By Courtney Mares
The cardinal was baptized at the age of 9 by Blessed Cyprian Michael Iwene Tansi, a Nigerian priest known for his holiness, pastoral zeal and asceticism, in 1941 and says the priest left an indelible mark on his life and vocation.
Nigeria is home to an estimated 35 million Catholics and has one of the highest rates of Mass attendance in the world. Yet despite Catholicism’s rapid growth, Africa’s most populous nation has never had a native canonized saint.
That could change with Blessed Cyprian Michael Iwene Tansi, a Nigerian priest known for his holiness, pastoral zeal and asceticism. Beatified in 1998, Tansi now needs one more miracle attributed to his intercession to be declared Nigeria’s first saint.
Cardinal Francis Arinze, now 93, one of Africa’s most prominent Catholic leaders and a retired Vatican prefect, has been a strong proponent of Tansi’s cause for sainthood. Cardinal Arinze was baptized at the age of 9 by Father Tansi in 1941 and says the priest left an indelible mark on his life and vocation.
“He was the first priest I knew,” Cardinal Arinze told EWTN News. “He brought me into the church: baptism, first Communion. I was his Mass server in 1945; my first Communion at his hands. He prepared me for confirmation.”
Cardinal Arinze remembers Tansi as a tireless missionary with an extraordinary prayer life who traversed eastern Nigeria by bicycle to preach the Gospel.
“He was a parish priest single-handedly in what is now 40 parishes,” Cardinal Arinze said.
“He hadn’t a car. He had a push bicycle and a motorcycle, which functioned sometimes. He was extraordinary,” he added.
The spiritual legacy of that ministry, Cardinal Arinze said, can be clearly seen today.
“Two hundred priests have arisen from those areas; three or four bishops, one cardinal, religious sisters, more than 200 seminarians. Why? Because of this man,” Cardinal Arinze said.
“He was like fire. Fire is warm. If you are near fire, you cannot be indifferent. You will be affected,” he added.
Father Tansi was born in 1903 into a poor, non-Christian family in what is now southeastern Nigeria. His childhood was marked by tragedy. His mother died after being accused by a medicine man of causing the deaths of several children in the village and was sentenced to death by poison.
Afterward, his father remarried and hoped his son would pursue education to lift the family out of poverty. Tansi was sent to a school run by the Holy Ghost Fathers, part of the early missionary presence in the region. He was baptized on July 7, 1913, taking the Christian name Michael.
“The first missionaries came to the eastern part of Nigeria in 1885. So we are new Christians, not up to 200 years yet,” Cardinal Arinze said.
At the time, most priests in Nigeria were European missionaries. Tansi was among the first cohort to study at St. Paul Seminary in Igbariam from 1925 to 1937.
“The seminary began in 1924 in that area, the first seminary in the eastern part of Nigeria,” Cardinal Arinze said. “He is the second group of Nigerians who [were] then priests east of the River Niger, eastern Nigeria. In 1937, he was ordained a priest. There were three of them.”
Tansi was ordained on Dec. 19, 1937, at the Cathedral-Basilica of the Most Holy Trinity in Onitsha, for the Archdiocese of Onitsha. Cardinal Arinze met him four years into his priesthood.
“I was one of the children in the primary school which he ran,” he said.
Father Tansi also oversaw a boarding school for boys ages 10 to 12, where discipline and prayer shaped daily life.
“They had to live there from Sunday evening until Friday morning,” Cardinal Arinze said. “He read to them the life of Dominic Savio. It was like a small seminary, and they took turns serving Mass.”
“Being his Mass server, assisting him at the altar, being near him was very powerful,” he recalled.
“When he was our parish priest, to see him was like a homily, like a sermon, even when he did not speak,” he added. “To see him celebrate Mass, you could not be indifferent.”
According to the Vatican’s Dicastery for the Causes of Saints, Father Tansi was deeply attentive to families, promoted chastity and the dignity of women, and emphasized the education of girls.
He lived more austerely than those he served, building his home with traditional materials, sleeping on uncomfortable beds and eating poorer food than the local people.
“His prayer life was extraordinary. His mortification, his ascetic life, he could not hide it,” Cardinal Arinze said. “Those who knew him, one person who cleaned his room revealed to people that there were little stones in his bed.”
“He ate very little, but he was always very kind to visit us and to seminarians,” he said. “He said to seminarians, ‘Eat; eat more.’ … And he would laugh and be jolly, but he would not eat much himself.”
In 1950, drawn to monastic life, Father Tansi was sent to the Trappist Abbey of Mount St. Bernard in England. He took the monastic name Cyprian and hoped to return to his native continent to help establish a monastery in Africa. His plans to found a monastery in Cameroon were cut short by failing health.
He died in England on Jan. 20, 1964, at age 61, from arteriosclerosis and a ruptured aneurysm. He was later reinterred in the Cathedral-Basilica of the Most Holy Trinity in Onitsha, Nigeria.
He was known for saying, “If you want to become a Catholic, live as a faithful Catholic, so that when people see you, they know that you are a Catholic. If you are going to be a Christian at all, you might as well live entirely for God.”
Pope John Paul II beatified Tansi on March 22, 1998, in Oba, Nigeria, making him the first West African to be beatified.
“The life and witness of Father Tansi is an inspiration to everyone in the Nigeria that he loved so much,” John Paul II said at the beatification.
“He was first of all a man of God: His long hours before the Blessed Sacrament filled his heart with generous and courageous love. Those who knew him testify to his great love of God,” the Pope said. “He was then a man of the people: He always put others before himself and was especially attentive to the pastoral needs of families. He took great care to prepare couples well for holy matrimony and preached the importance of chastity.”
Cardinal Arinze believes Nigeria’s lack of canonized saints is a reflection of the pastoral priorities of the local Church in Nigeria rather than any decision-making on Rome’s part.
“I would say that the Church in Nigeria has to place beatification and canonization causes as a pastoral priority,” he said. “There is a tendency to think of building a church, build a school, build a seminary, build a convent, but there is not such a rush to start the cause of beatification.”
“Rome cannot go around the world to promote causes,” he added. “It is for the local Church … but it has not become a priority for the Church in Nigeria.”
Cardinal Arinze also cautioned against focusing only on the sainthood causes of clergy.
“If only clerics are beatified, the impression is given that to be a good Christian you have to be a cleric,” Cardinal Arinze said.
In 2023, a cause was opened for Vivian Ogu, a 14-year-old Nigerian-born Catholic teenager killed in 2009 after refusing sexual violence.
“Causes are not promoted by logic. We pray. And also a miracle is demanded,” Cardinal Arinze said. “If there is not a miracle, the beatification will not be finalized. So … we have to pray.”
