For God and My Country

Catholic Leadership in Modern Uganda

J. J. Carney

• Publisher: Cascade Books
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781532682544
• Topic: Teología y religión
• Subtopic: Ministerio cristiano

A devout Catholic politician assassinated by a capricious dictator. A Cardinal standing up for his people in the face of political repression. A priest leading his nation's constitutional revision. The "Mother Teresa of Uganda" transforming the lives of thousands of abandoned children. Two missionaries who founded the best community radio station in Africa. A peace activist who has amplified the voices of grassroots women in the midst of a brutal civil war.Such are the powerful stories in For God and My Country, a book that explores how seven inspiring leaders in Uganda's largest religious community have shaped the social and political life of their country. Drawing on extensive oral research, J. J. Carney analyzes how personal faith, theological vision, and Catholic social teaching have propelled these leaders to embody Vatican II's call for the Church to be a sign of communion and unity in the world. Readers will gain rich insight into Uganda's postcolonial politics and the history of one of Africa's most important Catholic communities. Each chapter closes with leadership lessons and reflection questions, making this an ideal text for classroom and parish adoption.

1

The Catholic Politician

Benedicto K. M. Kiwanuka

The Chief Justice of Uganda’s Supreme Court had just entered his chambers to read through an overview of the day’s cases. It was a Thursday in September 1972. Benedicto K. M. Kiwanuka arrived at Uganda’s High Court straight from Catholic Mass at Rubaga Cathedral, a ritual in which he partook on a daily basis. A week earlier, he had taken the unusual step of requesting and receiving the Catholic sacrament of anointing, a ritual only granted in cases of serious illness or in anticipation of death. As Kiwanuka sat in his chambers, a commotion ensued. Plains-clothes intelligence officers with Uganda’s General Security Unit confronted and arrested him. As he was forcibly removed from the building, he shouted in Luganda to one of his assistants, “Matiya bantutte, naye abaana ba Maria tebafa!” (“Mathias, they have taken me, but children of Mother Mary do not die!”).59 These were the last public words of Benedicto Kiwanuka. To this day, his body has not been recovered.

One of the most important political leaders of the independence era, Benedicto Kiwanuka is largely unknown outside of Uganda. (His grandson, Matthias Kiwanuka, the former New York Giants defensive end and two-time Super Bowl winner, has far greater name recognition in my own United States). But as Uganda’s first chief minister and the architect of the Democratic Party’s rise to power between 1959 and 1962, Kiwanuka was one of the key players in Uganda’s transition from British colonialism to national independence. Even more significantly, he remains the only Ugandan prime minister or president to peacefully hand over power to a democratically elected successor. The most influential Catholic politician in modern Uganda, Kiwanuka embodied an eclectic mix of sometimes-competing identities: a devout and traditional Catholic layman, an anticolonial African nationalist, and a politician for whom democracy was a sacred cause. His brutal death at the hands of Amin also led many to see him as a martyr to the rule of law and judicial independence, and his family and friends are now pushing the Archdiocese of Kampala to introduce his cause as a “patron saint of Ugandan politicians.”60

Kiwanuka’s witness highlights the important if controversial question of what it means to speak of a “Christian” or “Catholic” political leader in the modern world. Such questions are fraught with ambiguities. The devout politician can overly assume God’s will, claiming that God has directly spoken to him and personally called him to lead the country into the promised land. On the other extreme are the Christian politicians who wholly privatize and compartmentalize their own religious faith. In the USA, the most famous example of this trend was John F. Kennedy who, in part to fend off Protestant fears of his own Catholic identity, claimed that “I believe in a President whose religious views are his own private affair.”61 Another challenge is the sheer breadth of the Catholic Church’s political and social teachings in service to the common good, defined at Vatican II as the “sum total of those conditions of social living which allow people, either as groups or as individuals, to reach their fulfillment more fully and more easily.”62 In the modern world, those teachings include standing up for religious freedom and human rights, supporting democratization and civic education, exercising a preferential option for the poor, caring for the environment, welcoming migrants, and advocating for the sanctity of human life from conception to natural death. But rare is the Catholic politician who is fully conversant with this tradition, much less one who embraces a range of positions that cut across the liberal-conservative ideological spectrum that dominate American politics in particular.

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So, although the Church in both Africa and America often laments the dearth of truly “Catholic” politicians, the task may be harder than we imagine. Benedicto Kiwanuka is by no means a perfect model. In the words of the Ugandan historian Samwiiri Lwanga Lunyiigo, “no politician is a saint!”63 But Kiwanuka’s witness can teach us about what it could mean to see politics as a vocation in the modern world. In particular, I will emphasize four dimensions of Kiwanuka’s political witness: 1) his commitment to building the common good and popular political participation through democratic systems, 2) his uncompromising stand against injustice and oppression, 3) his embodiment of public Catholic witness as a martyr, and 4) his ability to model personal Catholic devotion without political sectarianism.

Benedicto Kiwanuka’s Biography64

Benedicto Kagimu Mugumba Kiwanuka was born in May 1922 in Buddu province, the historic heartland of Catholicism in Buganda (see introduction). His father, Fulgensio Musoke, was a minor village chief, but in Buganda’s hierarchical culture he was classified as a mukopi, or peasant. He was also an alcoholic who squandered his family’s limited property and wealth, dying in 1940 in relative penury from complications of gonorrhea. In the words of Kiwanuka’s biographer, Albert Bade, his father’s demise led Kiwanuka to “develop a permanent dislike for extravagance, polygamy and poverty.”65

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