Saints Charles Lwanga and Companions

Saints Charles Lwanga and Companions are twenty-two Catholic martyrs who were killed between 1885 and 1887 in Buganda, a kingdom in the lands of present-day Uganda. All of them were lay people, most of them young courtiers of King Mwanga II, and many had received baptism shortly before their death. The Church commemorates them on June 3, the day on which, in 1886, Charles Lwanga and twelve of his companions died in the fire on Namugongo Hill.

The first to bring the Gospel there were Anglican missionaries, and two years after them came the Catholic Missionaries of Africa, known as the White Fathers, who landed at Entebbe on February 17, 1879. When, after the death of King Mutesa, his son Mwanga came to power, he at first received the missionaries kindly and entrusted many Christians with service in the palace.

Soon, however, he turned against them. The prime minister kept telling him that the Christians were a threat to the throne, but the main cause of the persecution was that the Christian pages refused to submit to the king’s immoral demands. Joseph Mukasa Balikuddembe, the head of the palace staff, protected the boys from them. On November 15, 1885, he was beheaded at Mengo, and before his death he declared that he forgave the king and urged him to repent. On that same day Charles Lwanga was baptized; he was in charge of the young men serving in the palace and strengthened them in faith and chastity.

At the end of May 1886 the king resolved to put to death all “those who pray,” as the Christians were called. Before his arrest Charles Lwanga baptized several pages who were still catechumens, among them Kizito, the youngest of the martyrs. In prison he openly encouraged his companions to persevere, and Kizito persuaded the others to go to their death together, holding hands.

Nine of the twenty-two were killed in various ways. Among them were Andrew Kaggwa, who cared for the sick during an epidemic and baptized many of them, and Matthias Mulumba Kalemba, who had given up the office of judge so as not to wrong anyone by his sentences; mutilated and abandoned in a deserted place, he was still asking for water three days later. The remaining thirteen were burned at the stake on Namugongo Hill at dawn on June 3, 1886, and the executioners marveled that they heard nothing but prayer. The last, John Mary Muzeyi, was thrown into a pond on January 27, 1887.

Benedict XV beatified the martyrs on June 6, 1920, and Paul VI canonized them on October 18, 1964, in Saint Peter’s Basilica, during the Second Vatican Council. In his homily he recalled that Anglicans, too, had been killed for the name of Christ in the same persecution. In 1969, as the first pope to visit Africa, he blessed at Namugongo the altar of the shrine being built there. Francis, who celebrated Mass there in 2015, said that the death of the Anglican martyrs for Christ bears witness to the ecumenism of blood.