Who is Father Charles?
Father Charles Kawesi is a Roman Catholic priest from Uganda currently serving as pastor of St. Gerard’s Catholic Church, a small rural parish community in Aiken, South Carolina. He spent the first 23 years of his priesthood serving various parish communities - including extremely poor ones - in the Diocese of Kampala, Uganda.
Father Charles lives a life of service to others. He has been actively involved in setting up numerous projects and programs to help primarily women and orphans in Uganda. He has personally taken responsibility for more than 30 orphans of his own and continues to add to the number as the need arises. In each case he finds someone willing to take in the child and then he provides for their food, clothing and education. Father Charles has graciously offered to serve as our “pipeline” in getting funds directly to those who need them most. He will celebrate his 25th Anniversary of Ordination on May 9, 2007.
Father Charles’ Orphans: Father Charles’ orphans are some of the luckiest kids in Uganda. He loves each of them as if they were his own, he provides for all their basic needs, and he stays actively involved in their care and upbringing - even while serving as St. Gerard’s pastor, a continent away! Father has a great love for all children so it he finds it difficult if not impossible to say “no” to any child in need - and in fact, he often goes out looking for street children and finding temporary shelter for them. His children come from anywhere and everywhere - some are orphaned because of AIDS, others are refugees fleeing from Gulu in Northern Uganda or Rwanda, others are just children who have no one to care for them or love them. These are Father Charles’ orphans and their numbers will only continue to grow.
Matt and Chris Solenberger : Matt is an altar boy at St. Gerard’s. He is twelve years old. He received a gift of $65 - a lot of money for a young boy in Aiken - from Christine Betancourt’s family for being an alter server at her funeral Mass. And he immediately donated that entire amount to Uganda Spirit for Father Charles’ orphans. Not to be outdone, his six year old brother Christian went home and emptied his piggy bank and donated another $36 to Uganda Spirit - for a total of $101 from the Solenberger brothers!
As an example of the remarkable power of giving, on hearing of Matt’s and Chris’s generosity, five St. Gerard’s parishioners each matched their gift, thereby contributing a total of over $600 to Uganda Spirit.
Imelda: Imelda is a Ugandan woman. She has a full time job but she has also become a single Mom, raising four of Father Charles’ orphans. And she is actively involved in helping others as well, through her work organizing the Kozito Life Line Association and now with Uganda Spirit.
Mathias: Mathias is a Ugandan construction worker - when he is able to get work. He is raising five children several of whom are Father Charles’ orphans. Mathias works with the Youth Group in the slum area of Kampala. They have formed a music ministry. A keyboard was recently donated in memory of Jason Byrnes, a young man from Budd Lake, New Jersey who died on March 8, 2007.
Ann Beffa: Ann lives in Half Moon Bay, California, and it was because of her very generous donation that Peggy began to think seriously about the possibility of starting a non-profit organization. Peggy found that when she told her friends about Father Charles, many of them wanted to contribute to the work he was doing - she wasn’t soliciting funds, only sharing his story. How many more people would have the opportunity to join the cause if we started a non profit organization!
Lori MacMath: Lori is a CCD teacher in Atlanta, Georgia who heard about Fr. Charles and his orphans from her mom, a parishioner at St. Gerard’s. Lori took a photo of each of her students and asked them to write and draw pictures to send to the children in Uganda so that they would know that they are being prayed for and cared about by children here in the United States. When classes resume in the fall they are planning to do a fundraiser.
Anne Shaffer: Anne is sixth grader in Denville, New Jersey. Learning from Peggy DeVine about her Uganda Spirit initiative, Anne took it upon herself to start a project to let children in Uganda know that they are not alone. When Peggy visited the Shaffer family in January, Anne’s school had just had a Non-Profit Organization Day to learn what a Non-Profit is and what they do. Peggy then told her a little about Uganda Spirit and the work we are trying to do. We recently learned that Anne has not only been saving her own money (approximately $30.00) but has also been working with her school and her Brownie Troop to help the work of Uganda Spirit.
