Shrine to Priest Gets a Festive Dedication

The women with towering stiff silk headdresses fluttered into their seats Saturday afternoon under the white tents outside St. Cecilia’s Catholic Church in South Los Angeles.

Some carried small children dressed in traditional robes or curious babies eager to grab the dangling earrings of women around them.

Others held laminated pictures of Blessed Cyprian Michael Iwene Tansi, a Nigerian priest and Cistercian monk beatified by the Holy See in 1998.

To the women, and to the men clustered nearby, the monk is simply Tansi, the first of their brethren to be raised by the pope to a level one step away from sainthood -- and potentially the first West African to be canonized.

Several hundred Nigerian residents of Southern California celebrated the unveiling of a shrine to Tansi at St. Cecilia’s on Saturday.

Cardinal Francis Arinze, a Nigerian who is chief of liturgy worldwide for the Catholic Church and whom some mention as an eventual candidate for the papacy, officiated at the Mass. The shrine’s completion was timed to coincide with the 10th anniversary of the Nigerian Catholic community in Los Angeles.

“This is us bringing Catholicism out of Nigeria for the first time,” said Delia Egbe, a 43-year-old mother dressed in the blue-and-white colors of the Virgin Mary.

In 1993, Father Michael Ekwutosi Ume became the first Nigerian to be ordained in the Archdiocese of Los Angeles. Soon afterward, he began to celebrate Masses in Igbo, the native tongue of many Nigerian Catholics.

A year later he found a permanent home for the Nigerian community within the mostly Latino parish of St. Cecilia’s. Now, he celebrates a biweekly Mass in Igbo, complete with traditional dancing and singing.

Today he will say Mass with Cardinal Roger M. Mahony and Arinze at the Cathedral of Our Lady of the Angels downtown. The Mass will feature Nigerian children dancing in the liturgical procession.

“We all go home to an American reality,” Ume said Saturday. “But we try to balance it by celebrating our own culture. That is what Tansi is all about: merging the culture of Nigeria and the culture of Europe, so they blend together.” Arinze and Ume were greeted by a welcoming crowd of dancers and honorary village chieftains in tribal dress.

The citations and presentations to Arinze gave way to traditional singing and dancing as a small army of volunteers began to hand out plates of spicy rice, chicken, goat meat and fried plantains.

At the back of the lot, a parishioner manned a table piled high with T-shirts emblazoned with Tansi’s image.

Lady B. Okankwo, dressed in a blue-and-gold costume, was buying a bound program as a friend greeted her with a shout of, “Hey, chief!” She turned with a wide grin and a warm hello in return.

“This is a gift,” she said. “We have such excitement at seeing everybody here, all dressed up.”

As she walked back under the tents, a shimmying conga line of 50 men and women under a banner reading “Mbaise Family Association of Southern California” paraded before Arinze and Mahony. A few had canes, and two nuns were dressed in white satin finery, but all threw their hands up in jubilation as they danced.

Arinze thanked them in a short address that preceded the 5 p.m. Mass, just before the Tansi shrine was unveiled.

“In the Catholic Church, we say no one is a stranger,” he said. “But here you already know that, and you live it.”