After a year of disagreements and delays, the ordination of the proposed new Bishop of Makeni, Monsignor Henry Aruna will now take place on the 5January 2013 in Freetown, according to a letter signed by the Archbishop of Freetown, the most Rev. Dr. Edward Tamba Charles of the Freetown Archdiocese. He was acting on the advice of the Apostolic Nuncio, the Vatican's Ambassador to Sierra Leone and Liberia who is based in Monrovia.
In the letter addressed to the president of the Archdiocesan Inter Parish Pastoral Council, the Rev. Father Vincent Davies, the Archbishop requests for “an emergency meeting of the Inter Parish Pastoral Council (IPCC) to start organising ourselves...”
He stresses that the Apostolic Nuncio “wants us to pay particular attention to the spiritual and pastoral aspects of the ordination”. But he gives no details.
Well now the Laity Council members say they will have none of it. In a letter t the nuncio, George Antonysammy, they say it is “totally unacceptable” to them to have the Bishop-elect.
“..the lay faithful hereby categorically state that we are not accepting him in any way for various reasons...” They say the announcement of his name was leaked and known before it was made, the process of selection was tampered with, the process of his appointment “did not take into cognizance of the sensitivity of the historical, cultural and traditional factors involved”. They also say that the composition of the Conference of Bishops of Sierra Leone is not representative of the different regions of the country with the makeni diocese “totally deprived of due representation”.
They state that they will not accept him “in any way to be shepherd of the Makeni Diocese”.
The letter stresses that their stance is in no way tribal but goes on to say that “the sensitivty of this issue was clearly manifested in the just concluded Presidential and general elections”.
The Laity Council had also rejected the initial naming of Father Aruna on grounds that “for the past fifty years, no local representative from the Church in Makeni has held a senior position of the rank of a Bishop even though it has many qualified and competent priests within the Diocese” and that “there was no geopolitical consideration in the appointment of Father Aruna as Bishop of Makeni in spite of the fact that the Diocese of Makeni has many qualified priests”.
Bishop Aruna will replace the Italian, George Biguzzi who retired at the end of 2011 after decades of service in Sierra Leone and will be the first Sierra Leonean to fill the post.
