The Uganda New Vision reports on the establishment of the “Catholic Apostolic National Church in Uganda”, which allows priests to marry and which has therefore attracted:
A Catholic sect that allows its priests to marry has registered and opened a branch in Uganda, with its headquarters in Jinja.
The Catholic Apostolic National Church, which does not allow women to become priests, has attracted a few Roman Catholic priests.
Its African archbishop, Mbewa Anzanga, a former Zambian Roman Catholic priest, has appointed Leonard Lubega the first bishop-elect for Uganda.
Lubega, a PhD graduate in Biblical Counselling from a US university, has already received an apostolic mandate for his election as Uganda’s first bishop. Lubega, who is also a lecturer at Kampala International University, was formerly a Charismatic Catholic Church priest.
Mbewa is due in the country in January to ordain over 10 priests and officially launch the new church in Uganda.
The Catholic Apostolic National Church and the Catholic Charismatic Church are both independent of the Roman Catholic Church, although they have historic connections to Roman Catholicism; the Catholic Apostolic National Church goes back to a Brazilian bishop excommunicated by Pope Pius XII in 1945, while the Catholic Charismatic Church was formed by a Canadian priest who received episcopal ordination from Old Catholic Bishops in 1968 (1). Curiously, quotes attributed to Lubega in the article about the Catholic Apostolic National Church perfectly match statements from the church’s website.
However, there is an important extra element which the New Vision ignores but the AP notes:
Mbewe has said he was inspired by the former Zambian archbishop, Emmanuel Milingo, who was married in 2001 to a South Korean woman by the Rev. Sun Myung Moon of the Unification Church.
Milingo was excommunicated in 2006 after installing four married men as bishops in the United States. Two weeks ago, the Vatican defrocked Milingo entirely, stripping him of his priestly functions so any future ordinations by him would be invalid.
Milingo did not just ordain married men in defiance of church teaching: he has also expressed the view that Rev Sun Myung Moon is the Messiah, and he appears to have embraced Unificationist theology. Further, as I blogged in 2007, Mbewe’s Catholic Apostolic National Church of Zambia was launched at the local “Peace Embassy”, which is run by Moon’s Universal Peace Federation; the UPF claims to promote inter-religious dialogue, but in this instance was clearly facilitating a schism for the benefit of Moon’s power games in Africa. Milingo has also been active recruiting married priests in Kenya.
The Roman Catholic Church in Uganda, meanwhile, has responded with a predictable call for temporal authorities to suppress its new rival:
Archbishop Cyprian Kizito Lwanga, the Roman Catholic archbishop of Kampala, called on the government not to allow such renegade religious groups to operate, saying they might cause confusion among Ugandans.
”I call upon government to avoid registering such new churches,” he said. ”They can bring about religious conflicts.”
Vice-President Gilbert Bukenya is apparently “investigating”.
In 2004 the 84-year-old former president of Uganda, Godfrey Binaisa, married a Japanese woman 28 years his junior in a Unificationist mass wedding in Seoul; the subsequent civil ceremony in Kampala was addressed by President Museveni, who made a hilariously tactless speech:
He said the only time Africans came close to Japanese was during the World War II when the British recruited two battalions of Africans to fight in Burma.
(1) This is definitely Lubega’s former denomination, despite the report calling it the “Charismatic Catholic Church” – see his listing here.
(Hat tip: Cult News Network)
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