.”
Credit: Holy Ghost Fathers/Nairobi
The recent election of Pope Leo XIV, he went on to say, “is a great joy because we have another Religious, another missionary-oriented Pontiff, who also will have more concern and good attention to the poor.”
“For me I think we all, as Christian missionaries, we should key into this new era, into this new era of evangelization, where we have been called that we should be shepherds that the sheep can hear our smell, not shepherds who are far up there,” Fr. Okoli told ACI Africa, recalling the late Pope Francis’ memorable image that “shepherds should smell like their sheep.”
ACI Africa’s Editor-in-Chief, Fr. Don Bosco Onyalla, is a member of the Spiritans.
ACI Africa was founded in 2019. We provide free, up-to-the-minute news affecting the Catholic Church in Africa, giving particular emphasis to the words of the Holy Father and happenings of the Holy See, to any person with access to the internet. ACI Africa is proud to offer free access to its news items to Catholic dioceses, parishes, and websites, in order to increase awareness of the activities of the universal Church and to foster a sense of Catholic thought and culture in the life of every Catholic.
Fr. Kenneth Okoli. Credit: ACI Africa
Credit: ACI Africa
Credit: ACI Africa
Credit: ACI Africa
Credit: ACI Africa
