Propose development policies not emotions in campaigns
Fr. Ambrose J. Bwangatto
Uganda has officially started the season of political campaigns with fanfare, drama and bickering between and within contending parties. Such a scenario is expected especially in political pluralism where the major operating premise is exclusion of the opponent. In the process of competing for political offices, candidates struggle to exclude others from political competition and political parties seek to exclude others from attaining any political advantage. The means used in this process vary and this tells why some pessimists, after observing politicians, conclude that politics is a dirty game. Since politics revolves around power and its trappings, political candidates pay their particular focus to attaining and maintaining power. This implies that politicians in power strive to maintain it and those without power endeavor to get hold of it. This situation makes politics to be so competitive and politicians to be so creative to achieve their ambition. In politics, the basic consideration is that the end justifies the means to achieve that end. This kind of argument would be the motivating factor for the many rosy promises the candidates are to make to the electorate, however unrealistic some may be.
Towards the year 2000, we witnessed to mantra-like slogans which characterized almost all political speeches: Clean water for all by the 2000; Education for all by the year 2000; Health For all by the year 2000; Good life for all by the year 2000. Ten years after, we are yet to achieve some of these promises. So in these campaigns, Presidential candidates have started with promises like granting federo to Buganda, cutting the cabinet size, free education, restoring the defunct parastatal bodies, re-instating presidential term limits, zero tolerance to corruption and its causes, equitable development, a just and fair land policy and jobs for all citizens and many more such promises. But the question is how realistic and fundamental are these promises to the life of the ordinary Ugandans and the mechanisms proposed to achieve them?
When one traverses the different parts of Uganda, the stark reality is that our worst challenge, as a country at the moment, is the level of wallowing poverty and underdevelopment in which thousands of people are still trapped. It is heartrending to notice the high level of dependency where the fortunate few Ugandans have to sustain whole clans and villages in their day-to-day economic needs. Such a scenario suggests that individual Ugandans seek to claim economic independence so as to achieve their full humanity and integrity. When we talk of economic growth, it should be related with human progress and a resultant quality of life. And the statistical data provided by government with projected economic growth rate requires to be translated into people’s actual lives. This is so because it is assumed that the faster an economy is growing the better off people are; and a rising GNP is taken to mean that a health and people’s lives are improving. But given our situation in the country, the life of the ordinary Ugandans is yet to improve to acceptable human standards.
Therefore, this carries a number of consequences for the candidates vying for the various political offices. (1) The electorate would like to have their questions answered in the policies and programs of the various party manifestos and how these would be achieved other than being drawn into insignificant personal differences between candidates. (2) Campaigns must be governed by rational arguments about real issues affecting the life of ordinary Ugandans other emotional flare-ups of politicians. (3) The various candidates must be proposing policies and developments programs and the challenges which face the nation and rationally deconstructing or ripping through alternative policies and programs of their opponents other than discussing trivial issues of personalities. (4) Ugandans as a decent people deserve pragmatic proposals from their leaders other than being drawn into non-constructive arguments which will never be realized in their daily ordinary life experiences.
Despite their differences, political candidates need to identify a common ground for the good of the nation and by acknowledging their differences; they can find common premises on which to work together for democratic changes and participation. The guiding principle for all candidates, despite their personal egos, should be to have a free, democratic and prosperous Uganda!
Ambrose JOHN L. Bwangatto
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Wednesday, November 3, 2010
Ugandan political candidates advised
Propose development policies not emotions in campaigns
Fr. Ambrose J. Bwangatto
Uganda has officially started the season of political campaigns with fanfare, drama and bickering between and within contending parties. Such a scenario is expected especially in political pluralism where the major operating premise is exclusion of the opponent. In the process of competing for political offices, candidates struggle to exclude others from political competition and political parties seek to exclude others from attaining any political advantage. The means used in this process vary and this tells why some pessimists, after observing politicians, conclude that politics is a dirty game. Since politics revolves around power and its trappings, political candidates pay their particular focus to attaining and maintaining power. This implies that politicians in power strive to maintain it and those without power endeavor to get hold of it. This situation makes politics to be so competitive and politicians to be so creative to achieve their ambition. In politics, the basic consideration is that the end justifies the means to achieve that end. This kind of argument would be the motivating factor for the many rosy promises the candidates are to make to the electorate, however unrealistic some may be.
Towards the year 2000, we witnessed to mantra-like slogans which characterized almost all political speeches: Clean water for all by the 2000; Education for all by the year 2000; Health For all by the year 2000; Good life for all by the year 2000. Ten years after, we are yet to achieve some of these promises. So in these campaigns, Presidential candidates have started with promises like granting federo to Buganda, cutting the cabinet size, free education, restoring the defunct parastatal bodies, re-instating presidential term limits, zero tolerance to corruption and its causes, equitable development, a just and fair land policy and jobs for all citizens and many more such promises. But the question is how realistic and fundamental are these promises to the life of the ordinary Ugandans and the mechanisms proposed to achieve them?
When one traverses the different parts of Uganda, the stark reality is that our worst challenge, as a country at the moment, is the level of wallowing poverty and underdevelopment in which thousands of people are still trapped. It is heartrending to notice the high level of dependency where the fortunate few Ugandans have to sustain whole clans and villages in their day-to-day economic needs. Such a scenario suggests that individual Ugandans seek to claim economic independence so as to achieve their full humanity and integrity. When we talk of economic growth, it should be related with human progress and a resultant quality of life. And the statistical data provided by government with projected economic growth rate requires to be translated into people’s actual lives. This is so because it is assumed that the faster an economy is growing the better off people are; and a rising GNP is taken to mean that a health and people’s lives are improving. But given our situation in the country, the life of the ordinary Ugandans is yet to improve to acceptable human standards.
Therefore, this carries a number of consequences for the candidates vying for the various political offices. (1) The electorate would like to have their questions answered in the policies and programs of the various party manifestos and how these would be achieved other than being drawn into insignificant personal differences between candidates. (2) Campaigns must be governed by rational arguments about real issues affecting the life of ordinary Ugandans other emotional flare-ups of politicians. (3) The various candidates must be proposing policies and developments programs and the challenges which face the nation and rationally deconstructing or ripping through alternative policies and programs of their opponents other than discussing trivial issues of personalities. (4) Ugandans as a decent people deserve pragmatic proposals from their leaders other than being drawn into non-constructive arguments which will never be realized in their daily ordinary life experiences.
Despite their differences, political candidates need to identify a common ground for the good of the nation and by acknowledging their differences; they can find common premises on which to work together for democratic changes and participation. The guiding principle for all candidates, despite their personal egos, should be to have a free, democratic and prosperous Uganda!
Fr. Ambrose J. Bwangatto
Uganda has officially started the season of political campaigns with fanfare, drama and bickering between and within contending parties. Such a scenario is expected especially in political pluralism where the major operating premise is exclusion of the opponent. In the process of competing for political offices, candidates struggle to exclude others from political competition and political parties seek to exclude others from attaining any political advantage. The means used in this process vary and this tells why some pessimists, after observing politicians, conclude that politics is a dirty game. Since politics revolves around power and its trappings, political candidates pay their particular focus to attaining and maintaining power. This implies that politicians in power strive to maintain it and those without power endeavor to get hold of it. This situation makes politics to be so competitive and politicians to be so creative to achieve their ambition. In politics, the basic consideration is that the end justifies the means to achieve that end. This kind of argument would be the motivating factor for the many rosy promises the candidates are to make to the electorate, however unrealistic some may be.
Towards the year 2000, we witnessed to mantra-like slogans which characterized almost all political speeches: Clean water for all by the 2000; Education for all by the year 2000; Health For all by the year 2000; Good life for all by the year 2000. Ten years after, we are yet to achieve some of these promises. So in these campaigns, Presidential candidates have started with promises like granting federo to Buganda, cutting the cabinet size, free education, restoring the defunct parastatal bodies, re-instating presidential term limits, zero tolerance to corruption and its causes, equitable development, a just and fair land policy and jobs for all citizens and many more such promises. But the question is how realistic and fundamental are these promises to the life of the ordinary Ugandans and the mechanisms proposed to achieve them?
When one traverses the different parts of Uganda, the stark reality is that our worst challenge, as a country at the moment, is the level of wallowing poverty and underdevelopment in which thousands of people are still trapped. It is heartrending to notice the high level of dependency where the fortunate few Ugandans have to sustain whole clans and villages in their day-to-day economic needs. Such a scenario suggests that individual Ugandans seek to claim economic independence so as to achieve their full humanity and integrity. When we talk of economic growth, it should be related with human progress and a resultant quality of life. And the statistical data provided by government with projected economic growth rate requires to be translated into people’s actual lives. This is so because it is assumed that the faster an economy is growing the better off people are; and a rising GNP is taken to mean that a health and people’s lives are improving. But given our situation in the country, the life of the ordinary Ugandans is yet to improve to acceptable human standards.
Therefore, this carries a number of consequences for the candidates vying for the various political offices. (1) The electorate would like to have their questions answered in the policies and programs of the various party manifestos and how these would be achieved other than being drawn into insignificant personal differences between candidates. (2) Campaigns must be governed by rational arguments about real issues affecting the life of ordinary Ugandans other emotional flare-ups of politicians. (3) The various candidates must be proposing policies and developments programs and the challenges which face the nation and rationally deconstructing or ripping through alternative policies and programs of their opponents other than discussing trivial issues of personalities. (4) Ugandans as a decent people deserve pragmatic proposals from their leaders other than being drawn into non-constructive arguments which will never be realized in their daily ordinary life experiences.
Despite their differences, political candidates need to identify a common ground for the good of the nation and by acknowledging their differences; they can find common premises on which to work together for democratic changes and participation. The guiding principle for all candidates, despite their personal egos, should be to have a free, democratic and prosperous Uganda!
Tuesday, August 3, 2010
Kayiira Murder Report: Lessons for Uganda
Kayiira Murder Report: Lessons for Uganda
The year was 2007 and it all started well at least on the political front. The Democratic Party then flexed her muscles and forced the government to wake from its complacency and stupid slumber and come out after 20 years to release the Kayiira murder report which it has kept under the carpet all along. I am not interested in the whole debacle whether the report is true, real, genuine or authentic. But I am interested in what transpired from the report and what the whole story taught us as Ugandans.
