wake-up my dearest Catholics

I am writing this work not as a professional, not as a theologian, nor a scholar but as a concerned youth who over ten years have experienced declination in the flock of Christ. I may not even be the best person to write this work but I am inspired through the instrumentality of my Lord Bishop, AlbertFashina; the Catholic Bishop of the Catholic diocese of Ijebu-ode. I was privileged to visit him with my superior when Baba Fashina lamented over the way our separated brethren are attracting Catholics; the flock of Christ entrusted to our care. To buttress his point; he read a passage of the scripture, from the Gospel of Matt: 16, 1-4, it reads
Some Pharisees and Sadducees who came to Jesus wanted to trap him, so they asked him to perform a miracle for them, to show that God approved him. But Jesus answered , When the sun is setting ,you say,  We are going to have fine weather, because the sky is red, And early in the morning you say, It is going to rain, because the cloud is red and dark . You can predict the weather by looking at the sky, but you cannot interpret the signs concerning these times!
He paused to look at our faces; he smiled, adjusted his spectacle and continued;
 How evil and Godless are the people of this day! You asked me for a miracle? No! The only miracle you will be given is the miracle of Jonah so he left them and went away.
I got home that day and became restless because my Lord Bishop words kept coming in trance. I remember Steven that lives in a parish house; every Sunday he will attend morning Mass and then rush to a nearby Redeem church to listen, according to him the Word of God. One day he returned and told me “my pastor prophesize in my life today”,I laughed and told him those fake pastors.
Today, I pounder on that incident again, are those pastors really fake? Is it true that our parishioners are running after them? Are they performing the miracles that people want? Are those miracles really from God? What are we not doing or not have that they have? Can we read the modern sign? Let us not pretend as if everything is okay. My brothers and sisters let us wake up. Hence, we shall be like a Yoruba woman that lost one of her twins, whenever people ask her where is Taiye (one of the twins) she will respond he travelled.
It may surprise you to know that about five years ago the Muslims held an international conference of Muslim leaders to re-strategize on evangelization. One of the new strategies is to marry Christian girls; they also empowered a new Islamic sect called Nasfat; their pre-occupation is to start opening/doing crusades with music and night vigils. They now also bless Holy water. While on Sundays, since it was observed that Christians goes around evangelizing their Muslim members; they also introduced Sunday Nasfat that brings together all Muslim sects. Also, do not forget the proposed Islamic Banking in Nigeria, the effort of Boko Haram to Islamize Nigeria among many.
Again the Redeem Church introduces ‘operation planting the church’ whereby every parish must plant another church every year.Even the traditional worshipers are not left behind; they now introduced church of Oduduwa on Sundays. One of the criterions to get employment in many companies now is determined by where you worship.
Look around from where you are reading this work, how many church can you count? How many of your friends, relatives, confirmation set, society members are still faithful Catholics? What are you doing to help them? You may wake up one day to discover that nobody is in your church again.
My superior usually say “if we rest we will rust”, and my experiences so far in the farming enterprise have proved that. We bought five hundred day old chicks; put them in a room and go to sleep. The next day, we woke up to discover that rats came from the roof to eat two out of five hundred birds. I said in my mind, it doesn’t matter, it’s just two. The same happen again and again till I counted twenty; then, one night they (rats) seem to come immense to carry more, it was only then that I sensed danger, I informed my superior who quickly made arrangement to put a ceiling board. We taught it was over, only to discover that the rats kept eating the window frame to re-gain access. Finally, we blocked them out.  Such is the nature of our Nigeria church; we all need to join hands to block out all this rats carrying our chicks.
Let us learn from the soldier-ants, whenever there is a grain of food; they march out to get it. They are always ready to fight in order to protect the queen. The mother church is our heritage, let us protect her. I am therefore calling for a retreat like soldiers, for a tactical, strategic military planning so as to go back to the field of battle to combat the ancient serpent in modern clothing. Let us learn to read the modern signs. Our challenges are no longer Emperors or ancient persecutions. Rather we are currently fighting with modernity where all the “isms”are against us. Let us not be like my father who went on hunting alongside with Monsignor Somide with a double barrel only to be confronted by a big buffalo, we need the modern weapon to combat modern war.
However am saying that we should return to the root and get it right, not that I am canonizing the influx of Pentecostalism. But to practice the rubrics such that we can Christianize modernity and not modernize Christianity but to practice our faith as prescribed by the mother church in the second Vatican council
I must not forget to mention that our orthodoxy had been threatened on the altar of ideology in the name of modernity, rubrics is no longer the algorithm many innovations in our liturgy and so we must return to the root! We must wake-up.