Tough times unite Anglican, Catholic churches

Former president Idi Amin greets Archbishop Janani Luwum in the early 1970s. FILE PHOTO

Religious leaders in Uganda have through the times moved from being passive observes to active participants in the governance of the country.
Uganda’s history of power struggles has had religion at its centre since the religious wars of late 1880s.

Though on the surface religion was the cause of the wars, politics was the undeclared catalyst between the Catholics, then known as the Wa Faransa, and Anglicans then known as the Wa’ngeraza.

All through the independence struggle, the Church played politics based on its interests. The formation of the Democratic Party (DP) has its roots in the Catholic Church, while Anglicans had their influence on the Uganda Peoples Congress (UPC).

During the 1961 and 1962 elections, the two political parties got religious names. DP became Dinni ya Papa (Pope’s faith) while UPC became United Protestants of Canterbury.

The beginning
Soon after independence, Church leaders kept away from active politics despite using their institutions for nation building.

In a paper titled The Politics of Ecumenism in Uganda, J.J. Carney says there were three different ways Church leaders responded to politics.
First, he says, they stayed away from politics and contributed towards nation building through improving education, poverty, and health services.

“Church leaders largely avoided antagonising government leaders on questions of justice, corruption and government repression of the political Opposition,” he says.

Second, Carney adds, it entailed shifting stances of silence, private lobbying and carefully crafted written critiques, especially between 1975 and 1977.

“Third, between Amin’s downfall and the middle years of Milton Obote’s second term in office, Church leaders adopted a posture of prophetic presence, standing for and with the people in Opposition to an increasingly violent state. This collective witness was undermined, however, by growing perceptions that the preeminent Catholic and Anglican leaders were supporting opposite sides during the Luweero War.”

Creating Uganda Joint Christian Council
From the outset of independence, Churches were positioned to play a consolidating role in the building of a new nation. This was where the principle of uniting different branches of the Christian Church (ecumenism) took centre stage, giving birth to the Uganda Joint Christian Council (UJCC).

The brains behind this idea were Bishop Leslie Brown of the Anglican Church and Bishop Joseph Kiwanuka of the Catholic Church.

Towards independence, the two men issued a statement in which they talked of “freedom of the human person, including rights to freedom from fear of arbitrary arrest, a right to a legitimate political Opposition, a free press, free expression, and free association”.

In 1963, the two men of God were behind the creation of the Uganda Joint Christian Council. UJCC’s formation was in reaction to the proposed Education Act by then prime minister Milton Obote, which was to take the control of education away from the Church.

According to Carney, in order to keep control of the education sector, Bishop Brown proposed for a creation of the joint council on Christian education, but Kiwanuka refined it to joint council of Christians.
During its first meeting in August 1963, its main focus was on media, social welfare, education and marriage.

Having stayed away from politics for a while, UJCC in February 1967 broke its silence when government expelled 10 Catholic priests from northern Uganda. They were accused of political activism.

Following the expulsion, the Church leaders wrote to president Obote saying “the mass expulsion was an act that seriously injured religion” and demanded government assurance of the exercise of religious freedom.

In the same year that the new Constitution was passed, the Church leaders were also concerned about some clauses and issued a joint statement on June 2, 1967, saying “this could produce fear and prevent the expression of opinions honestly held”.

Amin creates Inter-Religious Council
Despite being a Muslim, former president Idi Amin paid particular attention to cultivating a good relationship with religious leaders.
Carney says unlike Obote, Amin in the first years realised the power of the Church and respected it, to the extent of proposing a ministry of religious affairs.

“Amin understood the public importance of Uganda’s religious leaders. He wasted no time in courting them. Later in 1971, he established Uganda’s first Inter-Religious Council,” Carney writes.

His relationship with the religious leaders was so great that in 1972 while going for the Organisation of African Unity (OAU) summit in Mauritania, instead of politicians he asked religious leaders to accompany him.

He further endeared himself to the Church when he made the famous “I fear no man but God” statement.

Uniting Anglican Church
Two days before the 1971 coup that ousted president Obote, Namirembe Diocese had voted to secede from Church of Uganda and create its own Province of the Church of Buganda.

When Amin visited St James Cathedral Mbarara in August 1971 were then Archbishop of the Church of Uganda Erica Sabiiti had been exiled after being locked out at Namirembe Cathedral, Sabiiti in his sermon said, “We live in days when the world is turning its back on God and you coming out with emphasis on God, at a time when religious leaders are in despair, I feel that God has called you to be His instrument, to use you to bring back people to God.”

But with many feeling that the Amin regime was betraying its citizens, Church leaders too added their voice to condemn the ills that prevailed at the time such as the expulsion of Asians.

The Church’s first reaction was contained in a letter from the World Council of Churches (WCC) to which Uganda was a member. Then Bishop of Northern Uganda Janani Luwum helped in drafting the WCC response.

Writing in the book The Making of a Martyr, Margaret Ford says the letter “called upon the government of Uganda to refrain from any actions which impair or deny the citizenship of Ugandans of Asian origin.”

What the Church failed to do in the colonial and Obote regimes, it did in the Amin era. They started talking against the human rights abuses, rampant imprisonments and killings that were happening at the time.

Despite having courted them at the beginning, Amin also made sure the more the Church castigated him, the more they felt his wrath.

Though he did not make a direct response to the WCC letter, in November 1972 Amin expelled 53 Catholic missionaries and two months later the first religious victim of the regime, Fr Clement Kiggundu, also the editor of the Catholic daily newspaper Munno, was killed.

As the situation deteriorated, the religious leaders tried reaching out to Amin to improve the situation. Bishop Dunstan Nsubuga of Namirembe, Archbishop Sabiiti, and Emmanuel Cardinal Nsubuga of the Catholics had regular meetings with Amin during which they discussed church affairs.
A united Christian Church, however, turned out to be a threat to Amin.

“In March 1974, [Amin] looked to divide the churches by ordering Anglicans to re-join their Catholic brethren and then banning most other Christian denominations,” according to Bishop Festo Kivengere in I love Idi Amin: The Story of Triumph under Fire in the midst of Suffering and Persecution in Uganda.

In May 1975, Church leaders issued a memorandum in which they criticised the growing abrogation of human rights and the severe punishments meted out regardless of the severity of the abuse, such as the institution of the death penalty for smuggling.

Government retaliated by issuing a travel ban outside the country on Nsubuga and Luwum, and deporting 20 missionaries from the Anglican and Catholic churches.

In the eight years of Amin’s rule, religious ecumenism metamorphosed from happy excited leaders to frosty relations, characterised by killings and disappearances of not only members of their congregation but even religious leaders.

What they went through in the Amin era emboldened them to face what came after Amin.

Writing in The Church of Uganda Amidst Conflict, Kevin Ward says: “A unity in oppression and misery was forged between Buganda and the rest of Uganda, between Catholic and Protestant, and within the Church of Uganda itself.”