A Catholic Priest has charged Catholic Knights, Christians to invade the country’s political space and magnify it with Christian values.
The Parish Administrator St Mary Pro-Cathedral, Calabar, Rev Fr. Evaristus Bassey said this in a statement issued to some newsmen after the visit of the Supreme Knight of St Molumba, Sir Diamond Ovueraye in the occasion of the 4th Degree investiture of Knights.
“With your spiritual empowerment as given by the knighthood, brothers and sisters should ensure they permeate the secular society and infuse Christian values in politics and. Knights should be like catalysts, or yeasts, who in this sense would magnify catholic social principles”, he said.
“Our faith must assist us in the transformation of unjust structures, in the formulation of pro-poor policies, in the equitable distribution of resources and in the efficient and effective delivery of services” Bassey stated adding, “Knights should invade the political arena and infuse these values because it is only the Christian that ordinarily has a sense of justice and respect for everyone’s dignity and rights irrespective of their faith or ethnicity.
“Adherents of other faiths struggle with accepting other human beings as equal and giving them their due. We have to change the trajectory”.
He said Catholic Social principles urge everyone, especially the Catholic to be “biased towards the poor and defend the weak, to respect human dignity, to strive for the common good, to promote solidarity among peoples, to empower smaller groups and defend their autonomy, and to defend the right of every human being and to do justice.
“Our Christian faith should not be restricted to the private personal sphere. It must also reflect in the public space”.
He said “the newly inducted Knights who attain this level are in a certain sense seen as those who have passed through the fire and have been refined, not merely to glitter as gold, but permanently oriented towards aligning with Christ in his passion and resurrection.
“Indeed every step of the initiation should be seen as a deeper passage by way of the Cross. We cannot dispense of the Cross, it is the other side of the coin, and the other side is the Resurrection”.
