Saint Charles Lwanga and Companions

Martyrs

Feast Day

June 3

Life

1860–1886

Canonized

1964

Born

Bulimu, Buganda (modern Uganda)

Saint Charles Lwanga was born about 1860 of the Ngabi clan in the kingdom of Buganda, in present-day Uganda. He served as a page at the royal court of Kabaka (king) Mwanga II at Mengo. Catholic missionaries of the Society of Missionaries of Africa (the White Fathers, founded by Cardinal Charles Lavigerie) had arrived in Buganda in 1879. Charles was catechized by Joseph Mukasa Balikuddembe, the Catholic majordomo of the royal pages, who was beheaded on November 15, 1885, after rebuking the king for the murder of the Anglican missionary bishop James Hannington.

Charles took over the catechesis of the pages and was secretly baptized that same November. King Mwanga, opposed both to the missionaries' moral teaching and to the political influence of converts, ordered the surviving Christian pages, Catholic and Anglican, to renounce the faith. They refused. On June 3, 1886, Solemnity of the Ascension, Charles Lwanga and twelve other Catholic pages, with several Anglicans, were burned alive at Namugongo, about ten miles from Mengo. Charles, the leader, was burned separately. Other Catholic martyrs were executed in the surrounding months.

The total of Catholic martyrs of the Uganda persecution numbers twenty-two: Pope Saint Paul VI canonized them at Saint Peter's on October 18, 1964, during the Third Session of Vatican II, the first canonization of African martyrs in the modern era. Pope Paul VI then visited the Shrine of the Uganda Martyrs at Namugongo in 1969, the first papal visit to sub-Saharan Africa. Pope Saint John Paul II visited the shrine in 1993 and Pope Francis in 2015.