Cult Suicide Exposes Deep Troubles of Church in Uganda
Behind the grisly details and the gory sensationalism of the record-setting mass suicide in Uganda March 17 by former Catholics involved in a cult known as the Movement for the Ten Commandments of God is the story of a Church in crisis that looks like a mirror-image of Amchurch.
Indeed, after taking account of the differences in climate, history, standard of living, and culture that separate Africa from North America, there emerges from Uganda an image of the Catholic Church all too familiar to Catholic Americans: a Church out of touch with society, unable to deal with the moral, social, and political crises of the time, refusing to satisfy the legitimate expectations of faithful Catholics for sound liturgy, traditional devotions, and a consistent moral teaching, an "affirmative action" or quota system for clerical and episcopal appointments that exacerbates ethnic tensions, and Church leaders who betray their people for the sake of building a cozy relationship with the dominant political and economic powers.
In this environment of ecclesial paralysis and social chaos, good people are disoriented and at risk of catastrophic life outcomes. In the Ugandan tragedy, one sees a good priest transformed in several years into the recognized leader of a suicidal murderous cult; and the father of a large family — an outstanding Catholic business and political leader — seduced into becoming a "prophet" by a talented con artist: scenarios echoed countless times in the United States over the past 30 years.
Here is more evidence that the vacuum created by the Church's breakdown leaves a culture that breeds visionaries spreading "apparition fever" and apocalyptic warnings, attracting and inevitably exploiting thousands and tens of thousands of pious middle-aged women and their children with "messages" from the Virgin Mary.
In the Uganda case, the Virgin Mary is alleged to have begun speaking to a barmaid and prostitute in the mid-1980s, communicating through a hidden telephone system in common utensils, plates, and bowls.
This visionary, Credonia Mwerinde, claimed to receive her first vision in a cave on the property of a businessman and politician, Joseph Kibweteere.
According to the BBC: "She is said to have persuaded Kibweteere to take his [12] children out of school and sell his three other properties, car, and milling machines to feed the growing numbers of disciples.
"On one occasion she claimed the Virgin Mary had told her all children under five should be killed, and a sacrifice was needed immediately, according to the Kibweteeres' daughter Edith.
"When village elders told Kibweteere in 1992 that he must remove himself and his cult, Credonia Mwerinde's father offered his farm in Kanungu, west of Rwashamaire."
All of these religious issues — in both countries — of course, play out against a backdrop of dramatic political change and social transformation.
As Ugandan authorities probe the leading characters behind the mass suicide, in which more than 1,000 people were butchered, strangled, or incinerated, it has emerged that one of the leading figures, former Catholic priest Dominic Kataribabo, may have become a devotee of the Necedah (Wisconsin) apparitions while studying for a master's degree in religious education at the Jesuits' Loyola Marymount University in Los Angeles in the mid-1980s.
Kataribabo, who may or may not be dead — though the Ugandan government is reporting he died in the March 17 incineration at his church — worked as a priest in Los Angeles while studying at Loyola Marymount, where he was awarded his master's degree in 1987.
According to the priests he worked with at St. Anthony's Church in El Segundo, he was very pleasant, conscientious, and poor, using a car donated by a parishioner to travel back and forth from his parish to the university.
"He seemed to be pretty ordinary," university spokesman Norm Schneider told the Associated Press. "He seemed undistinguished."
In fact, Kataribabo, who was awarded a full Loyola Marymount scholarship in 1985 under a program run by the Archdiocese of Los Angeles and the university to educate Third World priests in return for their pastoral services in the priest-strapped area, was a veteran Ugandan priest with a distinguished record who had been the former rector of Kitabi Seminary, where he was appreciated as a very effective counselor.
On April 5, the international news agency Agence France Press (AFP) reported that Kataribabo — shortly after he returned from his studies in Los Angeles — had joined a cult founded by a former barmaid and prostitute who claimed to be receiving apparitions of the Virgin Mary.
"Archbishop Paul Bakyenga," reported AFP, "who had known Kataribabo since 1965, said the priest had videos about a group he had met in the U.S., which he understood to be similar to a millennialist cult.
"The bishop said he thought there was 'something funny' about the organization and did not want to see the videos.
"I thought America had changed him,' he added. 'He was quieter, not as exuberant as before he went. He seemed more deliberate in his talking and thinking'."
News agencies unanimously report that Kataribabo was a well-respected and popular priest before he became enthralled with Credonia (through the patriarchal Joseph Kibweteere), who founded the Movement for the Restoration of the Ten Commandments in the late 1980s. AFP disclosed that among Kataribabo's close friends was the attorney general of Uganda, Bart Katureebe, "who said he had tried in vain to get Kataribabo to return to the Church.
