PROVIDENCE — The African Catholic Community at the Holy Name Church in Providence on Nov. 11 welcomed home a former parishioner, choir member and theology student who was returning to celebrate his first Mass there as a newly ordained priest.
“My vocation, my ministry, would not have been complete without all of you,” Father Peter Bassey said during his homily.
Father Bassey is one of up to potentially four vocations that have come out of the parish.
Father Bassey became a member of the African Catholic Community upon moving to Providence from Nigeria in January 2013. He sang in the choir, helped train altar servers and took graduate theology classes at Providence College. By the fall of that year he was bound for the seminary in the Diocese of Buffalo in New York, but his short time at the parish left its mark on him.
“They help me and support me prayerfully,” Father Bassey said in an interview with the Rhode Island Catholic. “So I’ve always longed to see the day I can come here to celebrate Mass for them.”
Father Bassey said he chose to move to Buffalo because he was drawn to the challenges of working in a diocese with rough winters and a struggling economy. But he has maintained his ties to the African Catholic Community, coming to visit when he has vacation time. When he was ordained last June, members of the community traveled up to Buffalo to attend the Mass.
After his ordination, Father Bassey was assigned to the Nativity of Our Lord Church in Orchard Park, New York, where he serves as the parochial vicar.
Father Bassey said he began discerning a vocation to the priesthood in Nigeria when he was 9 years old. He attended seminary in the country but decided to slow down his entry into the priesthood when he moved to the United States, in order to better discern whether it was his true calling.
The African Catholic Community supported Father Bassey at a key moment in his vocation discernment, providing stability and direction at a time of great change in his life, according to Father Lazarus Onuh, the chaplain of the community.
“Usually when we have young men coming into the U.S. that first year is always a very challenging year to them,” Father Onuh said. He said he knew of other men who had immigrated from Nigeria to the United States thinking they had a vocation to the priesthood but who, in the first year, ended up pursuing other things.
But Father Bassey’s active participation in the African Catholic Community kept him grounded in his faith and vocation, Father Onuh said.
“The African Catholic Community provided a platform really to discern more properly his vocation,” Father Onuh said, because it “could remind him once again of what his goal is, what his mission in the U.S. was” all the while keeping him “very close to home and to his vocation.”
Father Bassey is just one of several vocations that have been nurtured at Holy Name. The parish currently has three men in seminary, two from the African Catholic Community and one who attended Latin Mass.
“For a small parish to see the beginnings of a realization of what we hope will be a series of vocations I think is wonderful and God-willing it will continue,” said Father Joseph Santos, the pastor at Holy Name.
At the end of Sunday’s Mass, the community presented Father Bassey with a chasuble, so that the community would be with him when he is at the altar celebrating Mass. Afterwards, the community held a luncheon in the parish rectory.
“His coming here today was very, very rewarding and we appreciated his sermon,” said Nicholas Mwah, a member of the community who sang in the choir with Father Bassey.
