Seán Ó Conaill – Jaja’s Question: A Blasphemous Theology?

If Catholic clergy cannot explicitly deny that God the Father needed Jesus to die to restore his lost ‘Honour’ are they silently endorsing and embedding this medieval theology? When this question turns up in a recent Nigerian novel Sean O’Conaill can’t resist speculating about Ireland’s responsibility.

“Of course God works in mysterious ways. Look what he did to his faithful servant Job, even to His own son. But have you ever wondered why? Why did He have to murder his own Son so that we would be Saved? Why didn’t He just go ahead and save us?”

This is the young rebellious Jaja, Nigerian son of a punctilious and abusive Catholic father, Papa Eugene – in the novel Purple Hibiscus (by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie). Deep tragedy stalks the family. Eugene is trapped in post-colonial status anxiety and is never taught to recognise this malady for the sin it truly is. None of the clergy in the novel can rise to that challenge. Instead Eugene gets the front pew in Church as the model Catholic parent he seeks to be. His family must suffer mutely – until in the end a dam breaks.

Is that truly a disgraceful – even a blasphemous – inference: that God the Father sought and arranged the death of Jesus on the Cross? If so why, still, in the Jubilee year of 2025 can that not be emphatically stated, even in Ireland? As that inference occurred in this instance to a Nigerian novelist born in 1977 and raised in a Catholic family, this inevitably suggests that Irish missionary priests were complicit in its arrival in Nigeria. Even today the Catechism of the Catholic Church of 1994 is most easily understood as verifying it (CCC 615). The abusive patriarch that Adichie describes is by all accounts an archetypal African scourge, so a theology of abusive patriarchy – of a Father God also bound to protect his own ‘honour’ by sacrificing his son –  is easily assimilable.     

Jesus proves otherwise by showing not the slightest sign of status anxiety himself – in any of the Gospel accounts – but this has still to be seen. Clerical status anxiety insists that St Anselm’s ‘satisfaction’ theology of atonement must remain embedded, the permanent ball and chain that both hobbles mission and empowers reaction. Jesus’ celibacy remains the diagnostic sign of his holiness – not his refusal to join in the endless human game of ‘shame or be shamed’. His claim to have ‘overcome the world’ – i.e. the fear of what people will think – goes unnoticed, even at the zenith of the global attention economy – and so does the origin of all xenophobic victimisation in the status anxiety of the mob.    

‘Sshh! Don’t say such things!’ No wonder Irish clergy have a phobia of theology, when the implications of a medieval theory that St Patrick knew nothing about are too troubling to speak about. That the Trinity could be bent instead upon freeing us from all fear of ‘what people think’ will probably be left to the novelists to reveal in the end. Even in Africa now people are reading René Girard – so it needn’t be true that any African clergy arriving here must be trapped in St Anselm’s mistake. 

But what exactly are our own young seminarians learning and thinking – and saying – these times, about the reason Jesus died on the cross?