1. That once the people stand resolute on a certain question incessantly, they can force the government to wake up from its political siesta and take action. Ugandans are too gentle compared to other East Africans that’s why we are constantly abused by the political elite and they go away scot-free. The Democratic Party has paved for us the way and opened our eyes. If Ugandans can stand together and make enough noise without fearing any manner of intimidation the government can accomplish something. There are a lot of things that call for urgent action from government and we cannot have the courage to note them down since the list would be endless. With pressure from D.P, the government which that was complacent for 20 years, managed to contact the Metropolitan Police in the U.K in a record time, produce the “certified copy” of the report to the press and table the same before Cabinet for further discussion. But all such action and speed has been prompted by the pressure and firmness from the Democratic Party. This is a great lesson for us fellow Ugandans. Since President Museveni alleged that his Cabinet Ministers are a sleeping lot, it seems, they need a lot of noise to wake them up and act. The President expressed what Uganda actually is, that is, a disorderly society. Uganda as a developing country has not yet built up viable social institutions which would guarantee equal opportunity to the individual citizens and the proper and harmonious functioning of the state. This brings us to the idea of a well-ordered society, which is a society effectively regulated by a public conception of justice, as a companion idea used to specify the central organising idea of society as a fair system of cooperation. However Uganda as a political society is deficient in the structures which ought to exist in a well ordered society. This creates a sort of social discord because the following three elements which operate in a well ordered society are lacking or partly deficient. First, and implied by the idea of a public conception of justice, it is a society in which everyone accepts, and knows that everyone else accepts, the very same political conception of justice. Second, and implied by the idea of effective regulation by a public conception of justice, society’s basic structure, that is, its main political and social institutions and the way they hang together as one system of cooperation, is publicly known, or with good reason believed, to satisfy those principles of justice. Third and also implied by the idea of effective regulation, citizens have a normally effective sense of justice, that is, one that enables them to understand and apply the publicly recognised principles of justice, and for the most part to act accordingly as their position in society, with its duties and obligations requires. In a well-ordered society, then, the public conception of justice provides a mutually recognised point of view from which citizens can adjudicate their claims of political right on their political institutions or against one another. Subsequent to the above, and an analysis of the existing context in contemporary Ugandan society, it is quite obvious that the country is not nearer the concept of the basic structure of society, which “is the way in which the main political and social institutions of society fit together into one system of social cooperation, and the way they assign basic rights and duties and regulate the division of advantages that arises from social cooperation over time.” I would consider that failure to measure to such a standard would place Uganda in what Rawls considers as the “burdened societies”. He portrays such societies that, “while they are not expansive or aggressive, lack the political and cultural traditions, the human capital and know-how, and, often, the material and technological resources needed to be well-ordered.” This understanding would illustrate the kind of problems which would reign in a society and the position of the individual person in the whole setting. It seems the Ugandan government can only act as long as there is pressure born upon it. Similar to the above Kayiira report, Uganda ratified the International Labour Organisation-C26 Minimum Wage- Fixing Machinery Convention in 1963, to fix minimum wages, but more than 40 years after the ratification, Uganda still lacks a clear minimum wage-fixing mechanism. Under this convention, each member of the International Labour Organisation that ratifies the convention is supposed to create or maintain machinery whereby minimum rates of wages can be fixed for workers employed in certain of the trades or parts of trades in which no arrangements exist for the effective regulations of wages by collective agreement. The Ugandan government had to make an international commitment to pass labour laws before the end of April 2006. This development had been born by pressure from the United States Congress, failure of which Uganda risks being removed from the list of beneficiaries of the US’s African Growth Opportunities Act (AGOA). The bills under consideration are: Employment bill, Occupational Safety and Health Bill, Labour Union bill, and Labour Dispute bill. This is prompted by the fact that labour laws which were enacted before the 1995 Constitution are obsolete with some provisions contradicting the constitution. My foremost conclusion on this point is that our government can only act as long as there some pressure from outside. Wake up Ugandans and make noise!! Bravo and thumbs up, Democratic Party!!
2. That no wrong-doing will ever be hidden from the memory of Ugandans however long it takes to uncover the truth. Memory is one of the greatest tools we humans possess. Memory is the retention of, and ability to recall, information, personal experiences, and procedures, skills and habits. There is no universally agreed upon model of the mind/brain and no universally agreed upon model of how memory works. Nevertheless, a good model for how memory works must be consistent with the subjective nature of consciousness and with what is known from scientific studies. Subjectivity in remembering involves at least three important factors:
(a) Memories are constructions made in accordance with present needs, desires, influences, etc.
(b) Memories are often accompanied by feelings and emotions
(c) Memory usually involves awareness of the memory
One of the most popular models of memory sees memory as a present act of consciousness, reconstructive of the past, stimulated by an analogue of an engram called the "retrieval cue." The engram is the neural network representing fragments of past experiences which have been encoded. The evidence is strong that there are distinct types and elements of memory which involve different parts of the brain, e.g., the hippocampus and ongoing incidents of day-to-day living (short-term or working memory); the amygdala and emotional memories. Memories might better be thought of as a collage or a jigsaw puzzle than as "tape recordings," "pictures" or "video clips" stored as wholes. On this model, perceptual or conscious experience does not record all sense data experienced. Most sense data is not stored at all. What is stored are bits and fragments of experience which are encoded in engrams. Exactly how they are encoded is not our concern but what is important is that people store their daily experiences and they come to form their imagination. Parliament has, in the past, passed touchy bills and it is alleged that there is a plan to table other contentious bills which are anti-life like abortion. Ugandans are carefully watching what is going on and will one day demand an explanation, since they keep all such issues alive in their memory.
Fr. Ambrose J. Bwangatto
St. Mbaaga’s Major Seminary Ggaba
P. O Box 4165 Kampala
UGANDA (East Africa)
Homepage: http://ugandapeople.com
The year was 2007 and it all started well at least on the political front. The Democratic Party then flexed her muscles and forced the government to wake from its complacency and stupid slumber and come out after 20 years to release the Kayiira murder report which it has kept under the carpet all along. I am not interested in the whole debacle whether the report is true, real, genuine or authentic. But I am interested in what transpired from the report and what the whole story taught us as Ugandans.
1. That once the people stand resolute on a certain question incessantly, they can force the government to wake up from its political siesta and take action. Ugandans are too gentle compared to other East Africans that’s why we are constantly abused by the political elite and they go away scot-free. The Democratic Party has paved for us the way and opened our eyes. If Ugandans can stand together and make enough noise without fearing any manner of intimidation the government can accomplish something. There are a lot of things that call for urgent action from government and we cannot have the courage to note them down since the list would be endless. With pressure from D.P, the government which that was complacent for 20 years, managed to contact the Metropolitan Police in the U.K in a record time, produce the “certified copy” of the report to the press and table the same before Cabinet for further discussion. But all such action and speed has been prompted by the pressure and firmness from the Democratic Party. This is a great lesson for us fellow Ugandans. Since President Museveni alleged that his Cabinet Ministers are a sleeping lot, it seems, they need a lot of noise to wake them up and act. The President expressed what Uganda actually is, that is, a disorderly society. Uganda as a developing country has not yet built up viable social institutions which would guarantee equal opportunity to the individual citizens and the proper and harmonious functioning of the state. This brings us to the idea of a well-ordered society, which is a society effectively regulated by a public conception of justice, as a companion idea used to specify the central organising idea of society as a fair system of cooperation. However Uganda as a political society is deficient in the structures which ought to exist in a well ordered society. This creates a sort of social discord because the following three elements which operate in a well ordered society are lacking or partly deficient. First, and implied by the idea of a public conception of justice, it is a society in which everyone accepts, and knows that everyone else accepts, the very same political conception of justice. Second, and implied by the idea of effective regulation by a public conception of justice, society’s basic structure, that is, its main political and social institutions and the way they hang together as one system of cooperation, is publicly known, or with good reason believed, to satisfy those principles of justice. Third and also implied by the idea of effective regulation, citizens have a normally effective sense of justice, that is, one that enables them to understand and apply the publicly recognised principles of justice, and for the most part to act accordingly as their position in society, with its duties and obligations requires. In a well-ordered society, then, the public conception of justice provides a mutually recognised point of view from which citizens can adjudicate their claims of political right on their political institutions or against one another. Subsequent to the above, and an analysis of the existing context in contemporary Ugandan society, it is quite obvious that the country is not nearer the concept of the basic structure of society, which “is the way in which the main political and social institutions of society fit together into one system of social cooperation, and the way they assign basic rights and duties and regulate the division of advantages that arises from social cooperation over time.” I would consider that failure to measure to such a standard would place Uganda in what Rawls considers as the “burdened societies”. He portrays such societies that, “while they are not expansive or aggressive, lack the political and cultural traditions, the human capital and know-how, and, often, the material and technological resources needed to be well-ordered.” This understanding would illustrate the kind of problems which would reign in a society and the position of the individual person in the whole setting. It seems the Ugandan government can only act as long as there is pressure born upon it. Similar to the above Kayiira report, Uganda ratified the International Labour Organisation-C26 Minimum Wage- Fixing Machinery Convention in 1963, to fix minimum wages, but more than 40 years after the ratification, Uganda still lacks a clear minimum wage-fixing mechanism. Under this convention, each member of the International Labour Organisation that ratifies the convention is supposed to create or maintain machinery whereby minimum rates of wages can be fixed for workers employed in certain of the trades or parts of trades in which no arrangements exist for the effective regulations of wages by collective agreement. The Ugandan government had to make an international commitment to pass labour laws before the end of April 2006. This development had been born by pressure from the United States Congress, failure of which Uganda risks being removed from the list of beneficiaries of the US’s African Growth Opportunities Act (AGOA). The bills under consideration are: Employment bill, Occupational Safety and Health Bill, Labour Union bill, and Labour Dispute bill. This is prompted by the fact that labour laws which were enacted before the 1995 Constitution are obsolete with some provisions contradicting the constitution. My foremost conclusion on this point is that our government can only act as long as there some pressure from outside. Wake up Ugandans and make noise!! Bravo and thumbs up, Democratic Party!!
2. That no wrong-doing will ever be hidden from the memory of Ugandans however long it takes to uncover the truth. Memory is one of the greatest tools we humans possess. Memory is the retention of, and ability to recall, information, personal experiences, and procedures, skills and habits. There is no universally agreed upon model of the mind/brain and no universally agreed upon model of how memory works. Nevertheless, a good model for how memory works must be consistent with the subjective nature of consciousness and with what is known from scientific studies. Subjectivity in remembering involves at least three important factors:
(a) Memories are constructions made in accordance with present needs, desires, influences, etc.
(b) Memories are often accompanied by feelings and emotions
(c) Memory usually involves awareness of the memory
One of the most popular models of memory sees memory as a present act of consciousness, reconstructive of the past, stimulated by an analogue of an engram called the "retrieval cue." The engram is the neural network representing fragments of past experiences which have been encoded. The evidence is strong that there are distinct types and elements of memory which involve different parts of the brain, e.g., the hippocampus and ongoing incidents of day-to-day living (short-term or working memory); the amygdala and emotional memories. Memories might better be thought of as a collage or a jigsaw puzzle than as "tape recordings," "pictures" or "video clips" stored as wholes. On this model, perceptual or conscious experience does not record all sense data experienced. Most sense data is not stored at all. What is stored are bits and fragments of experience which are encoded in engrams. Exactly how they are encoded is not our concern but what is important is that people store their daily experiences and they come to form their imagination. Parliament has, in the past, passed touchy bills and it is alleged that there is a plan to table other contentious bills which are anti-life like abortion. Ugandans are carefully watching what is going on and will one day demand an explanation, since they keep all such issues alive in their memory.
Fr. Ambrose J. Bwangatto
St. Mbaaga’s Major Seminary Ggaba
P. O Box 4165 Kampala
UGANDA (East Africa)
Homepage: http://ugandapeople.com
Monday, July 26, 2010
From Jjongoza to St. Mbaaga
The Story behind the Founding of St. Mbaaga’s Seminary
In earlier times when Archbishop Henry Streicher, W.F. announced to his people that he intended founding a seminary for young boys to train for the priesthood, some Africans said that that was impossible. Records have it that Oweekitiibwa Mugwanya (a very devoted and exemplary catholic) protested a lot and said to the Archbsihop that he could not get Africans into the priesthood where there were no marrying and begetting children. He is said to have gone even further to suggest that the Archbsihop would rather turn a leopard into a lamb than make an African a priest. Mugwanya said the same of African girls becoming nuns. Ironically his daughter, Restetuta, became a Religious sister in the congregation of the Daughters of Mary. She gave catechetical lessons to the young Emmanuel Nsubuga and faithfully served for more than 75 years as a Religious Nun.