"'It was after he came back from America that his problems started,' said Katureebe, who is MP for Rugazi, where the bodies have been discovered.
" ‘I don't think America as such changed him, but he was exposed to fresh ideas’."
The attorney general, who had known Kataribabo all of his life, added that Kataribabo had been a "model priest" and "the last person you would expect to join a cult."
"This thing has come as such a big shock," he said. "I have known him from when I was born. He was one of the priests at my wedding. We're really shattered. We don't know what to believe"
Archbishop Bakyenga told AFP that Kataribabo had told him that the Virgin Mary was asking people to pray because the end of the world was imminent. "I asked him, if you have seen an apparition why don't you allow the Church to make the necessary investigations? But he told me there was no time because something was coming to shatter the world into small pieces."
Putting The Pieces Together
Among the various reports on the cult's mass suicide, one of the most insightful and intriguing was provided by Charles Onyango-Obbo, a reporter for Uganda's Monitor, published March 22.
In his article, "Why Would 500 Be Burnt To Death for a Prostitute?," Onyango-Obbo situated the mass suicide within the larger context of a Catholic Church in crisis, with particular attention given to the Vatican's apparent tendency to appoint bishops who would irritate tribal tensions and animosities while imposing a rigorous process of "updating."
"...While in the last three days we have learnt quite a bit about what happened in Kanungu, we are still years away from knowing why it happened," he wrote.
"But we can try. The Movement for the Restoration of Ten Commandments of God was a small religious movement founded in the late 1980s not by [Joseph] Kibweteere, but by Credonia Mwerinde, according to Dr. J. Gordon Melton of the Institute for the Study of American Religion, Santa Barbara, Calif., who has taken a keen scholarly interest in the movement.
"Mwerinde was a barmaid and prostitute.
"Among the leadership were two other former priests, Dominic Kataribabo and Joseph Kasaparu, all of whom had been excommunicated from the Roman Catholic Church. Dominic Kataribabo is of particular interest…
"If this profile of Mwerinde is accurate, then she fits the mold of Acholi prophetess Alice Lakwena of the Holy Spirit Movement, an alleged former prostitute who led a rebellion against [Uganda's] Yoweri Museveni's government in the late 1980s.
"Lakwena claimed that she received messages from the spiritual world, and told her soldiers that they could protect themselves against bullets by smearing themselves with shea oil blessed by her.
"Lakwena and forces were finally routed in the sugar canes of Kakira, in Busoga, in a campaign where her fighters, charging at government soldiers bare-chested and glistening with oil, were mowed down by bullets in the thousands. Lakwena won the loyalty and following of some very educated people, including former education minister Prof. Isaac Newton Ojok.
"By some insightful accounts, the suicide and suspected murders in Kanungu have their roots in the 1960s.
"The defining event was the split of Ankole Diocese into three in the late 1960s. One became the Diocese of Kabale under Bishop Barnabas Halem'Imana, the other the Diocese of Fort Portal under Bishop Sarapio Magambo. Shortly after this, Bishop Ogez was replaced by Fr. John Baptist Kakubi as bishop of Mbarara.
"In the case of Kabale and Mbarara, the Catholic Church leadership's choice of bishops sparked resentment and began the process of alienation. Bishop Halem'Imana was opposed by mainstream Bakiga in Kabale, because he was seen as 'a Munyanianda' from Bufumbira (Kisoro today). In Mbarara, the Catholic establishment passed over Fr. Hillary Tibanyendera, an Oxford University graduate who was already a vicar general, in picking Kakubi, a Mukoki from Isingiro.
"Tibanyendera's problem was that he is a Munyaruguru, from Bushenyi, and they are regarded in Ankole as not being 100% Banyankole,' but 'recent' immigrants from Buganda. However, the broad area loosely described as Bunyaniguru, in Bushenyi, was and remains a virtual Catholic enclave, with a strong tradition of devotion to the Church, and had more than its fair share of priests.
"Resentment over the fact that they were discriminated in spite of their devout Catholicism for political reasons, rankled the Bunyaruguru.
"Fr. Dominic Kataribabo, a Munyaruguru like many leading priests in western Uganda at that time, returned to Uganda from the U.S. with a bagful of qualifications in this environment. Though Bishop Kakubi was considered to be a good man of God without the aloof intellectualism of Fr. Tibanyendera, his critics claim he remained resentful of priests of the Bunyaniguru tribe.
"Fr. Kataribabo was thought to be the man for one of the most intellectually demanding postings in the Catholic Church — chaplain of St. Augustine's at Makerere University. In a sense, he was in many ways a carbon copy of the present chaplain of St. Augustine's Makerere, the ebullient and outspoken Fr. Lawrence Kanyike.
