History & overview · every faith gets one
A Ugandan Marian movement that kept the commandments by keeping silent.
The movement formed in south-western Uganda around 1989 among Catholics who believed the Virgin Mary had told them the Ten Commandments were being broken wholesale and had to be restored. Its answer was practical and severe: if the tongue breaks commandments, stop using it. Members communicated largely in sign language and in writing, spoke aloud only on Mondays and Fridays, gave up sex including within marriage, fasted on Mondays and Fridays, and worked the movement's farms at Kanungu. They wore coloured robes by rank — black for novices, green for those keeping the commandments, green and white for the professed. They kept the Latin rite, received communion kneeling, and expected the end of the present age. On 17 March 2000 the church at Kanungu burned.
On 17 March 2000 the church building at the movement's Kanungu compound burned with members inside; at least 330 died there, and police said more bodies were probably reduced to ash. Ugandan police then exhumed 444 further bodies from mass graves at the movement's other properties and at leaders' houses, many showing signs of strangulation, poisoning or stabbing, bringing the recorded total to 778. Police reclassified the case from mass suicide to murder. Credonia Mwerinde, Joseph Kibwetere and Dominic Kataribaabo were placed on the wanted list; none has been found and no one has been prosecuted.
Why it is filed this way
Best described as a post-Catholic movement: it never repudiated Catholic doctrine and considered itself the faithful remnant of it, while operating outside the diocese and led by laypeople and by priests the church had removed. Ugandan scholarship and the Ugandan press have pressed a question the international coverage mostly skipped — how a movement this large operated for a decade in registered premises without official notice.
The movement ended in March 2000. Nothing survived it and no successor exists.
The founding
Credonia Mwerinde, a former shopkeeper and bar owner from Kanungu, said the Virgin appeared to her at a rock cave in 1988; her father Paulo Kashaku had reported visions since 1960. Joseph Kibwetere was a well-known lay Catholic, a former school proprietor and parliamentary candidate, who had been having his own visions since 1984 and joined her in June 1989. A US-educated priest, Dominic Kataribaabo, joined and became the movement's theologian; several other priests and nuns followed, and the Catholic Church in Uganda distanced itself from them. The core text, A Timely Message from Heaven: The End of the Present Time, was given to recruits to read repeatedly over four to six days before they were admitted.
Its founding is bound to Credonia Mwerinde and Joseph Kibwetere — 1989 CE.
What it holds
Reality. Created, ordered by law, and near its end. The present age was held to be closing, with the Kanungu compound described as Noah's Ark..
The divine. Wholly Catholic in structure — the Trinity, the Mass, the saints — with the Virgin Mary as the movement's actual channel of instruction. The apparition tradition it drew on was mainstream Catholic: Fatima, La Salette, Kibeho in neighbouring Rwanda. What set it apart was that the instructions were current, specific, and treated as binding..
Death and after. Judgment at the end of the present age, with the members gathered and taken. The date was expected at the end of 1999 and then moved..