So it was with Archbishop Nsubuga when he intimated that he intended to found a seminary for Late or Mature Vocations. The practice in Uganda was to take very young boys and train them from an early age for the priesthood. Failing to go to the junior or minor seminary at the age of about 14 meant that you had missed the boat and would have no chance of becoming a priest. But basing himself on Vatican II Decree “Optatam Totius” No. 3, which states that, “Care should be taken in fostering vocations in those special institutes which, keeping with local conditions, take the place of minor seminaries, and also among boys educated in other schools or according to other systems. Colleges for late vocations and other undertakings for the same purpose should be diligently promoted.” Archbishop Nsubuga decided to explore the possibilities of getting mature boys to train for the priesthood. In 1973 he directed his Vocations Director to go around exposing the possibility of joining the Seminary other than at the young age of 13 or 15. For two or three years, some young men, including those with theirn own professions, came forward. They were given a three months orientation course and were sent to Katigondo Major Seminary for ecclesiastical studies. Unfortunately Katigondo did not have enough room for all of Nsubuga’s candidates. Yet there was need for more priests. Wherever he went throughout the Archdiocese the Christians were asking him for more priests and more parishes. Vatican II had recommended “bringing Christ nearer to the people.” Around that time Katigondo fell short of accommodation and not all the successful candidates, coming from the Minor Seminaries and much less those coming from Nsubuga’s three months’ orientation course could be absorbed.
An idea dawned on him one fine day and he started to contemplate establishing his own Diocesan Major Seminary for Kampala Archdiocese. Nsubuga could not stomach seeing successful and worthy candidates being victims of circumstances. The ratio of priests to the number of Catholics in the Archdiocese was so alarming that something had to be done. But when he shared this idea with members of his curia and the priests of the Archdiocese, the immediate response was “IT IS IMPOSSIBLE”. “Let us discuss it”, he replied. After a serious discussion, followed by explanations of the Archbishop, a vote was taken. Some passed the idea, others rejected it outright and still a third group accepted it with reservations. Nsubuga interpreted the third group as being positive and so at the end of the day, the majority of priests who had gathered that day supported the Archbishop to found a Major Seminary for the Archdiocese. A feasibility study had to be done regarding the teaching staff, place of establishment and a few other things.
The Archbishop had almost ready answers for most of the disturbing questions regarding the opening of a major seminary. As for the place, Cardinal Nsubuga, had in his mind the vacant premises of the former Gaba Pastoral Institute which had transferred to Eldoret, Kenya because of difficulties in getting work permits for non-Ugandans during Idi Amin’s regime. He considered the transfer of the Institute to Eldoret a “felix culpa” (a blessed misfortune). As for the possibility of getting the qualified teaching staff, he jokingly replied by saying that when Archbishop Henry Streicher wanted to start a seminary in the year 1893, he did not wait until he had obtained priests with degrees. “We’ll start with the ones we have while training others,” he thought.
Cardinal Nsubuga informed his fellow Bishops about his intention of opening a Diocesan Major Seminary. “That’s impossible,” some Bishops said and they had good reasons for reacting so. Archbishop Nsubuga was their Metropolitan and the Chairman of the Uganda Episcopal Conference. They feared that he was planning to pull out of the National System of the Conference and hence split it by opening a rival seminary system. To these objections, Nsubuga replied by saying that he did not intend to pull out of the National System. He would continue sending to the National Seminary those students of his who would be admitted there. His other concern was to cater for late vocations and for those of his deserving students who, having successfully completed their Minor Seminary courses, were left out for lack of accommodation at Katigondo. There must have been other objections from the Bishops but they did not surface. One thing is certain and that is that the Bishops gave him the “green light” to start his own seminary with a big ‘BUT.’ “Yes you may, BUT not so near to our National Seminary.” The Bishops had proposed to rent the premises, which Nsubuga had in mind to open his seminary, to turn them into halls of residence for the seminarians at the National Seminary. That would mean that they could admit more candidates. Nsubuga objected saying that he wanted to establish his Seminary near to the National Seminary because at the start he would ask for the services of some of their staff members to teach some lessons at his seminary. On 23rd. December 1975, Archbishop Nsubuga wrote to the Sacred Congregation for the Evangelization of Peoples informing them of his intention to establish a Diocesan Major Seminary. All obstacles notwithstanding, Nsubuga opened St. Mbaaga’s Seminary on 16th February 1976, the eve of the anniversary of the arrival of the first Catholic Missionaries in Uganda (1879). Some interesting features were: The ceremony was very simple. The Seminary was dedicated to St. Mbaaga, one of the Martyrs of Uganda. The seminary was entrusted to Rev. Fr. John Baptist Kaggwa as its first Rector. When St. Mbaaga’s Seminary celebrated her Silver Jubilee of existence in 2001, Bishop J. B. Kaggwa, its first Rector for the first eight years, gave the homily at Mass. He said: “…However, the road was not smooth at all. There was no money. The candidates to come were not identified yet. The staff included only Fr. Evarist Ssempijja and myself. No Library. No Food. No essential commodities. These had to come from Nairobi. So our strongest support was ‘DIVINE PROVIDENCE’ and the love and understanding from my Ordinary (Cardinal Nsubuga) and the first priests I stayed with. The mission we were entrusted with by Archbishop Nsubuga was to form pastors capable of delivering in parishes and so we insisted on the qualities of a good pastor and on what he needed to do his job.”
To date records show that over 150 priests have been ordained from the precincts of St. Mbaaga’s seminary. The tribute goes to Nsubuga, our gratitude goes up to GOD. Among those priests are Ambrose J. Bwangatto from Jjongoza village who is an alumnus of St.Mbaaga's Ggaba!
In earlier times when Archbishop Henry Streicher, W.F. announced to his people that he intended founding a seminary for young boys to train for the priesthood, some Africans said that that was impossible. Records have it that Oweekitiibwa Mugwanya (a very devoted and exemplary catholic) protested a lot and said to the Archbsihop that he could not get Africans into the priesthood where there were no marrying and begetting children. He is said to have gone even further to suggest that the Archbsihop would rather turn a leopard into a lamb than make an African a priest. Mugwanya said the same of African girls becoming nuns. Ironically his daughter, Restetuta, became a Religious sister in the congregation of the Daughters of Mary. She gave catechetical lessons to the young Emmanuel Nsubuga and faithfully served for more than 75 years as a Religious Nun.
So it was with Archbishop Nsubuga when he intimated that he intended to found a seminary for Late or Mature Vocations. The practice in Uganda was to take very young boys and train them from an early age for the priesthood. Failing to go to the junior or minor seminary at the age of about 14 meant that you had missed the boat and would have no chance of becoming a priest. But basing himself on Vatican II Decree “Optatam Totius” No. 3, which states that, “Care should be taken in fostering vocations in those special institutes which, keeping with local conditions, take the place of minor seminaries, and also among boys educated in other schools or according to other systems. Colleges for late vocations and other undertakings for the same purpose should be diligently promoted.” Archbishop Nsubuga decided to explore the possibilities of getting mature boys to train for the priesthood. In 1973 he directed his Vocations Director to go around exposing the possibility of joining the Seminary other than at the young age of 13 or 15. For two or three years, some young men, including those with theirn own professions, came forward. They were given a three months orientation course and were sent to Katigondo Major Seminary for ecclesiastical studies. Unfortunately Katigondo did not have enough room for all of Nsubuga’s candidates. Yet there was need for more priests. Wherever he went throughout the Archdiocese the Christians were asking him for more priests and more parishes. Vatican II had recommended “bringing Christ nearer to the people.” Around that time Katigondo fell short of accommodation and not all the successful candidates, coming from the Minor Seminaries and much less those coming from Nsubuga’s three months’ orientation course could be absorbed.
An idea dawned on him one fine day and he started to contemplate establishing his own Diocesan Major Seminary for Kampala Archdiocese. Nsubuga could not stomach seeing successful and worthy candidates being victims of circumstances. The ratio of priests to the number of Catholics in the Archdiocese was so alarming that something had to be done. But when he shared this idea with members of his curia and the priests of the Archdiocese, the immediate response was “IT IS IMPOSSIBLE”. “Let us discuss it”, he replied. After a serious discussion, followed by explanations of the Archbishop, a vote was taken. Some passed the idea, others rejected it outright and still a third group accepted it with reservations. Nsubuga interpreted the third group as being positive and so at the end of the day, the majority of priests who had gathered that day supported the Archbishop to found a Major Seminary for the Archdiocese. A feasibility study had to be done regarding the teaching staff, place of establishment and a few other things.
The Archbishop had almost ready answers for most of the disturbing questions regarding the opening of a major seminary. As for the place, Cardinal Nsubuga, had in his mind the vacant premises of the former Gaba Pastoral Institute which had transferred to Eldoret, Kenya because of difficulties in getting work permits for non-Ugandans during Idi Amin’s regime. He considered the transfer of the Institute to Eldoret a “felix culpa” (a blessed misfortune). As for the possibility of getting the qualified teaching staff, he jokingly replied by saying that when Archbishop Henry Streicher wanted to start a seminary in the year 1893, he did not wait until he had obtained priests with degrees. “We’ll start with the ones we have while training others,” he thought.
Cardinal Nsubuga informed his fellow Bishops about his intention of opening a Diocesan Major Seminary. “That’s impossible,” some Bishops said and they had good reasons for reacting so. Archbishop Nsubuga was their Metropolitan and the Chairman of the Uganda Episcopal Conference. They feared that he was planning to pull out of the National System of the Conference and hence split it by opening a rival seminary system. To these objections, Nsubuga replied by saying that he did not intend to pull out of the National System. He would continue sending to the National Seminary those students of his who would be admitted there. His other concern was to cater for late vocations and for those of his deserving students who, having successfully completed their Minor Seminary courses, were left out for lack of accommodation at Katigondo. There must have been other objections from the Bishops but they did not surface. One thing is certain and that is that the Bishops gave him the “green light” to start his own seminary with a big ‘BUT.’ “Yes you may, BUT not so near to our National Seminary.” The Bishops had proposed to rent the premises, which Nsubuga had in mind to open his seminary, to turn them into halls of residence for the seminarians at the National Seminary. That would mean that they could admit more candidates. Nsubuga objected saying that he wanted to establish his Seminary near to the National Seminary because at the start he would ask for the services of some of their staff members to teach some lessons at his seminary. On 23rd. December 1975, Archbishop Nsubuga wrote to the Sacred Congregation for the Evangelization of Peoples informing them of his intention to establish a Diocesan Major Seminary. All obstacles notwithstanding, Nsubuga opened St. Mbaaga’s Seminary on 16th February 1976, the eve of the anniversary of the arrival of the first Catholic Missionaries in Uganda (1879). Some interesting features were: The ceremony was very simple. The Seminary was dedicated to St. Mbaaga, one of the Martyrs of Uganda. The seminary was entrusted to Rev. Fr. John Baptist Kaggwa as its first Rector. When St. Mbaaga’s Seminary celebrated her Silver Jubilee of existence in 2001, Bishop J. B. Kaggwa, its first Rector for the first eight years, gave the homily at Mass. He said: “…However, the road was not smooth at all. There was no money. The candidates to come were not identified yet. The staff included only Fr. Evarist Ssempijja and myself. No Library. No Food. No essential commodities. These had to come from Nairobi. So our strongest support was ‘DIVINE PROVIDENCE’ and the love and understanding from my Ordinary (Cardinal Nsubuga) and the first priests I stayed with. The mission we were entrusted with by Archbishop Nsubuga was to form pastors capable of delivering in parishes and so we insisted on the qualities of a good pastor and on what he needed to do his job.”
