There is an old adage which says ‘’Once Beaten, Twice Shy’’ It can certainly not be more relevant anywhere else, than it should be in the present mystery which is virtually overwhelming the Catholic Church in Cameroon. With the constantly unexplained mysterious deaths of four Catholic Bishops, we can only see the Christian family in Cameroon and the world at large, particularly the Catholic
community, reserving a special place in their lives to continue to sing songs of condolences, for the recurrent demise of their spiritual leaders, unless this mystery is sorted out and destroyed. Yet we think the Catholic Church in Cameroon has been beaten more than twice, which is enough to enable them to resist that spate of shyness that has eclipsed the mystery that surrounds the Church and is about to bring its reputation to question. Having faced one ugly situation four times no longer justifies silence but rather action. In the first place the question is, why Catholic Bishops?
The first time the Catholic Church experienced the death of their Bishops was in the early 60s, when the Ahidjo regime implicated Mgr. Albert Ndongmo, then Bishop of Nkongsamba, in a case where he was accused of collaborating with terrorists. He was tried at a Military Tribunal in Yaounde and sentenced to death. The sentence was later commuted to life imprisonment. In his case, though his death later in exile in Canada also bore similar circumstances of mystery, it was well known that Mgr Albert Ndongmo was no longer in the good books of the regime.
The second such unexplained killings involved another Bishop, Mgr Yves Plumy of Garoua. Mgr Yves’s death, though it raised a number of questions, was shrouded in similar circumstances. The matter seemed to have died down just like that and only gave the perpetrators the leeway for further under cover of their activities. It was not until Pope John Paul II visited Cameroon later that he questioned the cause of the Bishop’s death. We still wonder till today whether the Pope ever got any explanation to his enquiry. Certainly he did not. Our doubt still goes even farther, whether government took the Pontiff’s question seriously.
Next in that line was the Archbishop of Yaounde, Mgr Victor Tonye Bakot. The Arch Bishop barely survived a ghastly motor accident, after which he gave up his job under unexplained reasons. He is being honoured today by reference to him as the Emeritus Archbishop of Yaounde. This too is still an unsolved riddle which no one seems to have had the courage or mere concern to follow up and throw some light through darkness in the Church. Perhaps the most baffling is the recent death of Mgr Bernoit Bala, the Bishop of Bafia. The news broke out with rumours of his disappearance and the discovery of his car by the bridge over the Sanaga River. As rumours continued to develop into truths and half truths, it was reported that a note was found in the car which indicated that the purported author was in the water.
Without bothering much about all such details which may only mislead us from the track of the truth about this other mysterious death of another Bishop, strengthens our conviction that all this is not normal and there is more than the ordinary eye is capable of seeing. This perception even makes things more and more difficult to see through this mystery. In the spirit of love on which the Christian faith is founded, the best we can wish is that may this not happen again, with the strong belief also that there is nothing that can be hidden under the sun. May the Catholic family in Cameroon accept our sincere condolences.