20 Ugandan priests go into schism

Claiming over 10,000 followers, between 20 and 25 priests in Uganda have gone into schism and registered as the Catholic Apostolic National Church. The group, which has dispensed with the discipline of clerical celibacy, has ties to the Brazilian Catholic Apostolic Church, a sect started by the late excommunicated Bishop Carlos Duarte Costa.

Denouncing leaders of the new schism as “false prophets,” Ugandan Cardinal Emmanuel Wamala said that “they come putting on sheep’s clothes, but inwardly they are wolves who want to snatch the good values in the Church.”

44% of Uganda’s 28.3 million residents are Catholic.

The Ugandan government said it was investigating the breakaway Catholic Apostolic National Church in Uganda and would ban it if found to be illegal. Vatican officials said the priests were now considered "outside" the Catholic Church and would likely be excommunicated.

The creation of the splinter church underscored the increasingly vexing problem of enforcing celibacy for Roman Catholic priests in Africa, which has the world's fastest-growing Catholic population but where there have been several cases of priests living openly with women and fathering children.

Earlier this year, the Vatican summoned African bishops to Rome for a three-week meeting on problems of the church in Africa, and celibacy was a key topic of discussion.

The breakaway Ugandan church has as its head a former Zambian Catholic priest, the Rev. Luciano Anzanga Mbewe, who was excommunicated earlier this year for having founded what the Vatican called a schismatic church, the Catholic Apostolic National Church of Zambia, which allows for a married priesthood.