Gerry Straub: Gerry is a film producer whom we met at the 2007 Religious Education Congress in Anaheim. He gave up a very successful career in order to be able to apply his considerable talents to, in his words, “use film to empower the poor”. (Learn more about Gerry and his work on his website www.sandamianofoundation.org.) Gerry will be going to Uganda with Fr. Charles and Peggy DeVine on May 15th to film a documentary Alone In The World – The Unspeakable Tragedy of Uganda’s Children which will tell the story of Uganda Spirit and the children of Uganda.
Christine Betancourt: Christine was a founding Board Member of Uganda Spirit. She was diagnosed with Lou Gherig’s disease in January 2006. Christine loved children and strongly supported the work Father is doing in Uganda. She was alert and interested in Uganda Spirit until the day she died. It was her decision to offer her suffering for the success of our project. Within two weeks of her death, we received a call from the IRS telling us that we were on an “accelerated track” and soon after we received our Non-Profit status (six months earlier than anticipated).
Uganda Martyrs (1885-1886):
The following is a synopsis of the martyrdom of 22 Catholics in Uganda, over a century ago, by Father Robert F. McNamara:
Only in the nineteenth century did Christian missionaries begin to bring the Gospel to the hinterlands of the African continent. One of the most active missionary orders, the White Fathers, did pioneer work in equatorial Uganda.
When they began their apostolate in 1879, they found Mutesa, the kabaka (king) of the Buganda region, rather tolerant of their efforts. Not so, King Mwanga, the monarch who succeeded him. Mwanga, despite his youth, was already morally corrupt. Arabs had introduced homosexual practices to Uganda, and the kabaka had adopted them. In 1885 Joseph Mukasa, a Catholic in his court, dared to rebuke Mwanga for cruelty (in his assassination of Anglican bishop James Harrington and his party), and for his debauchery. The king soon found a pretext for ordering Mukasa beheaded.
If King Mwanga had hoped to daunt Christian opposition to his evil ways, he was mistaken. Charles Lwanga took Mukasa's place as a protector of the Christian pageboys whom the ruler constantly tried to victimize. Mwanga therefore launched a persecution against the Christians surrounding him.
As a result, 22 Catholics in all were executed on his order. Some were prominent people - one, a middle-aged judge; another, a tribal chieftain. But the largest group was the 17 pages, whose ages ran from 13 to 25. Thirteen of them were burned to death in a cruel mass execution. Nor were Catholic Christians the only object the wicked king's fury. An equal number of Protestants were put to death because of their Christian faith. Thus the purge of the court Christians became a touching ecumenical event.
Non-Christian Ugandans thought better rather than worse of the Christian faith as a result of the executions. Within a year after the deaths of the martyrs, the number of Catholic baptisms rose from 200 to over 500; and the number of catechumens, from 800 to 3000. Today, Uganda is at least one-third Catholic. In 1939 it was given Joseph Kiwanuka, the first black African bishop of the Latin Rite in modern times. Bishop Kiwanuka was a kinsman of Achilles Kiwanuka, one of the martyrs of 1886.
Pope Benedict XV beatified these 22 martyrs in 1920. Pope Paul VI canonized them during the course of the Second Vatican council in 1964. When Msgr. Richard K. Burns, pastor of St. Thomas the Apostle parish in Rochester, New York and builder of this beautiful church, consecrated the main altar on April 10, 1965, he sealed into it the relics of several saints, including some of the Martyrs of Uganda.
Today our American newspapers record an increasing number of cases of the sexual abuse of children. Merchants of flesh are promoting ever more boldly the prostitution of boys.
May the young martyrs of Uganda, who died rather than yield their purity to a pagan monarch, intercede on behalf of the integrity of our abused American youth. May our traditional American sense of decency win out against vices so ruinous to family life.
