Meet the First Native Nigerian Priest

More than 1,000 Nigerian priests are serving outside Nigeria, mostly in the West, making up for the shortfall of vocations in many Dioceses.

From Aleteia

By Ray Cavanaugh

Today, there are more than 1,000 Nigerian priests serving outside of their homeland. But the first Nigerian priest was ordained only in 1920.

Nigeria has emerged as one of the world's leading sources of priests, helping to fill many vacancies left by declining numbers of seminarians in Western nations. But Nigeria did not have its first native Catholic priest until the 1920 ordination of Fr. Paul Emechete. 

When Emechete was born in southern Nigeria in 1888, Catholic missionaries had recently arrived in his hometown. From an early age, he came into contact with the Church through mission schools and traveling catechists. Despite coming from a background rooted in a regional traditional religion, he was baptized into the Catholic faith in 1898. Some 16 of his relatives — including his father while on his deathbed — would also convert to Catholicism. 

As a young man, Emechete ventured away from his local community to find a higher-paying job in order to help his widowed mother. While working for a merchant, he was accused of fraud and imprisoned. His jail, however, was close to a local Catholic mission. And repeatedly hearing a church bell while incarcerated led him to reflect deeply on what he wanted upon regaining his freedom. 

Having served his time, Emechete returned to the Catholic mission and hit the books with a vengeance, soaking in theology, philosophy, and Latin. Receiving minor orders in 1914, he became a deacon in October 1919.

The regional bishop at that time, Thomas Broderick of Ireland, had written a letter stating that he had found a native man who was a suitable candidate for the priesthood. Such a letter might seem mundane by today's standards, but in that era it was rather a radical statement. 

Fr. Emechete was ordained by Bishop Broderick in the southern Nigerian city of Asaba on January 6, 1920. 

Homeland in heaven

Though the ordination was a significant event in Church history, it was not treated as anything special at the time. There were no newspaper headlines or large-scale acknowledgment that anything special had taken place. 

But the Church was indeed evolving, whether or not everyone was aware. Emechete's ordination came just several weeks after Pope Benedict XV's apostolic letter, Maximum illud, which stressed the importance of forming indigenous clergy when it came to missionary work. The goal was not to establish missions in faraway lands. Rather, it was for Western missionaries to eventually be able to withdraw after having enabled the indigenous peoples to thrive on their own. 

The papal letter was issued in the immediate aftermath of WWI — a time when nationalist sentiments were still running high. The Pontiff was concerned that some Western missionaries might focus too much on the “interests of their terrestrial homeland” and overlook the interests of “their homeland in heaven.”

Comfortably distanced from the jagged European political landscape, Fr. Emechete could devote himself entirely to serving in his homeland. Fluent not only in English and Latin but also in the region's three main ethnic languages, he operated effectively in several parts of Nigeria over a period of two decades. 

By the time of his death in 1948, he had left an example that paved the way for thousands of Nigerian priests. 

Now in the third Christian millennium, Nigerian priests have a central role in serving as “reverse missionaries” to the very same countries that previously brought the faith to their ancestors. 

In 2025, the national director of the Pontifical Mission Societies in Nigeria reported that there were over 1,000 Nigerian priests and religious serving abroad. So, in less than one century, the Church in Nigeria has gone from being dependent on missionaries to being a major exporter of them. 

It is safe to say that this sharp turn of circumstances would have startled both Fr. Emechete and the bishop ordaining him.