The priest, the secret son, and the decade the Church tried to cover up

Fresh details have emerged that a distinguished Catholic priest fathered a child, contrary to the vow of celibacy he had sworn to God, and that members of his family and the Diocese knew, and said nothing, for a decade.

A recent High Court ruling seen by The Standard reveals how three successive Bishops of Eldoret sat on the truth about Fr. Joseph Kariuki Njino's secret son and whose paternity was never once disputed on paper.

Yet it took a stalled grant of administration, a Will drafted in apparent secrecy, and a decade of litigation before a court finally forced the Church to confront the child it had left off the estate.

Fr. Njino died on July 22, 2015, a man of the cloth who had, in the words of his own Will, entrusted his estate to the incumbent Bishop of the Catholic Diocese of Eldoret as sole executor

What was never mentioned was DK, a boy born on July 4, 2003, whose birth certificate had, years before the priest's death, already carried his name as father.

It took a decade, three successive Bishops, two deaths in office, one renunciation, a birth certificate the Church never disputed, and a mother's decade-long fight through Eldoret's High Court before Justice Reuben Nyakundi finally ruled that DK is the priest's legitimate son and dependant, entitled to a share of the estate

"Children born from such continuum relationships like DK in our case are legitimate and are entitled to inherit their parents' property, both movable and immovable," the judge ruled,

"No written Will of the Deceased should be used as a shield by the Executor or Administrators to defeat the existence of those rights."

The judge went further, ordering the estate's administrators being current bishop of Eldoret, Joseph Obanyi, to set aside a share for DK within 60 days from the court's ruling, warning that in default the probate grant of representation shall stand revoked and the proceedings of confirmation to commence afresh.

The case file reads less like a straightforward inheritance dispute than a portrait of an institution playing for time.

Bishop Cornelius Kipng'eno Korir was granted letters of administration on July 22, 2016, exactly a year after the priest's death.

Before the estate could be confirmed, Korir himself died on October 30, 2017.

His successor, Rev. Maurice Anthony Crowley, applied to step into the role in 2018.

But before that substitution could even be formalised with amended letters of administration, a new Bishop, Dominic Kimengich, had taken the Diocese's seat, and by 2022 was asking the court to let him renounce the executorship altogether, citing, among other things, an unresolved paternity claim he said he could not address himself adequately.

In his own affidavit, Kimengich admitted the estate had sat unconfirmed for years, delayed and/or pending due to factors other than the change of circumstances.

He conceded plainly: "I do not have knowledge of the minor's claim of being the son of the Deceased and it is therefore necessary that the issue be determined by this Honourable Court."

In other words, the Church's own appointed custodians of the estate spent years passing the paternity question along like an unwanted parcel rather than answering it.

By September 2023, the grant finally landed with lay administrators, Michael Njuguna and Milcah Wamboi Njino, described in court papers as beneficiaries and family of the deceased priest.

When the priest's secret lover, Nancy Jepketer Rutto and her son finally got their objection before a judge, the family's defence rested almost entirely on the priest's vows.

The administrators told the court that Fr. Njino had taken a vow of chastity, which is a promise to remain celibate, and that he received full Catholic Funeral Rites for a priest.

"Therefore, Jepketer, her son and her witness were strangers to the family... mere busybodies and/or intermeddlers," the Njino family informed the court.

Counsel for the family went further, offering an alternative explanation for a decade of school fees, rent payments and hospital visits.

" That the priest was simply 'a philanthropist' who would give assistance and support to the less privileged, and that Jepketer may have benefited from his generosity without it being anything more," the lawyer added.

However, Justice Nyakundi disagreed with the arguments, noting pointedly that the family's own witnesses never addressed the one piece of documentary evidence that mattered most, the birth certificate, which was never controverted by the Executor and the beneficiaries to the estate.

"Nor did they produce any evidence of 'non-access' between Jepketer and the priest, the one thing capable of legally rebutting presumed paternity," Justice Nyakundi stated.

What tipped the case, according to the ruling, was less the mother's testimony than the documents she was able to produce and the Church never rebutted.

They include email correspondence between the priest and Jepketer dated from 2007 to 2014, photographs showing the child with both parents and, most strikingly, what her lawyers described as an agreement in which the priest's own family allegedly acknowledged the relationship and proposed transferring a specific parcel of land number NYANDARUA/KIRIMA/1163 to the boy to settle the matter quietly.

None of that alleged land-transfer proposal was disowned or explained by the administrators in their response to the court

The court also heard from a second witness, Esther Jepchumba Barno, who said she had personally observed the relationship developing since the 1990s and that Jepketer had confided in her regarding her romantic relationship with the late Father Njino.

Even as it ruled against the Church's decade of resistance, the court refused Rutto's request to exhume Fr. Njino's body from the Catholic Diocese of Eldoret Cemetery at Turbo Parish for DNA testing.

Justice Nyakundi found that digging up Fr. Njino's remains for DNA testing would violate his right to privacy even in death, without offering any proportionate benefit to the case.

"The application for exhumation fails the proportionality test," the judge ruled.

 "Once a body is buried, it should not be disturbed unless there is strong and new compelling evidence that disinterment is in the direct interest of justice, which the Court finds is not the case in this succession cause."