UGANDA
Sunday Monitor
By Ivan Okuda
Posted Sunday, March 31 2013
Not many desire to try out Fr Anthony Musala’s shoes right now. How one writes a stinging letter while the Pope assumes office, laying bare facts on the filth in the church and goes ahead to call for radical reforms is a reality too huge for the throat. You can describe him by any adjective in your mind. You can agree or disagree with him and you have the choice to either love or hate him. But perhaps, after a moment of reflection and soul searching, you and I might ask the question: What if this man is right?
The first time I came face to face with issues of clerical celibacy, particularly in the Catholic Church, I was a student of Julius Ocwinyo’s Fate of Banished, which is arguably the most authoritative Ugandan fiction voice on the same, especially having been written by a former seminarian. In there, I came face to face with a one Santo Dila, a Catholic priest entangled in an affair with a married woman. But that was only fiction.
Hardly a year after I shelved Ocwinyo’s novel, Musaala drops a bombshell and earns himself instant suspension. What follows? Testimonies by the public of priests and bishops siring children. One caller actually had to be stopped by a moderator when he called in Kfm’s Hot Seat show on Thursday and made sweeping allegations of a tycoon fathered by a deceased cardinal. During the same show, Ethics Minister, Rev Fr Simon Lokodo admitted he had, “heard of but not seen,” priests with children.
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