To date records show that over 150 priests have been ordained from the precincts of St. Mbaaga’s seminary. The tribute goes to Nsubuga, our gratitude goes up to GOD. Among those priests are Ambrose J. Bwangatto from Jjongoza village who is an alumnus of St.Mbaaga's Ggaba!
Friday, July 2, 2010
Shocked at Heaven's Door!
SHOCKED AT HEAVEN’S GATE
I was shocked, confused, bewildered
As I entered Heaven's door,
Not by the beauty of it all,
Nor the lights or its decor.
But it was the folks in Heaven
Who made me sputter and gasp--
The thieves, the liars, the sinners,
The alcoholics and all the trash.
There stood the kid from seventh grade
Who swiped my lunch money twice.
Next to him was my old neighbor
Who never said anything nice.
Herb, who I always thought
Was rotting away in hell,
Was sitting pretty on cloud nine,
Looking incredibly well.
I nudged Jesus, 'What's the deal
I would love to hear, Your take.
How'd all these sinners get up here?
God must've made a mistake.
'And why is everyone so quiet,
So somber - give me a clue.'
'Hush, child,' Jesus said, 'they're all in shock
No one thought they'd be seeing you.'
JUDGE NOT!!
Remember...Just going to church doesn't make
you a good Christian any more than standing in
your garage makes you a car. Every saint has a past
And every sinner has a FUTURE
I was shocked, confused, bewildered
As I entered Heaven's door,
Not by the beauty of it all,
Nor the lights or its decor.
But it was the folks in Heaven
Who made me sputter and gasp--
The thieves, the liars, the sinners,
The alcoholics and all the trash.
There stood the kid from seventh grade
Who swiped my lunch money twice.
Next to him was my old neighbor
Who never said anything nice.
Herb, who I always thought
Was rotting away in hell,
Was sitting pretty on cloud nine,
Looking incredibly well.
I nudged Jesus, 'What's the deal
I would love to hear, Your take.
How'd all these sinners get up here?
God must've made a mistake.
'And why is everyone so quiet,
So somber - give me a clue.'
'Hush, child,' Jesus said, 'they're all in shock
No one thought they'd be seeing you.'
JUDGE NOT!!
Remember...Just going to church doesn't make
you a good Christian any more than standing in
your garage makes you a car. Every saint has a past
And every sinner has a FUTURE
Thursday, July 1, 2010
An African labels Africans mentally weak! Ridiculous!!!
This blog post is in response to an article by Mark Namanya that appeared in the Monitor newspaper online that was posted on Saturday, June 26, 2010 titled: Mental weakness killing Africa more than anything else! According to the article, the author is critically negative of the performance of African teams in the on-going World Cup finals taking place in South Africa. He makes bewildering claims about African players that leaves one wondering the rational bearing of his consciousness. He ridicules African players as being intimidated by their white counterparts at the “….occasion everytime they advanced to the goal box” and that the “….problem of the African players is psychological stamina and lack of conviction in their minds.” I have been shocked to find an African writer, writing about African representatives to the World Cup finals taking place on the African continent, labelling Africans as mentally weak. It is an insult to the whole African race and a perpetuation of the centuries old prejudice against Africans. And moreover, an African person of such rank and intelligence, to begin negating reason to Africans and calling them mentally weak, shows that he is not rooted in African consciousness. And, again that one can detach oneself from the continent of his birth and objectify it and say...Mental weakness killing Africa....shows that his whole perception and imagination about Africa is of a foreigner. One of the disturbing developments in our country’s education system has been to produce a people who are disconnected from their natural environment and social context and life history. This phenomenon is an intriguing problem which demands immediate attention from experts to study and establish the factors that deprive the people of Africa of the pride, attachment and appreciation for their country, race and continent. I think, failure to sort out this question, poses challenges to the modernisation and development paradigm which Africa is craving for in this era. Again Africa is currently at a turning point in the world discourse and African scholars in all dimensions must take the mantle of leadership that would redeem the historically tainted image of Africa.
Friday, June 4, 2010
Family Curses: What is Essential to Know!
Questions on Family Curses Answered
Fr. Ambrose J. Bwangatto
Is there anything like a family/generational curse? Some people say that in family x, all members are drunkards etc
Before we delve deeper into this question, we have to understand what is meant by a curse. A curse simply put is defined as the opposite of a blessing. But such a definition is so simple and would easily make some to easily label anything bad a curse. The English word “curse” has obscure origins, but the etymological dictionary suggests that it derives from an Anglo-Saxon word meaning “wrath”. It is commonly defined as harming others through demonic intervention. Curses invoke evil, and the origin of all evil is demonic. There are four different but not independent forms of curses:
(i) Black magic or witchcraft or satanic which rites have a common characteristic to obtain a curse against a specific person through magic formulas or rituals by invoking the demon, but without the use of particular objects. Whoever devotes himself to these practises becomes a servant of Satan through his own fault. The word of God forbids these practises: “There shall not be found among you anyone who makes his son or his daughter pass through the fire, or one who practices witchcraft, or a soothsayer, or one who interprets omens, or a sorcerer, weaver of spells, consulter of ghosts or mediums, or necromancer. For anyone who does these things are detestable to Yahweh your God; it is because of these detestable practices that Yahweh your God is driving out these nations before you”.
(ii) Curses: when curses are spoken with true treachery especially if there is a blood relationship between the one who casts them and the accursed, the outcome can be terrible. The most common instances mainly involve parents or grandparents or uncles who call down evil upon children or grandchildren. The most serious consequences occur when the evil wish is against someone’s life or when it is pronounced on a special occasion such as birth or wedding. This is so because the authority and the bonds that tie parents to their children are stronger than any other person’s. A parent has a very strong bond of kin with his/her children. Here, we have to consider the instances in which parents do curse their children with the effect that children do carry that parental curse with them all through their lives. This may be damaging to their lives since all that characterise their lives may be failure and misfortune. This type of curse may become generational because parents may pass on such a curse to their children and their children’s children for generations to come. Here, we have also to think of instances where parents consecrate their children to the family spirits or to the devil for protection. In such instances, a child is already given up to the devil and to the demonic powers and they will always have to reclaim him/her as their own. This means that such a consecrated person has to be available in service to the powers to which he has been consecrated and any failure to recognise them may turn out to be fatal to the life of that person. Such a person may experience devastating experiences in life as a reminder that he belongs to the realm of the devil. Parents have to be careful when performing certain rites on children as this could turn out to be a curse for generations to come in the life of that individual. This is the origin of the generational or family curses. But curses are so broad that a curse may assume different characteristics, according to the end that is desired. For instance, it may be called “divisive” if it intended to separate spouses, engaged couples or friends. Another type of curse may be “infatuation” which is used to lead someone to “fall in love”. Other curses are called “illness” because the target will always be sick. The so called death curse is named destruction.
(iii) Evil eye: This consists in a spell cast by looking at someone. The evil eye is a true spell, in other words, it presupposes the will to harm a predetermined person with the intervention of demons. In this instance, the wicked deed is achieved through the sense of sight. Many times the perpetrators of the spell are not known nor how it began.
(iv) The Spell (also known as malefice or hex): This is the most commonly used means to achieve evil. The name in Latin means to do evil, that is, to make or manufacture some object with the most diverse and strange materials. This object has an almost symbolic value, it is a tangible sign of the will to harm, and it is offered to Satan to be imprinted with his evil powers. There are two distinct ways the spell is applied to the designated target. The direct way consists of mixing the object that is used for the spell into the victim’s food or drink. As mentioned earlier on, this is manufactured with the most diverse materials; it can be menstrual blood, bones of dead people; various burned powders, mostly black; animal parts – the heart seems to be the favourite; peculiar herbs and so on. But the evil effectiveness is not so much in the material used as in the will to harm through demonic intervention. This will is manifested in the black magic formulas that are chanted while mixing this material. The Indirect way consists in putting a spell to objects that belong to the target – photographs, clothes or other belongings- or figures that represent the accursed: dolls, puppets, animals, even real people of the same age and sex. This is called ‘transfer material’ and it is struck with the same ills that are intended for the victim. A doll is very common example: during the satanic rite, pins are stuck all around a doll’s head. As a result, the victim suffers from intense headaches as if pins are in ones head.
In Greek mythical tradition, the family curse is presented as a punishment inflicted by an angry god on the descendants of an individual who has offended that deity. The curse, although a legacy from the past, is also a destiny, and involves prophecies of what is to come. It has the power to overrule any potential individual development, rendering the person a mere vehicle for the unfolding of the curse.
The first known example of the word occurs in the 11th century: Goddes curs, the wrath of God. A curse is thus something inflicted by a wrathful deity in response to human wrong-doing. Its roots lie in the past, but it predetermines the future. Most people do not think in terms of their families being cursed, whatever difficulties they experience like repeating generations of broken marriages, alcoholism, sexual and drug addiction, suicide, financial ruin, and functional diseases, however much these patterns are deeply disturbing in their consistency and precision.
When we read the scriptures we realise that the whole of creation is under a curse or bondage from God for having fallen through the Original Sin of Adam and Eve. “Therefore, just as sin entered the world through one man, and death through sin, and in this way death came to all men, because all sinned” (Rom. 5:12). Again the letter to the Romans states that, “For the creation was subjected to frustration, not by its own choice, but by the will of the one who subjected it, in hope that the creation itself will be liberated from its bondage to decay and brought into the glorious freedom of the children of God,” (Rom. 8:20-21). Hence, we would define a curse in the context of original sin as that which God brought on all creation. But outside the context of the Original Sin we would end up labelling every bad thing in our lives a curse. For instance, persecution, trials of faith, every sickness, every failure, every accident, every type of poverty, carrying the spiritual cross, and so on would all be labelled curses. Outside the context of Original Sin a curse, from a biblical perspective, is any undesirable matter that emerges from an utterance, statement, pronouncement, and invocation, oral or written vocabulary that expresses ill will or misfortune to an individual, animal or objects. What distinguishes a curse from other unpleasant matters is in its expressive. It needs to be uttered whether verbally or in writing. It’s not just a bad thought, feelings of anger or hatred towards someone. Curses are not telepathic or psychical. Neither can curses be received through a dream, vision, apparition, or any spiritual phenomena. They can only be expressed in the physical or earthly realm, not spiritual realm. We could agree that until such mental or any spiritual phenomena are physically uttered whether verbally or in writing they cannot result in a curse. The expressed words, whether spoken or written, do not constitute curses on their own. They’re cursing words but they are not curses in the real sense. In general language we say someone spoke cursing words to another. However, in reality the words themselves are not curses. It’s what emerges or results from the words that constitute curses.
The nature and characteristics of curses
The nature and effects of a curse can be any type of unpleasant matter. This does not mean any type of unpleasant matter is a curse. It only implies that a curse can come in any form or characteristic that is undesirable.
It can be characterized by any one or more of the following: affliction, nuisance, hardship, pain, grief, despair, misfortune, punishment, condemnation, sentence, scourge, torment, torture, terror, toil, bondage, deformity, abnormality, payback, hindrance, difficulty, stumbling block, interference, holdup, predicament, confusion, chaos, and so on – anything unpleasant. But as said earlier, not all unpleasant or undesirable matters are a result of a curse. A curse is only a subset of various categories of unpleasant and undesirable matters.
