The Ugandan Martyrs

By Msgr. Thomas P. Hadden

Something about people who give their lives for Jesus has always attracted others to the Faith. This is what happened as a result of the lives and deaths of those we call the Ugandan Martyrs.

They lived in a time of the 19^th century when the fabric of Africa was being torn apart. Europeans were carving out colonial empires in Africa without regard to the way they divided tribes and clans and destroyed their morals.

The Church sent the White Fathers to preach the Gospel. The Church of England also sent missionaries. The people of what we now call Uganda were citizens of the Kingdom of Buganda, and were ruled by a wise king named Mutesa. But Mutesa was succeeded by his son Mwanga, who was not as wise and disciplined as his father.

Mwanga abandoned the traditional morality of his people and assumed the sexual ethics of the invaders. He importuned the pages at the royal court join in his immorality. A young Catholic man, Charles Lwanga, was in charge of the pages. He saw to the religious education of those who were Christian, and encouraged them to live up to the morality of their faith. This enraged King Mwanga, who ordered Charles and 21 other youths aged 13 to 30 to be tortured and killed. Some were beheaded, others dismembered, fed to wild dogs, castrated, or burned to death.

From this horror the Church grew. Today Uganda is Christian, and Catholic priests and Religious from Uganda are spreading the gospel to other nations. (The first Black African Bishop in modern times was named by Pope Pius XII in 1939. If my memory is accurate, Bishop Waters invited him to the Diocese for a visit, and he celebrated Mass at Our Lady of the Atonement, the then Black parish in Kinston.)

In 1969, Pope Paul Vl made a pilgrimage to the site of the young Ugandans' martyrdom, and canonized them. He also dedicated the church there and named it a basilica. Pope John Paul II also made a pilgrimage to this shrine in 1993. Every year on June 3^rd, the day that most of the martyrs were killed, there is a national holiday. It is also a Feast Day for both the Catholic and Anglican Churches. The national university is named Uganda Martyrs University.