Cardinal John Njue may have taken to heart the exhortation to lay up treasures in heaven, where neither moth nor rust doth corrupt and thieves do not break through nor steal.
While he served the Catholic Church, Njue appeared to have a serious disdain for money.
His biographer Waithaka Waihenya says if you met Njue, frisked his pockets and even turned him upside down, no coin or currency notes would fall.
When Njue’s father gave him land in Embu, the bishop gave it out to his siblings, not wanting any property to derail his devotion to God.
The biography titled Feeling with the Church: Cardinal Njue’s Long Service in the Catholic Church says Njue had no bank accounts nor any property to his name.
“To him, money and property meant nothing and he believed that it should be the same for the priests...” it reads.
After celebrating mass at Nairobi’s St Peter Claver one day, some faithful collected cash, put it in an envelope and gave Father Stephen Karingu to pass to Njue as a token.
“It must have been a lot of money ... because that envelope was bulging,” Fr. Karingu says.
When he handed the envelope, Njue looked at it and was about to decline but accepted it anyway.
As he got to his car, a church member approached him and proceeded to “pour all his problems to him”.
“The Cardinal reached back to his pocket, took out the envelope he had been given and without even counting the money or getting to know how much it was, he handed the entire envelope to the man,” the book reads.
Fr Karingu says he could not believe what he was seeing. “The man just gave a way the money, just like that.”
It was not the first nor the last time Njue gave money away.
“When he was given money by anyone, he used to say: ‘They did not give this money to me because I am Njue. They gave the Cardinal and therefore it belongs to the flock’,” the biography reads.
It describes him as a dyed-in-the-wool believer in the Christian teaching that a man of God will always reap where he worked. The belief put him at vicious loggerheads with the priests in the city.
When he took the reins in the city, Njue demanded that priests adopt a similar outlook to money as his.
He pushed to cap their remuneration at Sh10,000 and raise the contribution from their churches to the Nairobi archdiocese from five to 30 per cent.
The priests rejected the proposal, telling Njue to do anything but not touch a shilling of their earnings.
He believed, the biography says, that if priests worked for the faithful properly, “they would never hunger or thirst or want for anything”.
Njue retired as the head of the Catholic Church in Kenya in January, bringing his reign as archbishop of Nairobi (since 2007) to an end.
(edited by o. owino)