There are five conditions for an ill-will or misfortune to operate as a curse on a person
1. Curse words need to be outside the Original Sin or the fallen nature.
Curse words from God are outside the Original Sin or the fallen nature of which the individual innocently inherited from Adam. The book of Deuteronomy has a snapshot of God’s curse words for people walking in disobedience. Here is an example of God’s words of misfortune on the disobedient: “You will sow much seed in the field but you will harvest little, because locusts will devour it. You will plant vineyards and cultivate them but you will not drink the wine or gather the grapes, because worms will eat them. You will have olive trees throughout your country but you will not use the oil, because the olives will drop off,” (Deuteronomy 28:38-40).
2. Curse words need to be specifically addressed to an individual. Curses are always specifically addressed to an individual. In this case a curse needs to have a source who is the originator of the curse, and who expresses the curse to an individual. There are only three sources that qualify to curse: God, people and the individual himself or herself. Being specifically addressed to an individual means curses on people are not random. They do not just happen by chance, or by bad luck, or accidentally occur on a person. Like mail curses have an address where they are sent to. It is to the person, people or entity they’re addressed to that curses will affect. We have seen that the curses God pronounced in the book of Deuteronomy did not just randomly apply to anyone. They were pronounced on those who fell in the category of the disobedient. Thus anyone walking in obedience was automatically spared from the curses. A person walking in obedience was actually entitled to God’s blessings.
3. Curse words need expression through two avenues: speech or in writing. Curse words or statements of ill will or misfortune, need to be uttered whether verbally or in writing by the source directed to an individual. A mere mental wish of ill will or misfortune cannot result into a curse.
4. Curse words need a person deserving or having grounds to receive it. For every curse word to have any effect on an individual it needs to find a person having one or both of the following factors: (a) A person in a position of deserving it. Deserving it implies a person did something wrong intentionally or ignorantly and the curser (source assigning the curse) is justly proclaiming punishment and holding the person accountable for the wrong. (b) A person having grounds or a legal doorway to receiving it. Having a legal doorway to receiving a curse implies a person is not directly responsible or accountable for a wrong but has a liability for it. He/she has an avenue of access for a curse to bear fruit. This liability poses as a risk factor. Liabilities include having not received the gift of salvation and walking in sin. Walking in sin also opens grounds or legal doorways to receiving curses in some areas. The major source of curses from walking in sin is God (curses from God). Self-imposed curses can also have an effect on a person since walking in sin creates grounds or legal doorways for various negative matters. St. Paul cautions us thus: “Do not be deceived: God cannot be mocked. A man reaps whatever he sows. The one who sows to please his sinful nature, from that nature will reap destruction; the one who sows to please the Spirit will reap eternal life,” (Galatians 6:7-8).
5. Curse words need to go through God, the ultimate Gatekeeper of words. The word of God is clear on this: “To man belong the plans of the heart, but from the Lord comes the reply of the tongue,” (Proverbs 16:1) and “Many are the plans in a man’s heart, but it is the Lord’s purpose that prevails,” (Proverbs 19:21). God cannot be forced into action by proper wording or ritual. Thus a curse could not be used capriciously as a weapon against one's personal enemies.
From all the above, we can deduce that there’s a family or generational curse in a certain family if members of that family do conform to the above conditions that merit to term their situation as being cursed. But we cannot precisely state that such and such a family or members of such and such a family are cursed. We may not have the proper instruments for measuring such curses. That’s why we need to approach an officially appointed exorcist to help us determine our fate. In the Catholic Archdiocese of Kampala, UGANDA, we have Rev. Fr. Dr. Dominic Mwebe Bakipapankulawa currently Parish priest of Nansana Catholic Parish on Hoima Road, who is the officially appointed Archdiocesan Exorcist. His contacts could be provided on request!
Fr. Ambrose J. Bwangatto
Is there anything like a family/generational curse? Some people say that in family x, all members are drunkards etc
Before we delve deeper into this question, we have to understand what is meant by a curse. A curse simply put is defined as the opposite of a blessing. But such a definition is so simple and would easily make some to easily label anything bad a curse. The English word “curse” has obscure origins, but the etymological dictionary suggests that it derives from an Anglo-Saxon word meaning “wrath”. It is commonly defined as harming others through demonic intervention. Curses invoke evil, and the origin of all evil is demonic. There are four different but not independent forms of curses:
(i) Black magic or witchcraft or satanic which rites have a common characteristic to obtain a curse against a specific person through magic formulas or rituals by invoking the demon, but without the use of particular objects. Whoever devotes himself to these practises becomes a servant of Satan through his own fault. The word of God forbids these practises: “There shall not be found among you anyone who makes his son or his daughter pass through the fire, or one who practices witchcraft, or a soothsayer, or one who interprets omens, or a sorcerer, weaver of spells, consulter of ghosts or mediums, or necromancer. For anyone who does these things are detestable to Yahweh your God; it is because of these detestable practices that Yahweh your God is driving out these nations before you”.
(ii) Curses: when curses are spoken with true treachery especially if there is a blood relationship between the one who casts them and the accursed, the outcome can be terrible. The most common instances mainly involve parents or grandparents or uncles who call down evil upon children or grandchildren. The most serious consequences occur when the evil wish is against someone’s life or when it is pronounced on a special occasion such as birth or wedding. This is so because the authority and the bonds that tie parents to their children are stronger than any other person’s. A parent has a very strong bond of kin with his/her children. Here, we have to consider the instances in which parents do curse their children with the effect that children do carry that parental curse with them all through their lives. This may be damaging to their lives since all that characterise their lives may be failure and misfortune. This type of curse may become generational because parents may pass on such a curse to their children and their children’s children for generations to come. Here, we have also to think of instances where parents consecrate their children to the family spirits or to the devil for protection. In such instances, a child is already given up to the devil and to the demonic powers and they will always have to reclaim him/her as their own. This means that such a consecrated person has to be available in service to the powers to which he has been consecrated and any failure to recognise them may turn out to be fatal to the life of that person. Such a person may experience devastating experiences in life as a reminder that he belongs to the realm of the devil. Parents have to be careful when performing certain rites on children as this could turn out to be a curse for generations to come in the life of that individual. This is the origin of the generational or family curses. But curses are so broad that a curse may assume different characteristics, according to the end that is desired. For instance, it may be called “divisive” if it intended to separate spouses, engaged couples or friends. Another type of curse may be “infatuation” which is used to lead someone to “fall in love”. Other curses are called “illness” because the target will always be sick. The so called death curse is named destruction.
(iii) Evil eye: This consists in a spell cast by looking at someone. The evil eye is a true spell, in other words, it presupposes the will to harm a predetermined person with the intervention of demons. In this instance, the wicked deed is achieved through the sense of sight. Many times the perpetrators of the spell are not known nor how it began.
(iv) The Spell (also known as malefice or hex): This is the most commonly used means to achieve evil. The name in Latin means to do evil, that is, to make or manufacture some object with the most diverse and strange materials. This object has an almost symbolic value, it is a tangible sign of the will to harm, and it is offered to Satan to be imprinted with his evil powers. There are two distinct ways the spell is applied to the designated target. The direct way consists of mixing the object that is used for the spell into the victim’s food or drink. As mentioned earlier on, this is manufactured with the most diverse materials; it can be menstrual blood, bones of dead people; various burned powders, mostly black; animal parts – the heart seems to be the favourite; peculiar herbs and so on. But the evil effectiveness is not so much in the material used as in the will to harm through demonic intervention. This will is manifested in the black magic formulas that are chanted while mixing this material. The Indirect way consists in putting a spell to objects that belong to the target – photographs, clothes or other belongings- or figures that represent the accursed: dolls, puppets, animals, even real people of the same age and sex. This is called ‘transfer material’ and it is struck with the same ills that are intended for the victim. A doll is very common example: during the satanic rite, pins are stuck all around a doll’s head. As a result, the victim suffers from intense headaches as if pins are in ones head.
In Greek mythical tradition, the family curse is presented as a punishment inflicted by an angry god on the descendants of an individual who has offended that deity. The curse, although a legacy from the past, is also a destiny, and involves prophecies of what is to come. It has the power to overrule any potential individual development, rendering the person a mere vehicle for the unfolding of the curse.
The first known example of the word occurs in the 11th century: Goddes curs, the wrath of God. A curse is thus something inflicted by a wrathful deity in response to human wrong-doing. Its roots lie in the past, but it predetermines the future. Most people do not think in terms of their families being cursed, whatever difficulties they experience like repeating generations of broken marriages, alcoholism, sexual and drug addiction, suicide, financial ruin, and functional diseases, however much these patterns are deeply disturbing in their consistency and precision.
When we read the scriptures we realise that the whole of creation is under a curse or bondage from God for having fallen through the Original Sin of Adam and Eve. “Therefore, just as sin entered the world through one man, and death through sin, and in this way death came to all men, because all sinned” (Rom. 5:12). Again the letter to the Romans states that, “For the creation was subjected to frustration, not by its own choice, but by the will of the one who subjected it, in hope that the creation itself will be liberated from its bondage to decay and brought into the glorious freedom of the children of God,” (Rom. 8:20-21). Hence, we would define a curse in the context of original sin as that which God brought on all creation. But outside the context of the Original Sin we would end up labelling every bad thing in our lives a curse. For instance, persecution, trials of faith, every sickness, every failure, every accident, every type of poverty, carrying the spiritual cross, and so on would all be labelled curses. Outside the context of Original Sin a curse, from a biblical perspective, is any undesirable matter that emerges from an utterance, statement, pronouncement, and invocation, oral or written vocabulary that expresses ill will or misfortune to an individual, animal or objects. What distinguishes a curse from other unpleasant matters is in its expressive. It needs to be uttered whether verbally or in writing. It’s not just a bad thought, feelings of anger or hatred towards someone. Curses are not telepathic or psychical. Neither can curses be received through a dream, vision, apparition, or any spiritual phenomena. They can only be expressed in the physical or earthly realm, not spiritual realm. We could agree that until such mental or any spiritual phenomena are physically uttered whether verbally or in writing they cannot result in a curse. The expressed words, whether spoken or written, do not constitute curses on their own. They’re cursing words but they are not curses in the real sense. In general language we say someone spoke cursing words to another. However, in reality the words themselves are not curses. It’s what emerges or results from the words that constitute curses.
The nature and characteristics of curses
The nature and effects of a curse can be any type of unpleasant matter. This does not mean any type of unpleasant matter is a curse. It only implies that a curse can come in any form or characteristic that is undesirable.
It can be characterized by any one or more of the following: affliction, nuisance, hardship, pain, grief, despair, misfortune, punishment, condemnation, sentence, scourge, torment, torture, terror, toil, bondage, deformity, abnormality, payback, hindrance, difficulty, stumbling block, interference, holdup, predicament, confusion, chaos, and so on – anything unpleasant. But as said earlier, not all unpleasant or undesirable matters are a result of a curse. A curse is only a subset of various categories of unpleasant and undesirable matters.