"Fr. Kataribabo, however, never got the job as St. Augustine's. He was instead transferred to a village church in Kasenkero to work among illiterate peasants. The move was seen as a slap in the face by the Catholic leadership, at the behest of Bishop Kakubi.
"Meanwhile Joseph Kibweteere [the patriarch of 12 children], a devout Catholic, wealthy dairy and poultry farmer, dabbled in politics as a staunch member of the Democratic Party which is viewed by some Catholics of old as 'their party.'
"Kibweteere's world of business and politics collapsed after the elections of December 1980, which Milton Obote's UPC stole. In the process, UPC robbed Kibweteere's DP of victory. He was forced into 'exile' in neighboring Kabale and lived a miserable life.
"Museveni's rise to power enabled Kibweteere to return to Ankole. He had no business, or party to return to.
"He listened to his devout soul and formed a church; or joined Mwerinde for that matter. The combination of Kibweteere and Kataribabo was an explosive mix; bringing two intelligent men who had suffered extreme disillusionment with the formal institutions of the Church and politics.
"From what is known of some of their followers who died in the Kanungu fire, the two men tapped into a powerful need. The need of mostly middle-aged men and 'pure ways' of religion. They were fed up with a Church leadership, which was out of touch with the people, and corrupt priests who stole and bedded their flock.
"They had no place to turn to, as they hated the politicians who lied, broke promises, and filled only their stomachs.
"Understandably, Kibweteere and Kataribabo saw those pure old ways in the restoration of the Ten Commandments of God. However, if there was a message in their new vocation, God rebuffed them by refusing to let them be the messengers to deliver The End....
"One would have thought that in these troubled times, the Catholic Church would have reached out, granted the rebels 'amnesty' the way they exhorted the government to do with Kony's Lord Resistance Army who also kill so that this country might be ruled according to the Ten Commandments. The Church, though, won't budge. It will not hold Mass for the people who died in Kanungu, because they committed suicide, which is against the Church's teachings. Even the children who obviously didn't choose to die will not get prayers from the bishops.
"It is this failure by the Church to reach out, to respond creatively to new challenges like these that give rise to the Kibweteeres, and which transform former prostitutes like Mwerinde into new messiahs.
"There is no reason therefore to fear that what has been burnt and buried in Kanungu are only the bodies of the members of the Movement for the Restoration of the Ten Commandments. Its spirit remains very much alive."
More Insight
That same week, the East African newsweekly published Onyango-Obbo's report on how the government of Ugandan President Yoweri Museveni is buying the votes of the Catholic people by giving cars to priests and bishops, who will be expected to tell their people how to vote on the upcoming referendum on whether or not the country should return to a multiparty system.
After commenting on the political crisis in Rwanda and Burundi, he wrote:
"But even in Uganda where priests, nuns, and Islamic mullahs haven't wielded machetes, the churches and mosques seem to be in a moral crisis.
"Nowhere has that crisis been more pronounced than over the issue of the ban on free political party activities, and the June/July referendum on whether or not to return to multiparty government or remain with the present quasi-one-party 'Movement system.'
"The Movement government of Yoweri Museveni is set to win, in part because the mainstream parties have boycotted the referendum, and also because its present monopoly of power and unlimited access to state resources makes it unbeatable....
"The archbishop of the Catholic Church, Emmanuel Cardinal Wamala, and several of his archbishops have flip-flopped between vociferously opposing the referendum, and giving qualified support for the June/July vote and Museveni. The Joint Christian Council (JCC), an organization of all the major Christian groups, has endorsed the referendum. The religious leaders who are unhappy with this position say some members of the JCC have a narrow interest in the referendum.
"The JCC is accredited as an electioneering monitoring and civic education body, and therefore gets a slice of the cash and four-wheel drive cars that are handed out to support these activities.
"In the good old days when the Christian churches and organizations abroad sent a lot of aid, and rich parishioners at home gave generously to churches, the priests and bishops were not needy and therefore were more independent-minded.
"Today foreign church bodies" are no longer generous with their grants. And the crushing poverty has left most parishioners too poor to give money to the churches.
"This has increased the influence of the government over the mainstream churches because it's the one with the cash. If you see a bishop or sheikh driving a new Shillings 60m ($40,000) Pajero in Uganda today, you know it was donated to him by President Museveni. Many bishops and priests are falling over themselves to please the president and get a car or money.
"In exchange they deliver their flock to vote for the president's side… The unhappy reality for many Christians in Uganda is that they are headed for a future where their bishops will no longer look to Rome or Canterbury for leadership, but to the State House for a cue from the president.
"Caesar is winning."
This item 2833 digitally provided courtesy of CatholicCulture.org
