Department of Church and Society, CSN

People masquerading as Catholic Priests and other Church agents are having a field day in the West African nation of Nigeria owing to gaps in communication between Parishes, the Local Ordinary of the country’s Catholic Diocese of Oyo has said.
According to Bishop Emmanuel Adetoyese Badejo, better and quick communication between Catholic Parishes in the country could ensure that fraudsters do not move from station to station, extorting innocent people.

Bishop Badejo recalled encountering a man who presented himself at the Diocese, pretending to have been sent by the Catholic Secretariat of Nigeria to provide health services in his Episcopal See.

At one Parish in the Diocese, the man managed to raise funds from people without the permission of the Parish Priest, Bishop Badejo said in the September 4 interview.
He continued, “Before people realized they were being deceived, the man disappeared and went to Ibadan, some four kilometers away. But he didn’t manage to deceive the people in Ibadan because I had circulated the information about him by the time he got there, and he was arrested.”

There are fake people all over the place because of poverty and many other challenges we have. That is why we must up our game to be at par with those who are trying to ruin the image of the Church.

To curb the trend, Bishop Badejo suggests that authorities in Nigeria ensure that the law against impersonation is designed to work.
“Unfortunately, laws are not made to work in most of our societies,” Bishop Badejo said, adding that the Church must also help herself by training her agents and giving them the necessary identification.

According to the Local Ordinary of Oyo Diocese, the Church must also improve its network of information.
“People masquerade as Catholic Priests in one Parish and, when they are discovered, they move to the next Parish where they continue to exploit the people,” he said, and added, “If we can improve our network of communication, and share information a bit more, the issue of people masquerading as something they are not could diminish.”
Recently, an alarm was raised about two men who went about, clad as Catholic Priests. It later emerged that they belonged to a certain ‘Old Catholic Apostolic Church’.
In another incident, the Local Ordinary of Nigeria’s Catholic Diocese of Lokoja ordained four men, who presented themselves as Seminarians before it later emerged that they were fraudsters.

In yet another reported incident, a certain Mother Mario allegedly went about obtaining money from families of young girls who she enrolled in her unauthorized “religious congregation”.