There are five conditions for an ill-will or misfortune to operate as a curse on a person
1. Curse words need to be outside the Original Sin or the fallen nature.
Curse words from God are outside the Original Sin or the fallen nature of which the individual innocently inherited from Adam. The book of Deuteronomy has a snapshot of God’s curse words for people walking in disobedience. Here is an example of God’s words of misfortune on the disobedient: “You will sow much seed in the field but you will harvest little, because locusts will devour it. You will plant vineyards and cultivate them but you will not drink the wine or gather the grapes, because worms will eat them. You will have olive trees throughout your country but you will not use the oil, because the olives will drop off,” (Deuteronomy 28:38-40).
2. Curse words need to be specifically addressed to an individual. Curses are always specifically addressed to an individual. In this case a curse needs to have a source who is the originator of the curse, and who expresses the curse to an individual. There are only three sources that qualify to curse: God, people and the individual himself or herself. Being specifically addressed to an individual means curses on people are not random. They do not just happen by chance, or by bad luck, or accidentally occur on a person. Like mail curses have an address where they are sent to. It is to the person, people or entity they’re addressed to that curses will affect. We have seen that the curses God pronounced in the book of Deuteronomy did not just randomly apply to anyone. They were pronounced on those who fell in the category of the disobedient. Thus anyone walking in obedience was automatically spared from the curses. A person walking in obedience was actually entitled to God’s blessings.
3. Curse words need expression through two avenues: speech or in writing. Curse words or statements of ill will or misfortune, need to be uttered whether verbally or in writing by the source directed to an individual. A mere mental wish of ill will or misfortune cannot result into a curse.
4. Curse words need a person deserving or having grounds to receive it. For every curse word to have any effect on an individual it needs to find a person having one or both of the following factors: (a) A person in a position of deserving it. Deserving it implies a person did something wrong intentionally or ignorantly and the curser (source assigning the curse) is justly proclaiming punishment and holding the person accountable for the wrong. (b) A person having grounds or a legal doorway to receiving it. Having a legal doorway to receiving a curse implies a person is not directly responsible or accountable for a wrong but has a liability for it. He/she has an avenue of access for a curse to bear fruit. This liability poses as a risk factor. Liabilities include having not received the gift of salvation and walking in sin. Walking in sin also opens grounds or legal doorways to receiving curses in some areas. The major source of curses from walking in sin is God (curses from God). Self-imposed curses can also have an effect on a person since walking in sin creates grounds or legal doorways for various negative matters. St. Paul cautions us thus: “Do not be deceived: God cannot be mocked. A man reaps whatever he sows. The one who sows to please his sinful nature, from that nature will reap destruction; the one who sows to please the Spirit will reap eternal life,” (Galatians 6:7-8).
5. Curse words need to go through God, the ultimate Gatekeeper of words. The word of God is clear on this: “To man belong the plans of the heart, but from the Lord comes the reply of the tongue,” (Proverbs 16:1) and “Many are the plans in a man’s heart, but it is the Lord’s purpose that prevails,” (Proverbs 19:21). God cannot be forced into action by proper wording or ritual. Thus a curse could not be used capriciously as a weapon against one's personal enemies.
From all the above, we can deduce that there’s a family or generational curse in a certain family if members of that family do conform to the above conditions that merit to term their situation as being cursed. But we cannot precisely state that such and such a family or members of such and such a family are cursed. We may not have the proper instruments for measuring such curses. That’s why we need to approach an officially appointed exorcist to help us determine our fate. In the Catholic Archdiocese of Kampala, UGANDA, we have Rev. Fr. Dr. Dominic Mwebe Bakipapankulawa currently Parish priest of Nansana Catholic Parish on Hoima Road, who is the officially appointed Archdiocesan Exorcist. His contacts could be provided on request!
Ugandans Humiliated by Poverty and stripped of Dignity
Poverty Humiliates Ugandans and are stripped of Dignity
Fr. Ambrose J. Bwangatto
In this treatise on poverty, I want to argue why I say so! A fundamental dimension of poverty is the inability to adequately feed oneself and one’s family and to meet other basic requirements such as clothing, housing and healthcare. There is broad agreement that poverty occurs when someone experiences a fundamental deprivation – a lack of some basic thing or things essential for human well-being. Intuitively, most people think they can recognise poverty – hunger, malnutrition, worn clothing, unwashed bodies, run-down housing or no home at all, begging, lack of access to clean water, primary schooling or basic health services, and so on. But this apparent consensus is considered deceptive because there is no objective way of defining poverty. The way that poverty is conceptualised is inherently about value preferences that vary between individuals, organisations and societies. Until the 1990’s, poverty was considered mainly in ‘material’ terms – as low income or low levels of material wealth. But other factors like vulnerability and multidimensional deprivation especially of basic capabilities such as health and education have been emphasised as key aspects of poverty. Indeed poverty is rarely the result of a single factor. Instead, combinations of, and interactions between, material poverty, extreme capability deprivation and vulnerability often characterise the chronically poor. On the other hand, poverty is not a static condition. This implies that the dynamics of people’s poverty changes, or does not change, over time. Nevertheless common to the poverty situation, is that poor people commonly experience several forms of disadvantage and discrimination at the same time.
The above consideration of poverty provides us with a background to initiate our investigation into its relationship with human dignity in the Ugandan context. In a situation of poverty an individual is reduced to a peculiar scenario since one is unable to supply oneself with all the basic material necessities of survival. The most distressing representation of poverty is that of the long term poor who are not economically active because of health, age, physical and mental disability. With this group, there is no obvious remedy for the causes of their poverty. Then, there are those who are economically active but unable to escape poverty because of the terms of their employment, their lack of access to productive assets or social barriers that mean they are discriminated against. Poverty renders its victims to the fringes of society and makes it thorny for them to participate equally in the opportunities, which are prevailing. So poverty is a form of injustice and “the poor are victims of injustice.” If this is the case, then there is a deliberate disregard for their humanity and an abuse to their dignity. In the Uganda’s development discourse, the poor are framed as part of the problem, lacking the level of economic activity to drive through the transformations required to move Uganda out of being a ‘backwards’ -agricultural economy. In a speech attributed to the President of Uganda, which aimed at articulating the government’s underlying project of development, Museveni argued that most of the 85 percent Ugandans engaged in the agricultural economy “are stepping on top of each other and not doing anything useful.” This is practically the same as saying that the poor are not worth existing, they are just good for nothing beings and a burden to the nation of which they are the principle components and hence a burden to themselves.
In addition to the above, one of the fundamental questions, which is distressing, is about the causes of poverty. According to the Chronic Poverty Report 2004-5, a group of disabled Ugandan women stated that, “Obwavu obumu buba buzaale. Abaana babuyonka ku bazadde baabwe, ate nabo nebabugabira ku baana” meaning that – some poverty passes from one generation to another as if the offspring sucks it from the mother’s breast. But this is a common belief among Ugandans and we can attribute this to the fatalistic mentality, which is a common anthropological ingredient in our society. Paulo Freire would characterise this as “semi-intransitive consciousness, that is, a mode of consciousness which cannot objectify the facts and problematical situations of daily life.” He assumes that men whose consciousness exists at this level of quasi-immersion lack what we call ‘structural perception’, which shapes and reshapes itself from the concrete reality in the apprehension of facts and problematical situations. For Freire, lacking structural perception, men attribute the sources of such facts and situations in their lives either to some super-reality or to something within themselves; in either case to something outside objective reality. If the explanation for those situations lies in a superior power, or in men’s own natural incapacity, it is obvious that their action will not be orientated towards transforming reality, but towards those superior beings responsible for the problematical situation, or towards that presumed incapacity. Therefore, it is not hard to trace here the origin of the fatalistic attitudes men adopt in certain situations.
Nevertheless if we consider the men and women’s perceptions of the causes of poverty in Uganda, we recognize a number of reasons, which are at the same varied. I have preferred the women’s explanation, which I suppose, is more representative of the reality on the ground. Women have ranked the key causes of poverty as the following. One, Ignorance, defined as a lack of knowledge; doing things, which are not helpful, and an inability to communicate the necessary information, for instance to husband or to wife. As a result people do not use their assets well. Two, laziness, defined as people who do not want to work. They are able, they have the knowledge, they aren’t stupid, but they don’t want to work. An example would be someone who has land, but instead of cultivating it, rents it to obtain money for alcohol or despite having their own land they do casual work to get quick money for alcohol. Three, drinking, that some people just get up to drink. Four, education, that is, most of the youth do not have skills so they spend their time drinking and then gang up to break into homes. The women link the lack of education to polygamy as the husbands concentrate on one wife and her children and the others are neglected and not educated. The girls are sentenced to marriage. Other reasons given are, theft of animals and crops; lack of cooperation within families, polygamy, poor soil fertility, variable climate, sale of household assets by husbands and decline in farm-gate prices. Men on the other hand discussed mostly the meso-level causes of poverty.
This state of affairs carry complicated repercussions for the individual human person and the wider social setting. According to a survey carried out in the health institutions it is claimed that patients are left to die in Mulago hospital. The report details the plight of the six-year-old Sadat Mangeni lying in agony and pain at the Cancer Institute in Mulago Hospital suffering from a heavily swollen cheek and deformed jaw. His father with seven more children had to sell all his cows to save the life of his child and as a consequence his other children had to drop out of school because of the expenses incurred on Sadat’s treatment. This is because the full dose needed to save the boy’s life reportedly costs between Shs3 million and Shs5 million (that is between 1500 and 2500 Euro) and the family cannot raise it. The report gives other appalling instances, for example, Lukiya Nakiwala, 17, was admitted to the hospital suffering from kidney cancer. Her parents failed to raise Shs3 million (about 1500 Euro), to buy the requisite drugs and going by the doctor’s advice, she went for the only free available alternative – radiotherapy with its adverse effects that she went into comma and re-admitted to the hospital. Other cases involve patients like Solome Banura, 16, suffering from leukaemia and her condition demand a dose of cancer drugs worth Shs300, 000 after every two weeks, but her parents cannot afford it. Some patients need drugs that range from Shs70, 000 to Shs100, 000 just for a start. And other patients recount their dreadful experiences in health institutions that even after one has spent Shs3 million to buy drugs from Nairobi, he could not get a doctor to administer the drugs on him. The high mortality and morbidity rate in Uganda can be attributed partly to poverty because many people are unable to get the necessary medical attention, given that they have no financial means to access the same. The only feasible alternative is to resign to God’s mercy. And again it has been reported that “Patients who cannot afford their own drugs from outside pharmacies are either neglected or pushed out of the hospital.” This is a precarious situation for the poor and the United Nations believes that “overcoming human poverty will require a quantum leap in scale and ambition: more nationally own strategies and policies, stronger institutions, wider participatory processes, focussed investments in economic and social infrastructure, and more resources, domestic and external.
Fr. Ambrose J. Bwangatto
In this treatise on poverty, I want to argue why I say so! A fundamental dimension of poverty is the inability to adequately feed oneself and one’s family and to meet other basic requirements such as clothing, housing and healthcare. There is broad agreement that poverty occurs when someone experiences a fundamental deprivation – a lack of some basic thing or things essential for human well-being. Intuitively, most people think they can recognise poverty – hunger, malnutrition, worn clothing, unwashed bodies, run-down housing or no home at all, begging, lack of access to clean water, primary schooling or basic health services, and so on. But this apparent consensus is considered deceptive because there is no objective way of defining poverty. The way that poverty is conceptualised is inherently about value preferences that vary between individuals, organisations and societies. Until the 1990’s, poverty was considered mainly in ‘material’ terms – as low income or low levels of material wealth. But other factors like vulnerability and multidimensional deprivation especially of basic capabilities such as health and education have been emphasised as key aspects of poverty. Indeed poverty is rarely the result of a single factor. Instead, combinations of, and interactions between, material poverty, extreme capability deprivation and vulnerability often characterise the chronically poor. On the other hand, poverty is not a static condition. This implies that the dynamics of people’s poverty changes, or does not change, over time. Nevertheless common to the poverty situation, is that poor people commonly experience several forms of disadvantage and discrimination at the same time.
