Former child soldier from Nigeria celebrates 25 years serving as priest

Image: Stephen D. Cannerelli/The Post Standard

By Sarah Moses/The Post Standard/Syracus

Salina, NY -- The Rev. Ejike Innocent Onyenagubo was 12 years old when he made a life-changing promise to God.

“There was a civil war for three years in Nigeria, and I was fighting the war at the age of 12,” he said. “I prayed, promising if I survived the war I would give my life to service God and his people. I prayed for my family to survive, too.”

Onyenagubo, who is known by many as Father Innocent, said about 2 million people died in the war. His family survived and he kept his promise. Earlier this month, Father Innocent celebrated 25 years as an ordained Catholic priest.

Father Innocent, 57, was born and raised in Nigeria. The civil war lasted from 1967 to 1970, and he fought for about two years in the conflict. After the war was over, he was reunited with his family and went back to school. “There was the temptation not to continue with education,” he said.

But he did, and while he was in secondary school, which is similar to high school, he said he remembered his promise to God. “I went to the pastor of my parish and I asked him to show me the way to get to the seminary,” he said.

After 10 years in the seminary, he was ordained in the Diocese of Owerri as a priest in 1986. He served for a number of years as a priest and pastor in several different parishes in Nigeria. “Then one day the bishop called me and told me I was going on a mission,” Father Innocent said. “He told me I was going to Syracuse and I said, ‘Where is it?’”

In 1999, Father Innocent arrived in Syracuse to serve as the parochial vicar at Immaculate Heart of Mary Church, in Salina. His journey from Ahiazu Mbaise in southeast Nigeria to Central New York was part of Bishop James Moynihan’s international recruitment effort for the Syracuse Catholic Diocese in the late 1990’s.

He served seven years at the church and has been the Chaplain of Upstate University Hospital since 2006. Father Innocent said working in the hospital reminds him of his childhood in Nigeria. “Here there is pain and agony that goes with death and suffering,” he said. “It’s the same pain as there was in wartime in Nigeria.”

He said he saw many people die of hunger and die in battle during the war. He said he sought comfort in God. In the hospital people seek their chaplain. “They seek comfort in God through me,” he said. “And that is the job satisfaction I have here. The people get that comfort when I tell them that the Lord is with us.”

Father Innocent recently celebrated his quarter century as a priest with a celebration of his life at the Immaculate Heart of Mary Church. “They brought my sister from Nigeria, without me knowing it,” he said. “It was the surprise of my life. When I saw my sister, I had tears of joy. I never expected it.”

Father Innocent became a United States citizen in 2008. He said Syracuse is a home for him, but he will go wherever the church needs him. “I’m happy here,” he said. “But I’ll go anywhere God sends me.”