The Rev. Chrispin Oneko, having led one of his first Sunday Masses at his new American parish, was feeling content until he discovered several small notes left by his parishioners.The notes, all anonymous, conveyed the same message: Father, please make your homilies shorter.
One said that even five minutes was too long for a mother with children.
At home in Kenya, Oneko had preached to rural Africans who had walked for hours to get to church and would have been disappointed if the sermons were brief.
"Here the whole Mass is one hour," he said, a broad smile on his round face. "That was a homework for me, to learn to summarize everything and make the homily 10 minutes, maybe 15. Here, people are on the move very fast."
Oneko is part of a wave of Roman Catholic priests from Africa, Asia and Latin America who have been recruited to fill empty pulpits in parishes across the United States. They arrive knowing how to celebrate Mass, anoint the sick and baptize babies. But few are prepared for the challenges of being a pastor in this country.
Oneko, 46, had never counseled parishioners like those he found at St. Michael the Archangel Catholic Church in Oak Grove, Ky., near the Army's Fort Campbell. Many are active-duty or retired military families coping with debt, racial prejudice, multiple deployments to war zones and post-traumatic stress disorder.
Nor did he have any idea how to lead the multimillion-dollar fundraising campaign that the parishioners had embarked on, hoping to build an octagonal church with a steeple to replace their red-brick parish hall.
Cutting his sermons short was, in some ways, the least of Oneko's worries when he arrived in 2004. He did not understand the black American experience. He had never dealt with laypeople so involved in running their church. And yet, the families of his church would come to feel an affinity with their gentle new pastor, reaching out to him in his hour of need, just as he had tended to them in theirs.
To the volunteers at St. Michael's, it was clear that Oneko was out of his element in many ways.
Marie Lake, the church's volunteer administrator, and her husband, Fred, often invited him for dinner. "My husband was driving him down 41-A, and there was a big old statue of Uncle Sam," said Mrs. Lake, who owns an accounting business and keeps the church's books. "He thought it was Sam from Sam's Club wholesale."
To help Oneko along, the Lakes gave him a high-school textbook on U.S. history and government.
"Many years ago, we sent our missionaries to Africa, and now they're sending missionaries here," Mrs. Lake said. "It's strange how that goes."
In the largely rural, largely white area of western Kentucky, the Rev. Darrell Venters, who is in charge of recruiting priests for the Diocese of Owensboro, knew that some of his parishes would never accept Oneko, who is short, stout and very dark-skinned.
But Venters thought of St. Michael's, with its racial mix and many families who had lived abroad.
"We knew if any parish would accept him, it would be this one," he said.
Inspired to serve
When Oneko was growing up, the priest in his Roman Catholic parish was an American who spoke the native Luo language and was beloved by the villagers. He showed the children home movies of his parents and his seminary back in America.
"He inspired me," Oneko said. "He was able to speak my language better than anybody I have known. It really interested me, the way I saw him praying the rosary every day. I just admired to be like him."
In Kenya, Oneko became the sole pastor for 12 satellite parishes in an 80-mile stretch. He later served in Jamaica.
Oneko arrived at St. Michael's on the heels of a Nigerian priest who had helped out temporarily. Oneko said he was unnerved to hear that the Nigerian had not been a resounding success.
Parishioners complained that they could not understand his accent.
An American pastor said the Nigerian had seemed overly interested in material goods. When an ophthalmologist offered to fit him for glasses at no charge, he asked for three pairs.
But parishioners soon noticed that Oneko was different. He listened and won people over with his humility. He preached slowly, in his Kenyan accent: "Late us prrray." Sometimes he spelled out words when he saw the congregation looking puzzled. "B-I-R-D, not B-E-D," he said.
He did not tell the parishioners that in Kenya and Jamaica, he had been a charismatic Catholic, participating in faith healings and leading Masses with spirited singing and clapping that lasted for hours. In Kentucky, he stuck to the music the congregation was used to.
Some afternoons, the church's deacon, Jack Cheasty, would see Oneko sitting alone at the piano in a corner of the church, quietly playing the upbeat charismatic hymns he loved. "He's cautious to do anything that might be divisive," Cheasty said, "and that's one of his strengths."
Tending the flock
Oneko was making house calls recently, giving Communion to three parishioners too ill to come to church. At the first house, he was offered a seat in an armchair, but instead he chose to sit on a rumpled couch next to his ailing parishioner, SunI Robbins, so frail from lung cancer that she could barely sit up. She opened trembling hands to receive the Eucharist.
"Don't lose hope," Oneko said gently, "because we all love you. ... The whole church, we are all praying for you. Just trust in God's mercy and love." (She has since died.)
Later in his car, he said that Africans are far more accustomed to death -- and premature death -- than Americans. In Kenya, he said, many parents are used to having children die. In Africa, he said, "We just accept it."
He drove to the home of one of the church's founding members, Shirley Korman.
Korman, a retired nurse who has congestive heart failure, said that after her husband died, Oneko comforted her and led a moving funeral.
"Father Chrispin," she said, "if you're still here in Kentucky, I want you to come and do my funeral."
His answer was gentle: "I hope to still see more of you, but if it happens, I will fulfill your request."
On the way out, after passing a portrait of Confederate Gen. Robert E. Lee, Oneko spied a statue of a guardian angel on the kitchen table. The angel was a beautiful woman in flowing robes, and she was black.
"I haven't seen one like that before!" Oneko exclaimed, delighted.
Bidding farewell
In June, after four years at St. Michael's, Oneko was transferred as part of a routine reshuffling of priests in the diocese. When he told the worshippers at a Mass about the transfer, some cried. Several told him that they would leave the church. He said: "Don't come to the church because of me. Come because of God."
He insisted that he did not want a big goodbye party because he was afraid he would cry. Still, he was showered with gifts: calling cards; a white chasuble from the Silver Angels club of elders, hemmed for his short frame; a $1,500 check from the parish for his coming trip to see his family in Kenya; and from Korman, a replica of the black angel he had seen on her kitchen table.
He was leaving the parish no more and no less healthy than he had found it. Attendance still fluctuated from 300 to 450 on a weekend -- lower in summer and during troop mobilizations.
In one of his last official acts, he baptized an 11-month-old baby.
The mother, Jennifer Banse, had been waiting for this moment for months. Her husband had just returned from Iraq, in time for Oneko to perform the baptism before he transferred. In her husband's absence, Oneko had been a comfort.
In the ceremony, the infant, Hope Charity Banse, rested her head on her mother's shoulder, then stretched her hand toward the African priest, who was more familiar to her than her own father.
"Hope Charity," Oneko said, "the Christian community welcomes you with great joy."
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Sotto Voce
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