Saint Charles Lwanga and Companion Martyrs: The Hope of Africa
If the Church seems moribund in North America, there is hope in the vast continent of Africa, where there are untold millions of Catholics, fervent, joyful and full of life, a spiritual energy that was sown by those who came before, not least the countless martyrs through the ages, from Saints Perpetua and Felicity in the third century, to a group of whom we celebrate today from the nineteenth, on this memorial of Charles Llwanga and his companions, put to death for the Faith in Uganda between 1885 and 1887.
The principal motivation of the martyrdoms, the victims horrifically burnt alive, was that these Christian converts, Catholics and Anglicans, refused to submit to the homosexual lust of the king, Mwanga II, a sodomite and pederast. They were young men – pages and ministers at the king’s court – who chose death rather than renounce their faith and be defiled; so they gladly perished in the flames prompted by Mwanga’s diabolical rage and fury.
But where sin abounds, grace – not least in this case, heroism and courage – abound all the more. These martyrs are fitting patrons for our age, wherein Mwanga’s vices and perversions are becoming ‘normalized’, even in children, and anyone who dares demur…well, we will see.
There were 22 whom the Catholic Church beatified by Pope Benedict XV 1920, the same year that the Pope canonized the eight North American/Canadian Jesuit martyrs, who were also tortured to death by those who had refused Christ. Pope Saint Paul VI then canonized them African martyrs in 1964 in the midst of the Second Vatican Council, praising also the 23 Anglican martyrs. His homily for the occasion signifies much, and might even be considered politically ‘incorrect’ in today’s zeitgeist of multiculturalism. But the Holy Father was well aware that Christian civilization had to purify pagan barbarism, and that the latter had to be replaced with the former, keeping, of course, whatever is true and good in the native genius:
The infamous crime by which these young men were put to death was so unspeakable and so expressive of the times. It shows us clearly that a new people needs a moral foundation, needs new spiritual customs firmly planted, to be handed down to posterity. Symbolically, this crime also reveals that a simple and rough way of life – enriched by many fine human qualities yet enslaved by its own weakness and corruption – must give way to a more civilised life wherein the higher expressions of the mind and better social conditions prevail.
Tragically, Uganda later had to endure the savage, even demonic, rule of Idi Amin (1971-79, +2003), who seized power in a military coup seven years after the canonization of the martyrs, and who soon revealed himself as an even-more corrupt Mwanga redivivus, massacring an untold number of his own people in a reign of terror that nearly defies description. We must learn from history, which includes the witness of others, or we may well be doomed to repeat it, as we are finding out on various fronts of this fallen world.
I will leave you with Paul VI’s own words, which give us hope that all is indeed not lost, and much gained:
These African martyrs herald the dawn of a new age. If only the mind of man might be directed not towards persecutions and religious conflicts but towards a rebirth of Christianity and civilisation!
Africa has been washed by the blood of these latest martyrs, the first of this new age (and, God willing, let them be the last, although such a holocaust is precious indeed). Africa is reborn free and independent.
The blood of Christians really is the seed of the Church, as the early Father, Tertullian (himself an African) quipped in the third century, perhaps more true now than then. And the rebirth of the Church in the third millennium, if current demography is any indication, will be out of Africa, one of the few places on Earth still having enough children to perpetuate humanity. We have much to learn, or re-learn, from these noble people, and may this burgeoning continent perfect their own genius by the supernatural grace the Faith offers.
Saint Charles Llwanga and companion martyrs, orate pro nobis!
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