The above consideration of poverty provides us with a background to initiate our investigation into its relationship with human dignity in the Ugandan context. In a situation of poverty an individual is reduced to a peculiar scenario since one is unable to supply oneself with all the basic material necessities of survival. The most distressing representation of poverty is that of the long term poor who are not economically active because of health, age, physical and mental disability. With this group, there is no obvious remedy for the causes of their poverty. Then, there are those who are economically active but unable to escape poverty because of the terms of their employment, their lack of access to productive assets or social barriers that mean they are discriminated against. Poverty renders its victims to the fringes of society and makes it thorny for them to participate equally in the opportunities, which are prevailing. So poverty is a form of injustice and “the poor are victims of injustice.” If this is the case, then there is a deliberate disregard for their humanity and an abuse to their dignity. In the Uganda’s development discourse, the poor are framed as part of the problem, lacking the level of economic activity to drive through the transformations required to move Uganda out of being a ‘backwards’ -agricultural economy. In a speech attributed to the President of Uganda, which aimed at articulating the government’s underlying project of development, Museveni argued that most of the 85 percent Ugandans engaged in the agricultural economy “are stepping on top of each other and not doing anything useful.” This is practically the same as saying that the poor are not worth existing, they are just good for nothing beings and a burden to the nation of which they are the principle components and hence a burden to themselves.
In addition to the above, one of the fundamental questions, which is distressing, is about the causes of poverty. According to the Chronic Poverty Report 2004-5, a group of disabled Ugandan women stated that, “Obwavu obumu buba buzaale. Abaana babuyonka ku bazadde baabwe, ate nabo nebabugabira ku baana” meaning that – some poverty passes from one generation to another as if the offspring sucks it from the mother’s breast. But this is a common belief among Ugandans and we can attribute this to the fatalistic mentality, which is a common anthropological ingredient in our society. Paulo Freire would characterise this as “semi-intransitive consciousness, that is, a mode of consciousness which cannot objectify the facts and problematical situations of daily life.” He assumes that men whose consciousness exists at this level of quasi-immersion lack what we call ‘structural perception’, which shapes and reshapes itself from the concrete reality in the apprehension of facts and problematical situations. For Freire, lacking structural perception, men attribute the sources of such facts and situations in their lives either to some super-reality or to something within themselves; in either case to something outside objective reality. If the explanation for those situations lies in a superior power, or in men’s own natural incapacity, it is obvious that their action will not be orientated towards transforming reality, but towards those superior beings responsible for the problematical situation, or towards that presumed incapacity. Therefore, it is not hard to trace here the origin of the fatalistic attitudes men adopt in certain situations.
Nevertheless if we consider the men and women’s perceptions of the causes of poverty in Uganda, we recognize a number of reasons, which are at the same varied. I have preferred the women’s explanation, which I suppose, is more representative of the reality on the ground. Women have ranked the key causes of poverty as the following. One, Ignorance, defined as a lack of knowledge; doing things, which are not helpful, and an inability to communicate the necessary information, for instance to husband or to wife. As a result people do not use their assets well. Two, laziness, defined as people who do not want to work. They are able, they have the knowledge, they aren’t stupid, but they don’t want to work. An example would be someone who has land, but instead of cultivating it, rents it to obtain money for alcohol or despite having their own land they do casual work to get quick money for alcohol. Three, drinking, that some people just get up to drink. Four, education, that is, most of the youth do not have skills so they spend their time drinking and then gang up to break into homes. The women link the lack of education to polygamy as the husbands concentrate on one wife and her children and the others are neglected and not educated. The girls are sentenced to marriage. Other reasons given are, theft of animals and crops; lack of cooperation within families, polygamy, poor soil fertility, variable climate, sale of household assets by husbands and decline in farm-gate prices. Men on the other hand discussed mostly the meso-level causes of poverty.
This state of affairs carry complicated repercussions for the individual human person and the wider social setting. According to a survey carried out in the health institutions it is claimed that patients are left to die in Mulago hospital. The report details the plight of the six-year-old Sadat Mangeni lying in agony and pain at the Cancer Institute in Mulago Hospital suffering from a heavily swollen cheek and deformed jaw. His father with seven more children had to sell all his cows to save the life of his child and as a consequence his other children had to drop out of school because of the expenses incurred on Sadat’s treatment. This is because the full dose needed to save the boy’s life reportedly costs between Shs3 million and Shs5 million (that is between 1500 and 2500 Euro) and the family cannot raise it. The report gives other appalling instances, for example, Lukiya Nakiwala, 17, was admitted to the hospital suffering from kidney cancer. Her parents failed to raise Shs3 million (about 1500 Euro), to buy the requisite drugs and going by the doctor’s advice, she went for the only free available alternative – radiotherapy with its adverse effects that she went into comma and re-admitted to the hospital. Other cases involve patients like Solome Banura, 16, suffering from leukaemia and her condition demand a dose of cancer drugs worth Shs300, 000 after every two weeks, but her parents cannot afford it. Some patients need drugs that range from Shs70, 000 to Shs100, 000 just for a start. And other patients recount their dreadful experiences in health institutions that even after one has spent Shs3 million to buy drugs from Nairobi, he could not get a doctor to administer the drugs on him. The high mortality and morbidity rate in Uganda can be attributed partly to poverty because many people are unable to get the necessary medical attention, given that they have no financial means to access the same. The only feasible alternative is to resign to God’s mercy. And again it has been reported that “Patients who cannot afford their own drugs from outside pharmacies are either neglected or pushed out of the hospital.” This is a precarious situation for the poor and the United Nations believes that “overcoming human poverty will require a quantum leap in scale and ambition: more nationally own strategies and policies, stronger institutions, wider participatory processes, focussed investments in economic and social infrastructure, and more resources, domestic and external.
Friday, May 28, 2010
Appreciate Churches in the HIV/AIDS Fight
Appreciate Churches in the fight against HIV/AIDS
Fr. Ambrose J. Bwangatto
I am writing in response to an article titled “Church Leaders failing us” by Hillary Bainomugisha that appeared in the New Vision of Wednesday 12th May, 2010. In this article which started as his experience from the seminar organised by the Office of the First Lady to discuss the ways of helping married couples improve their fidelity in order to curb the rising cases of HIV/AIDS, he went on to make a number of unwarranted assertions. But most notable among them for the spread of HIV/AIDS which came to characterise his article, was that people do not take their spirituality seriously and have not been helped by religious leaders we esteem so highly. From this observation he made a host of statements that portrayed the Church negatively in the fight against HIV/AIDS.
First, he brought an example of Fr. Santos Constantino Wapokura of Nebbi Catholic Diocese who defiled two girls and possibly infected them with HIV. Immediately after that he mentions himself as a Catholic who tried to join the seminary but was stopped by the Rector and when he mentions it to people, they sigh with relief. Meaning that, he is lucky not becoming a priest as priests are defilers like Fr. Santos just mentioned, rapists and child molesters as press reports from all over the world indicate. So, he indicated that in the fight against HIV/AIDS priests as religious leaders have failed all the efforts to contain the spread of HIV/AIDS among married couples. I don’t know whether Bainomugisha made a survey in the churches to establish the Anti-HIV programs before his stinging criticism of the Church leaders. It is wrong and unethical to describe the historically known government partners in the fight against HIV/AIDS as partners in the spread of the same disease! It is wrong to portray the church, one of the architects of the internationally acclaimed ABC strategy as having failed the same cause they have fought for ages!
Secondly, he joins the popular opinion to call for optional celibacy in the priesthood arguing that people decide to become celibate priests at a time when they are totally unaware of their own resistance capacity against what they will be missing. I don’t know how much seminary training with theological formation Bainomugisha got to the extent of proposing against the virtue of celibacy. But apart from that, on a practical side I have got testimonies from people who suggest that they have been inspired by those faithful celibate chaste priests to live a life of sexual abstinence in this time of HIV/AIDS. Whereas, Bainomugisha popularly calling himself Dr.Love, has consistently promoted a permissive and laissez-faire sexual culture in the columns he runs in the New Vision and as a direct result expose countless people to HIV/AIDS, the priestly celibacy he mocks has proved the contrary and for his information, it motivated the origin of the A strategy in the whole ABC campaign for which Uganda as a country is applauded. On my recent visit to a school in Aachen, Germany, I was surprised to find a teacher using an HIV manual from Uganda with the ABC strategy being strongly emphasised.
Thirdly, he attacks the institutional churches and labels them as institutions which celebrate the prevalence of sin in the world because that is how they survive, because without sin, church leaders would be on the streets begging for food. He argues more that when spirituality is institutionalised, churches end up more concerned with image other than justice, making alliances with other churches they oppose from the pulpit and praying for the restoration of idolatry and always courting the rich and shun the poor. I cannot tell for sure whether Bainomugisha reads and prays with the bible or not and I cannot tell whether during his seminary days, he took a course called Bible Knowledge or not. The alliances he indirectly refer to and condemns, is the Uganda Joint Christian Council (UJCC) a body that brings together Christians from the Church of Uganda, Catholic Church and Orthodox Church. These churches despite their doctrinal differences, try as much as they can to realise the prayer of Jesus Christ for his disciples: “...that all of them may be one” (John 17:20-21). This attitude that Bainomugisha adopts against the institutional churches is rooted in the post-modernist culture that does away with traditional institutions and doctrines and advocates for loose and private spiritualities. I am afraid that the mode of hostility and criticism against the institutional Churches and church leaders is not helpful in the fight against HIV/AIDS.
Fr. Ambrose J. Bwangatto teaches Theology and Philosophy at Ggaba Seminary, but currently in the Netherlands.
Fr. Ambrose J. Bwangatto
I am writing in response to an article titled “Church Leaders failing us” by Hillary Bainomugisha that appeared in the New Vision of Wednesday 12th May, 2010. In this article which started as his experience from the seminar organised by the Office of the First Lady to discuss the ways of helping married couples improve their fidelity in order to curb the rising cases of HIV/AIDS, he went on to make a number of unwarranted assertions. But most notable among them for the spread of HIV/AIDS which came to characterise his article, was that people do not take their spirituality seriously and have not been helped by religious leaders we esteem so highly. From this observation he made a host of statements that portrayed the Church negatively in the fight against HIV/AIDS.
First, he brought an example of Fr. Santos Constantino Wapokura of Nebbi Catholic Diocese who defiled two girls and possibly infected them with HIV. Immediately after that he mentions himself as a Catholic who tried to join the seminary but was stopped by the Rector and when he mentions it to people, they sigh with relief. Meaning that, he is lucky not becoming a priest as priests are defilers like Fr. Santos just mentioned, rapists and child molesters as press reports from all over the world indicate. So, he indicated that in the fight against HIV/AIDS priests as religious leaders have failed all the efforts to contain the spread of HIV/AIDS among married couples. I don’t know whether Bainomugisha made a survey in the churches to establish the Anti-HIV programs before his stinging criticism of the Church leaders. It is wrong and unethical to describe the historically known government partners in the fight against HIV/AIDS as partners in the spread of the same disease! It is wrong to portray the church, one of the architects of the internationally acclaimed ABC strategy as having failed the same cause they have fought for ages!
