Heroic Men in Red
by Fr. Roger Landry - June 5, 2009
I have always had a great devotion to the martyrs and for this reason, June has always been a special month. We begin the month with the memorials of Saints Justin, Marcellinus and Peter and Boniface and finish it celebrating the heroic deaths of Irenaeus, Peter and Paul and the first martyrs of the Church of Rome. In between we mark Barnabas, John Fisher and Thomas More as well as commemorate the birth of the great martyr St. John the Baptist.
Ever since the clergy sexual abuse scandals came to light in 2002, however, I have grown in great devotion to the late 19th century Ugandan martyrs we celebrate on June 3. Saints Joseph Mkasa, Charles Lwanga, and their twenty companions, all killed between the ages of 14-25, gave their blood not only in testimony to their fidelity to Christ but in explicit condemnation of the evil of the sexual abuse of minors.
Since the time I re-read their story of their martyrdom in 2002, I have prayed to them as intercessors to help all Catholics in our country — bishops, priests and lay people — imitate their courage, fidelity to Christ, and total refusal to allow sexual sins to be perpetrated against the young.
When the White Fathers arrived in Buganda, the southern part of what is now Uganda, in 1879, they found the local King Mtesa hospitable to outside influence in the hope of improving his personal and national situation. Mtesa had already welcomed in Anglican missionaries a few years earlier. Because he liked the Christian teaching on the afterlife, he even allowed the missionaries to evangelize the members of his court.
One of his young pages was Mukasa Balikuddembe, who rose in prominence at the palace after he courageously saved Prince Mwanga's life by capturing and killing with his bare hands a venomous snake threatening him. For 3 years, Mukasa received a very thorough catechumenate at the palace from the White Fathers before being baptized in 1882 with the name of Joseph.
After the White Fathers needed to go into exile for a couple of years because the dying king feared outside influences, Joseph Mukasa became the de facto catechist for the converts and hundreds of catechumens. When the priests returned after Mtesa's death in 1884, they saw that Joseph Mukasa had helped the new converts bring family members to the Lord, renounce slavery, polygamy and other practices against the Gospel, and dedicate themselves heroically to serving those in need.
Once Prince Mwanga had succeeded his father, Joseph Mukasa became his majordomo, the top assistant in charge of the king's palace and court. To be head of the pages, Joseph appointed a young catechumen, Lwanga. What both men soon discovered, however, was that King Mwanga was homosexually-attracted to the teenage boys and solicitous to have them brought into his private company. Through various means, Joseph and Lwanga successfully and repeatedly conspired to thwart the king's designs, but the king drew increasingly frustrated.
After King Mwanga had had an Anglican missionary bishop murdered, Joseph went into his presence and reproved him for the murder as well as for his perverse attraction to the boys in his service. Even though it was technically the majordomo's traditional responsibility to correct the king, Mwanga would have nothing of it. His anger boiled against Joseph and his fellow Christians whom he knew were training the boys to resist his advances. Under the pretext of Joseph's disloyalty for putting the commands of another king, "The God of the Christians," over his own, King Mwanga sentenced him to be burned alive.
To the executioner who was having trouble carrying out his orders against the majordomo, Joseph said, "A Christian who gives his life for God has no reason to fear death. Tell Mwanga that he has condemned me unjustly, but I forgive him with all my heart." After that, the executioner took it upon himself to behead him Joseph and burn his body rather than have him be burned alive.
The day of Joseph's martyrdom, Lwanga and the other catechumens among the pages were baptized. King Mwanga had made it known that he was intending to put to death all the Christians in his court and they wanted to make sure that they were baptized by water and the Holy Spirit before they were baptized in blood. Lwanga took the Christian name Charles.
Several months later, after the king returned from a fishing trip and saw one of the routine objects of his sordid desire receiving catechetical instruction, he summoned the catechist, St. Denis Ssebuggwawo, put a spear through his chest and then had his executioners hack him to pieces. The following day, the king, fuming, assembled all the pages and demanded that they make a choice, between God and him, between prayer and the predator, between life and death.
"Let all those who do not pray stay here by my side," he said, waving to his right, and "those who pray" he told to stand by the fence at his left. Charles Lwanga and a group of 26 Christian pages, 16 Catholics and 10 Anglicans, headed toward the fence. He asked them whether they intended to remain Christians. "Until death!," they replied. "Then put them to death!," Mwanga responded, sentencing them to be burnt alive in Namugongo, a village 37 miles away.
They began the death march, which they turned into a religious procession with hymns, prayers and expressions of joy. This was in the sharpest contracted to the brutality of their "chaperones," who beat them so fiercely that three of them died along the way. Once in Namugongo, they were forced to watch for days as the pyre awaiting them grew and became increasingly intense.
The executioners decided to kill Charles Lwanga first, in the hope that after his death, others might abandon the faith. To increase his sufferings, he was placed in a reed mat and fire was set first to his feet first so that these would be charred to the bone before the flames would reach the other parts of his body. In the midst of his suffering, Charles said to his executioner, "You are burning me, but it is as if you are pouring water over my body," a reference to the sweet solace of his baptism, the foretaste of his imminent new birth.
After he was dead, the others remained steadfast and entered the pyre. One young page said to a priest present who was mourning the death of so many young Christians, "Why be sad? What I suffer now is little compared with the eternal happiness you have taught me to look forward to!" They died on June 3, which was fittingly Ascension Thursday.
It's no surprise that, on the foundation of their heroic faith, the Church has continued to grow in Uganda. Since their martyrdom, Catholics in Uganda have grown from a few hundred to almost 12 million Catholics out of a total population of 26 million.
All of these martyrs could have easily chosen another path. They were among the few chosen ones in the king's service. Joseph Mukasa and Charles Lwanga could have simply looked the other way when King Mwanga was going after the pages, become even more powerful in the kingdom, and saved their lives. The young boys could have chosen to give in to the king's depravations as a means to satisfy worldly ambition, provide for their families and survive. None did. Even though Christianity was less than a decade old in their kingdom, they had already gotten what it was about, and they were willing to die rather than to sin, to be killed rather than to allow sinful predation to happen to the young and innocent, to be burned alive rather than to betray the faith in the least in order to keep their lives.
In canonizing them, the Church has exalted them as models not just for Catholics in Africa, but in Ireland, America and across the globe.
Father Roger J. Landry is pastor of St. Anthony of Padua in New Bedford, MA and Executive Editor of The Anchor, the weekly newspaper of the Diocese of Fall River.
