3 June 2021
Memorial of St. Charles Lwanga & Companions
Today the Church celebrates the memorial of St. Charles Lwanga and his companions who were martyrs in Uganda. Christianity flourished for a period of time under a tolerant king as Catholic and Anglican missionaries worked in the country. A less tolerant successor came into power who was worried about the Europeanizing of the country, so the new king pursued an aggressive repression of missionaries and new Christian converts. The king also desired to sleep with servants of the royal household, and those that were Christians refused on grounds of their faith. Charles Lwanga was a royal page who converted to Christianity and ministered to his fellow pages, sharing his new faith in Christ with them. When the king discovered Charles had become a Christian and his fellow Christian pages, he ordered all of them put to death. Charles supposedly confronted his executioner telling him that he should convert to Christianity. The boldness of his request strikes me; even as he faces death, he has hope for the executioner’s heart to change.
Our readings today our full of bold prayers amidst what appears to be hopeless times. Tobit and Sarah pray that they might survive their wedding night. Her previous seven husbands had died soon after marriage, and as we saw earlier in the daily mass readings, Sarah despaired for the way people viewed her. The Gospel reading today does not contain a petition as it does a recognition of who answers prayer. Jesus starts his instruction with the beginning of the Shema prayer: “Hear, O Israel! The Lord our God is Lord alone!” It is the beginning of prayer to recognize the Lord in our hearts and the in-breaking of hope into a hopeless situation. As Jesus suggests, the boldness of what we proclaim needs to find an echo in action with his summary of the Law as to love God and our neighbors. Let us pray that our actions reflect our prayers, the prayer that the Lord truly to reign and to give all that we have, like Charles Lwanga and his companions, to God’s loving care.