Roman Catholics: Uganda’s Black Saints

Saints may live and die for the love of God, but the Roman Catholic Church sometimes canonizes them to reward the Christian loyalty of a country’s faithful or to make some moral point. Last week the Vatican expressed its interest in the African church and its opposition to racism by announcing that in October, Pope Paul VI would proclaim as saints 22 Bantu converts from Uganda who were martyred between 1885 and 1887.

The Uganda martyrs are the largest group of lay saints ever canonized by the Catholic Church at one time and the first Bantu Africans publicly honored by the church.†About half of the martyrs —some known only by their first names —were youthful pages in the court of Buganda’s pagan King Mwanga, and were speared to death after they refused his homosexual advances. The other saints include Bugandan nobles, a potter and a shipbuilder, who were burned or beheaded when they refused to revert from Christianity to spirit-worship. In all, about 200 Catholic and Protestant converts died for Christianity during Mwanga’s persecution; the missionary order of White Fathers, who converted the Ugandans to Catholicism, promoted the cause of only those whose martyrdom was unquestionably due to religion.

The Uganda martyrs were beatified by Pope Benedict XV in 1920, achieved elevation to sainthood when the Sacred Congregation of Rites accepted as miraculous two cures from pulmonary plague attributed to their intercession. A shrine has been erected at Namugongo, near the site of their martyrdom, and Uganda today has become one of the strongest outposts in Africa. About 2,000,000 Ugandans are Roman Catholic, and three of the country’s eight dioceses are governed by black bishops, one a descendant of an Uganda martyr.

† Among other black saints: a 4th century Ethiopian bishop named Moses; Benedict the Moor, a 16th century Franciscan whose par ents were African slaves; and the Dominican lay brother Martin de Porres (1569-1639), a Peruvian mulatto canonized in 1962.