c. 2000 Religion News Service
(Rabbi Rudin is the national interreligious affairs director of the American Jewish Committee.)
(UNDATED) The recent horrific news that some thousand members of a Ugandan religious cult were murdered by the group’s leaders should forever end the ridiculous comment that such crimes are “unbelievable.” Tragically, cult murders are quite believable and are growing in number.
The long list of widely reported cultic murders began in 1978 with the Jonestown, Guyana, massacre and includes the Branch Davidians in Texas in 1993, the Solar Temple killings in Europe and Canada during the mid-1990s, the 1995 Tokyo subway gas attack by the Aum Shinrikyo cult, and the 1997 Heaven’s Gate catastrophe in California.
However, the slaughter of the innocents in Kanungu, Uganda, represents a lethal example of millennium madness. The leaders of something called the Movement for the Restoration of the Ten Commandments was led by 20 former Roman Catholics who asserted that the Virgin Mary had personally told them the world would end on December 31, 1999.
When that apocalyptic event did not happen, the date was moved forward to Dec. 31 of this year, but the movement’s hierarchy could not wait. Instead, during February and March they systematically burned and stabbed some 1,000 poverty-stricken cult members. When Ugandan authorities first discovered the grisly and charred remains, they termed it a mass suicide, but they soon realized it was something else: cultic mass murder.
The group was led by 68-year-old Joseph Kibwertere who was once a prominent Catholic educator in Uganda, and Cledonia Mwerinde, a forty-something one-time prostitute. Joining them in the brutal atrocities was 32-year-old Dominic Kataribab, a former priest who, it has been reported, once studied theology at Loyola Marymount University in Los Angeles.
Interpol and the Federal Bureau of Investigation are currently searching for Kibwertere and Mwerinde, who possibly escaped the bloody murders. Kataribab’s body was apparently identified among the human ashes.
Not surprisingly, the movement and its leaders were excommunicated and a Ugandan Catholic Bishop described the cult as an “obnoxious form of religiosity, rejected by the Church.” Archbishop Paul Bakyenga decreed that “no Mass will be celebrated” for the victims, but Gerard Banura, a theologian at Makerere University in Uganda, said “somehow the Catholic church made a mistake” by not tending to the critical needs of a population beset by AIDS, poverty, and social unrest.
Following the discovery of the thousand bodies, Archbishop Christophe Pierre, the Vatican Nuncio in Uganda, announced that Pope John Paul II wanted a full probe of the murders. Nearly 45 percent percent of the Ugandan population is Catholic.
The cult itself is a classic text book study of human depravity and exploitation that featured the familiar trio of sex, money, and power. At the time of the mass murders, the group was under investigation for rape, kidnapping, and illegal confinement. Ugandan press reports indicate Kibwertere, Mwerinde and other leaders forced their followers to turn all their money over to the cult. Sexual abuse, a mainstay of cultic life, was widespread within the group.
Because the sect banned all sexual relations among its members, no children were born inside the doomed group. The grim daily routine featured extremely hard physical labor and a single portion of porridge as food. The movement also demanded its members fast two days a week. Of course, the cult leaders were exempt from such a strict regimen, but weakened by food and sleep deprivation, the followers were cowed into total submission. Another means of mind control was the banning of all conversation among the cult members.
In the wake of the mass murders, the usual academic apologists of so-called “New Religious Movements” quickly came forward to “explain” the cult. We were told to “understand the root causes” of the Movement for the Restoration of the Ten Commandments and to “recognize the movement as an alternative religion.” But murder is murder is murder.
Even more disturbing is the general disinterest expressed by most of the American public. If more than a thousand members of a cult had been burned alive in the United States, the outcry would have been enormous. But because the victims were poor, politically impotent black Africans, they are being quickly forgotten. Racism is the only apparent reason for this apathy.
Shame on the cult apologists for misleading the public and shame on those who care so little about the victims of mass murder. And most of all, shame on those who close their eyes to the growing problem of destructive cults.
DEA END RUDIN