Feast day: June 3

St. Charles Lwanga & Companions

Martyrs of Uganda · d. 1886

Patron of African youth, converts, torture victims

Master of pages at the Ugandan royal court, burned alive with 21 companions for protecting boys from the king's abuse and refusing to renounce Christ.

Charles Lwanga was a young man of the kingdom of Buganda, in what is now Uganda, and served as a page and then master of pages at the court of King Mwanga in the 1880s, in the very first years of Christianity in the region. The new faith, brought by missionaries only a few years before, was spreading rapidly among the young men of the court, who were drawn by its teaching and its promise of human dignity.

King Mwanga turned violently against the Christians, enraged both by their growing influence and by their refusal — led by the older pages — to submit to his sexual demands upon the boys in his service. Charles Lwanga, as master of the pages, did all he could to protect the younger boys from the king and to strengthen them in the faith, even baptizing several of them himself as the danger closed in.

When the king's fury broke into open persecution, Charles and his companions — pages, soldiers, and servants, Catholic and Anglican alike, some of them mere teenagers — were rounded up and given the chance to renounce their faith and live. They refused. Charles encouraged the others to remain steadfast and joyful even as they were marched to their deaths.

On June 3, 1886, Charles Lwanga and a group of his companions were burned alive at Namugongo, praying and, it is said, singing as they died. Far from crushing the new Church, their courage astonished the nation and made converts by the thousands, so that Uganda became one of the most Christian lands in Africa. Twenty-two of the Catholic martyrs were canonized in 1964, and Charles Lwanga is honored as a patron of youth and of Catholic action in Africa.

As he burned, he reportedly said quietly, 'You are burning me, but it is as if you are pouring water over my body.' Uganda is now majority Christian.

Image: Albert Wider (Copyrighted free use), via Wikimedia Commons.