From Africa to Arizona: Missionary priest learns to love rural life in the Southwest

By Jonathan Liedl
Originally published in Catholic Rural Life's Summer 2021 magazine

Father Richard Kusugh, V.C., has served the entirety of his 17 years as a priest in the Diocese of Tucson. But he didn’t grow up there. In fact, when he first heard he was being assigned to the diocese, fresh off his 2004 ordination, he readily admits that he didn’t have the most accurate picture of what life was like in contemporary Arizona.

"I pictured cowboys and [American] Indians, like the old Wild West,” the priest recalls with a chuckle.

Father Richard’s misconception is easy to forgive once you realize that, prior to coming to Tucson for his first assignment, he’d spent the entirety of his life 7,500 miles away. The priest is a native of the west-African nation of Nigeria. All he knew of the southwestern United States came from old Western films and Clint Eastwood.

But after nearly two decades of serving in the Diocese of Tucson, Father Richard is something of a “cowboy” priest himself. When occasion calls, he can certainly look the part, with his own Stetson hat, custom boots, and an overcoat that would make Wyatt Earp proud. And although he doesn’t ride a horse, he’s crisscrossed the backroads and highways of rural Arizona more than most during the course of his service in the sprawling diocese, sometimes driving 250 miles on a given Sunday just to celebrate Mass at his assigned parishes.

It’s all been part of a unique journey of priesthood in rural Arizona, which Father Richard says he’s been blessed to experience.

Sowing Seeds in African Soil

Father Richard’s journey to rural Arizona began at home in Nigeria. Raised in a faithful Catholic family, he says his desire for the priesthood was awakened through his involvement with the Via Christi Society, a new lay group that had started in Makurdi, Nigeria, in the 1970s.

Inspired by missionary priests from Europe, especially the Holy Ghost Fathers, Via Christi was founded to be a homegrown movement devoted to fostering missionary and apostolic life in Nigeria. In its early years, its founder, Father Angus Fraser, gathered young men for times of focused Christian formation, including prayer, Scripture study, charity and brotherhood. The movement was focused on helping lay Catholics live out their call to holiness, not necessarily on fostering vocations to the priesthood.

“But after living that way of life for a while, I found myself wanting more,” recalls Father Richard, who first got involved with Via Christi in high school.

Father Richard was one of the first four men from Via Christi to enter the seminary for priestly formation. He and his companions were motivated by a desire to be radical witnesses for Christ—willing to take on the most difficult assignments and always at the service of others. While envisioning what his priestly ministry might look like, Father Richard imagined serving in poor and neglected parishes in Nigeria’s urban centers, or in remote villages where he didn’t even know the local tribal language.

“Like the word of God says, the Gospel must be preached to the ends of the earth,” Father Richard says, recalling his inspiration at the time. He just had no idea then that “the ends of the earth” for him would come to mean southern Arizona.

But in the early 2000s, after the now-former Diocese of Tucson’s Bishop Gerald Kicanas reached out to the bishop of the Diocese of Makurdi about receiving missionary priests, an agreement was reached. Less than two months after becoming priests, Father Richard and his companions were on a plane to Tucson.

Reaping a Rural Ministry Harvest

The transition was dramatic, but in many ways Father Richard was well prepared to be a missionary priest in a foreign country. Brought up in a military family, he was used to “coming in and out of people’s lives,” prepared to move on to the next place for the sake of the mission. Life in Nigeria, Africa’s most populous country with a significant diversity of tribes, languages and religions, also helped him to adapt to a new and unfamiliar culture.

But what helped the foreign priest perhaps more than anything was his commitment to fully investing in the community he was serving. Whether he was in the mining town of San Manuel, or up in Parker along the Colorado River, Father Richard says he always strived to be “all in.”

“It was just a desire to be where the people are,” he says of his approach to ministry, which corresponds to Pope Francis’ insistence that priests “smell like the sheep.”

And in Father Richard’s case, sometimes “smelling like the sheep” literally meant spending time around livestock. In places where roping was big, he’d spend time at the rodeo grounds, sometimes even performing the ceremonial role of opening the gate for the calf to run out. Other staples of small-town life, like Friday night football and post-Sunday brunches at the local restaurant, also became facets of his ministry. Along the way, he picked up Spanish, so he could celebrate the sacraments for some members of his community in their native language.

For Father Richard, it wasn’t hard to fall in love with smalltown Arizona life, which he says is marked by “family, community and pride.” He says he came to especially appreciate the farmers and ranchers in his community, whom he described as “the most hopeful people I’ve ever met.”

“They always trust that next year will be better, and that God will provide,” notes Father Richard, adding that the hopeful trust of the farming community has inspired him in his own faith.

Father Richard is also familiar with the struggle that family farmers and ranchers have faced in recent decades in southern Arizona. A couple years ago, he actually traveled to Minnesota to take part in a Catholic Rural Life retreat focusing on rural ministry. He’d known that times were tough, but the retreat with other priests gave him a greater appreciation for the deeper challenges facing small-scale agriculture, namely unfair competition from corporate conglomerates, who can undercut prices and drill deeper wells, essentially monopolizing the water supply. Father Richard has seen firsthand that when small farmers lose, so do the small towns they support.

Inspired by his time with CRL, Father Richard says he was able to come back to Arizona and build deeper relationships with his parishioners in the ag community, helping them to see their work as a noble vocation and more intentionally celebrating rural life.

Now the pastor of an urban parish in Tuscon, Father Richard fondly recalls his time serving in rural Arizona.

“The pride and loyalty people had, even in the face of hardship and struggles, was amazing,” he says. “You just knew this was ‘Smalltown, USA,’ and I was privileged to be a part of that.”