Today is the feast day of the Ugandan Martyrs (St. Charles Lwanga and Companions). They have something to say to us. But are we listening?Many web sites, particularly Anglican ones, are coy about why they died. They died “for being Christian” these websites say. But that's a sin of omission. Young men between the ages of 14 and 24, the Ugandan Martyrs were hacked to death, speared, or burned alive because of what, as Christians, they refused to do.
Sent by their families to serve as pages for their king, the martyrs were Catholics and Anglicans. But their king was sexually depraved, and pages had to do more than serve him his food and fetch him his clothes. They said no.
It's an uncomfortable story for us in the West. First, which of us parents would want our sons to die horribly rather than do something that they certainly weren't volunteering for? Like St. Maria Goretti, an 11-year-old girl who died of stab wounds after resisting being raped and forgiving her rapist, these boys and men were the victims of someone far more powerful. Like St. Maria Goretti, St. Charles Lwanga and Companions teach us that being such a victim does not oblige anyone to resist to the death (otherwise they wouldn't call it “heroic” virtue), but that what they resisted was truly evil.
Second, what the Ugandan martyrs died rather than submit to is exactly what some of our priests have recently been convicted of coercing boys and young men to do. It was a very small number of priests, to be sure, and one far surpassed by the number of men who are not priests who did (and continue to do) the same thing. But while we struggle with the outrageous attacks on the Church that the sins of those men brought on us all, we must not forget that they really were sins. It's popular in some Catholic circles to imagine that none of us has ever committed a sin, but St. Charles Lwanga and Companions teach us the truth that sinfulness is both part of human nature and something that can be resisted.
Third, we don't want to talk about the nature of these sins. Or, like some Anglicans, we want to say that was then, and this is now; that the sin was the boys and men being forced; that the thing they were being forced to do would have been perfectly fine if it had been their idea, and the man in question wasn't in a position of authority over them, and they had been over the age of consent. But St. Charles Lwanga and Companions did not die because they didn't want to adopt an “alternate lifestyle.” They died – as both the Catholic and Anglican shrines in Uganda do not hesitate to say – because they did not want to sin.
They did not want to sin, even if they wouldn't be culpable for the sin. They did not want to sin, even if no one would have blamed them for choosing to submit rather than to die.
Today is the feast day of the Ugandan Martyrs. They have something to tell us. Are we listening?
