Uganda: Gov't may ban renegade Catholics

Twenty renegade priests who are either married or want to marry have broken from the mainstream Catholic Church in Uganda and formed a new church where celibacy is not required.

The Ugandan government said January 8 that  it was investigating the breakaway Catholic Apostolic National Church in Uganda and would ban it if found to be illegal. Vatican officials said the priests were now considered ''outside'' the Catholic Church and would likely be excommunicated.

The creation of the splinter church underscored the increasingly vexing problem of enforcing celibacy for Roman Catholic priests in Africa, which has the world's fastest-growing Catholic population but where there have been several cases of priests living openly with women and fathering children.

In 2009, the Vatican summoned African bishops to Rome for a three-week meeting on problems of the church in Africa, and celibacy was a key topic of discussion. The Vatican, however, has remained firm that priests must not marry, although there are exceptions for priests of the Eastern rite and for converts from Anglicanism.

The breakaway Ugandan church has as its head a former Zambian Catholic priest, the Rev. Luciano Anzanga Mbewe, who was excommunicated earlier this year for having founded what the Vatican called a schismatic church, the Catholic Apostolic National Church of Zambia, which allows for a married priesthood.

The Ugandan offshoot is located in the eastern town of Jinja. Mbewe is expected to visit soon to officially launch the church and ordain new priests, said Rev. Leonard Lubega, who says he has been appointed bishop-elect by Mbewe.

Mbewe has said he was inspired by the former Zambian archbishop, Emmanuel Milingo, who was married in 2001 to a South Korean woman by the Rev. Sun Myung Moon of the Unification Church.

Milingo was excommunicated in 2006 after installing four married men as bishops in the United States. In December 2009, the Vatican defrocked Milingo entirely, stripping him of his priestly functions so any future ordinations by him would be invalid.

Lubega said the Catholic Apostolic National Church in Uganda already has over 12,000 followers.

''We are Catholics but not Roman Catholics,'' Lubega said, adding that the new church, while not under Pope Benedict XVI recognizes him and prays for him.

Archbishop Cyprian Kizito Lwanga, the Catholic archbishop of Kampala, called on the government not to allow such renegade religious groups to operate, saying they might cause confusion among Ugandans.

''I call upon government to avoid registering such new churches,'' he said. ''They can bring about religious conflicts.''

Cardinal Emmanuel Wamala has slammed the newly registered Catholic Apostolic National Church, describing it as a group of ‘false prophets’.

Cardinal Wamala also said he has not received any information indicating that the group’s top leaders were ever priests in the Catholic Church in Uganda.

“I don’t know these so-called priests and the Church should not be scared,” the cardinal said. “Many such people have emerged in Uganda and gone. I advise Ugandans neither to follow nor listen to them because they intend to divide the church,” Wamala said.

The retired Archbishop of Kampala said for the past 2,000 years, the Catholic Church has stood the emergence of such groups and has not been shaken. He cited Apostle Paul, who wrote that such false prophets would rise but the world should not listen to them.

Throughout the Bible, Wamala said, there are warnings of false prophets and Messiahs. “They come putting on sheep’s clothes but inwardly they are wolves who want to snatch the good values in the Church,” he warned.

Information has emerged that the leader of the sect, Fr. Leonard Lubega, was never ordained a Catholic Church priest in Uganda. Also another sect’s priest, Fr. Matovu Seguya, has until recently been serving as an Orthodox priest in Mityana and was not previously a priest in the Catholic Church.

Source: FIDES