Secondly, he joins the popular opinion to call for optional celibacy in the priesthood arguing that people decide to become celibate priests at a time when they are totally unaware of their own resistance capacity against what they will be missing. I don’t know how much seminary training with theological formation Bainomugisha got to the extent of proposing against the virtue of celibacy. But apart from that, on a practical side I have got testimonies from people who suggest that they have been inspired by those faithful celibate chaste priests to live a life of sexual abstinence in this time of HIV/AIDS. Whereas, Bainomugisha popularly calling himself Dr.Love, has consistently promoted a permissive and laissez-faire sexual culture in the columns he runs in the New Vision and as a direct result expose countless people to HIV/AIDS, the priestly celibacy he mocks has proved the contrary and for his information, it motivated the origin of the A strategy in the whole ABC campaign for which Uganda as a country is applauded. On my recent visit to a school in Aachen, Germany, I was surprised to find a teacher using an HIV manual from Uganda with the ABC strategy being strongly emphasised.
Thirdly, he attacks the institutional churches and labels them as institutions which celebrate the prevalence of sin in the world because that is how they survive, because without sin, church leaders would be on the streets begging for food. He argues more that when spirituality is institutionalised, churches end up more concerned with image other than justice, making alliances with other churches they oppose from the pulpit and praying for the restoration of idolatry and always courting the rich and shun the poor. I cannot tell for sure whether Bainomugisha reads and prays with the bible or not and I cannot tell whether during his seminary days, he took a course called Bible Knowledge or not. The alliances he indirectly refer to and condemns, is the Uganda Joint Christian Council (UJCC) a body that brings together Christians from the Church of Uganda, Catholic Church and Orthodox Church. These churches despite their doctrinal differences, try as much as they can to realise the prayer of Jesus Christ for his disciples: “...that all of them may be one” (John 17:20-21). This attitude that Bainomugisha adopts against the institutional churches is rooted in the post-modernist culture that does away with traditional institutions and doctrines and advocates for loose and private spiritualities. I am afraid that the mode of hostility and criticism against the institutional Churches and church leaders is not helpful in the fight against HIV/AIDS.
Fr. Ambrose J. Bwangatto teaches Theology and Philosophy at Ggaba Seminary, but currently in the Netherlands.
Tuesday, April 27, 2010
Wrong on the Bible!
Wokuri got it wrong on the Bible
Rev. Ambrose John Bwangatto
This writing is in response to an article that appeared in the New Vision of Tuesday, November 10, 2009, page 13, titled “The Bible can no longer be used to subjugate women” by Margaret Wokuri. In this article which started as a review of the recently published book of Dr. Miria Matembe, “Woman in the eyes of God: Reclaiming lost identity,” Margaret went on to suggest that the book carry a number of perspectives; but she deliberately chose to aim her venomous attack on the Holy Bible as “an instrument used for long to subjugate women by being reminded how they came from Adam’s rib and how God commanded them to be submissive to their husbands. She went on to applaud “some feminists who have chosen to blacklist the Bible as an instrument of male dominance, other feminists who have just re-written the Bible replacing He’s with She’s. She also castigated “especially religious leaders and other people who think they are ‘holier than thou’ who for long sided with the dominant biblical versions that seek to suppress women.”
Whereas I appreciate Margaret’s concern in the article for the plight of women marginalisation and subjugation, but according to internal evidence there are innumerable discrepancies which cannot be reconciled within the article and in the broader biblical hermeneutics. First, I find her approach very reductivistic in style. At the outset she states that the book of Dr. Matembe takes you to the world of perspectives, but she decides to reduce all of them in her attack on the Holy Bible. Secondly, whereas she portrays the Bible as an instrument of women subjugation and male dominance, but in listing women that society harshly condemned like Rahab, Tamar and Bathsheba, she also portrays the God of the Bible as liberating, healing, inclusive and non-judgmental. Thirdly, whereas, again, she labels the Bible as “an instrument” of subjugation, at the end of her article she invites the women “to take up the challenge and work directly with God as portrayed in the Bible to save our society.”
We have to recognize that according to the Christian teaching, the Bible is the word of God or we could even state that the bible is the written speech of God to mankind. The central message of the Bible is God’s self-communication as a saving God. When God appeared to Moses at Mountain Horeb He said to him that “I have seen the misery of my people…, I have heard their cry. I know their sufferings, and I have come down to deliver them” (Exodus 3:7-8). The Bible as a Holy Book has never been and will never be an instrument of subjugation, discrimination or ethnocentrism in itself. It is the word of God communicating a message of salvation for mankind and revealing a saving God. The Bible has been branded as discriminative, exclusive and even divisive because of the different methods applied to interpret it. Many flawed interpreters, preachers and scholars use the Bible for their own vested interests. Tools drawn from the critical theory and social constructionism as used in the social sciences with its attendant methods of critical discourse and text analysis have been applied to biblical interpretation and the effect has been to relegate to the periphery the message of salvation inherent in the Holy Bible and take on the presumptuous social dominant discourses and power dynamics apparently lying therein. That’s why the bible is labelled as an instrument promoting women violence, slavery, marginalisation, poverty and also perpetuating male dominance. Many scholars and activists have betrayed their intellectual responsibility by reducing the Bible to the level of a text book and apply the same tools used on other texts. The Bible communicates only the message of salvation and only reveals a saving God. This could sufficiently explain why countless people over the centuries have drawn from the bible a lot of inspiration, consolation, healing, and encouragement on their life’s journey. Let us hold with respect the Holy Books of the various religious traditions because they are a source of life for millions of believers throughout the world who draw meaning from them.
Catholics are a fair game!
Catholics are a fair game!
Fr. Ambrose J. Bwangatto
The British Foreign Office in its buoyant mood to prepare for the four-day visit of Pope Benedict XVI to the U.K, from September 16th to the 19th 2010, has made a number of proposals to make what they described as “an ideal visit.” As well as suggesting the launch of “Benedict” condoms, the memo circulated also proposed that the Pope should “open an abortion clinic,” “announce sacking of dodgy bishops”, sponsor a network of AIDS clinics, conduct a training course for bishops on child abuse allegations, ordain a female priest and bless a gay marriage. It also suggested getting the Pope and Her Majesty the Queen to sing a duet for charity and apologising for the Spanish Armada. Such gratuitous mockery has now created an acute diplomatic embarrassment for the British Government forcing it to make a grovelling apology to the Vatican (cfr. BBC News online). On a closer look at the so-called suggestions, it is a mockery of the teaching of the Catholic Church and her doctrines or a result of some of her unfortunate dark spots like paedophile priests. One retired British diplomat, commenting on the furore, has written that those who have been shocked by this document are suffering from a ‘sense of humour failure’, since this was merely the kind of in-joke that is made all the time among diplomats. But one cannot imagine that such suggestions whether as a joke or not can be made about Muslims, Hindus, Buddhists or other classes of people. Christians in general and Catholics in particular are a fair game. They could be ridiculed and made to look foolish, old fashioned and bizarre. This world view, of bullying of Christians, is widespread in fashionable circles among those who purport to be the most liberal, educated and enlightened minds. But the nagging question on the minds of Catholics is that: Why are the brightest and most liberal and highly educated minds are actually so closed and display a vicious illiberalism and gross absence of respect for other points of view? Why the most liberal minds are exhibiting the worst puerile signs of intolerance? It is baffling to notice that really some of the brightest minds have a parochial view of reality and cannot go beyond the confines of their cultural boundaries. Many people are attacked on a daily basis and some, even killed because of their religious beliefs in a world which we thought is growing more tolerant and safer for everybody to live.
But there are some hard facts which we need to contend with today. First, the world today is experiencing an irreversible and accelerated trend of migration, globalisation and multiculturalism where monocultures no longer exist. People are experiencing the joy of what it means to be a world citizen and the world has witnessed to the beauty of beliefs, cultures, values, practices, customs, norms and religions. All kinds of ethnocentrisms and intolerance have no place in the world nowadays. It does not make any sense to make a mockery of people’s religious beliefs and attitudes; and it does not yield anything positive apart from creating tensions, insecurity and chaos. Secondly, the society in which we live has changed in important ways, meaning that there is a need to interpret the world afresh, apply the values to new problems and generate fresh thinking and proposals for change. The United Nations estimates that currently 200 million people live outside their countries of origin, an increase of a quarter since 1990; and it is estimated that 5.5 million British citizens live outside the United Kingdom, rather more than the number of foreign nationals who live in the UK. This mobile global elite is prone to champion open borders; and are less interested by nationalism, instead arguing for new sorts of regional and global reordering. In such a scenario, any form of intolerance is a recipe for self-isolation, ethnocentrism and is undesirable in the community of nations which demands a certain level of civility and humane tolerance. It is surprising that societies which were once seen as an epitome of civility and culture are quickly sliding to debauchery in the name of freedom. The daily abuse of the Catholics and constant chatter against their beliefs indicates a new form of intolerance which is equivalent to the persecutions of the young Church in the first century of the Christian era. The Church is an innocent lamb which can be ridiculed and abused without any grave consequences. It is soft and easy prey to all kinds of debauchery. Attacks against the Church cannot be levelled against any other institution or class of people. It is easy to ridicule Christians without any grave consequences, neither economic sanctions nor diplomatic blockades. So, it is easy! But anyone attacking a weak and feeble person, that person too, is weak and feeble! Could it be that those attacking the church are weak human beings and feeble mortals who want to overcome their weakness and fallibility by attacking the church! May be so!
But there are some hard facts which we need to contend with today. First, the world today is experiencing an irreversible and accelerated trend of migration, globalisation and multiculturalism where monocultures no longer exist. People are experiencing the joy of what it means to be a world citizen and the world has witnessed to the beauty of beliefs, cultures, values, practices, customs, norms and religions. All kinds of ethnocentrisms and intolerance have no place in the world nowadays. It does not make any sense to make a mockery of people’s religious beliefs and attitudes; and it does not yield anything positive apart from creating tensions, insecurity and chaos. Secondly, the society in which we live has changed in important ways, meaning that there is a need to interpret the world afresh, apply the values to new problems and generate fresh thinking and proposals for change. The United Nations estimates that currently 200 million people live outside their countries of origin, an increase of a quarter since 1990; and it is estimated that 5.5 million British citizens live outside the United Kingdom, rather more than the number of foreign nationals who live in the UK. This mobile global elite is prone to champion open borders; and are less interested by nationalism, instead arguing for new sorts of regional and global reordering. In such a scenario, any form of intolerance is a recipe for self-isolation, ethnocentrism and is undesirable in the community of nations which demands a certain level of civility and humane tolerance. It is surprising that societies which were once seen as an epitome of civility and culture are quickly sliding to debauchery in the name of freedom. The daily abuse of the Catholics and constant chatter against their beliefs indicates a new form of intolerance which is equivalent to the persecutions of the young Church in the first century of the Christian era. The Church is an innocent lamb which can be ridiculed and abused without any grave consequences. It is soft and easy prey to all kinds of debauchery. Attacks against the Church cannot be levelled against any other institution or class of people. It is easy to ridicule Christians without any grave consequences, neither economic sanctions nor diplomatic blockades. So, it is easy! But anyone attacking a weak and feeble person, that person too, is weak and feeble! Could it be that those attacking the church are weak human beings and feeble mortals who want to overcome their weakness and fallibility by attacking the church! May be so!
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