The Measured Prophet · Faith · Catholic

Pilgrimage Is Already a Prayer

This year, Ebola cancelled the crowd. What remained was the question the crowd was helping us avoid.

SEGAWA ELVIS WILLIAM 4 June 2026

The Namugongo Basilica from above. That wide ground holds over half a million people on a normal June 3rd. Today it held 400. It was still Martyrs Day.

"I have fought the good fight, I have finished the race, I have kept the faith."
— 2 Timothy 4:7

"Goodbye, friends. We are on our way."
Last words of Saint Kizito, age 14 — June 3, 1886

A few weeks ago on this blog I was writing about the weeks where decades happen — that dizzying feeling of watching history move faster than you can process it. Today I want to write about something that did not happen. Namugongo. The shrine. The million-person crowd that gathers every June 3rd and was this year quietly cancelled, redirected to home parishes, on account of the Ebola outbreak in eastern DRC that has been disturbing the region's peace for longer than the news cycle remembers.

Which is, when you sit with it, a slightly funny instruction to give. Go home and commemorate people who refused to go home.

But I am not here to be funny today. I am here because this year's disruption opened something up in me that I want to think through out loud, in case it opens something up in you too.

❦What Happened This Year

President Museveni announced the postponement on May 17, following consultations with religious leaders and the National Epidemic Response Task Force. The DRC's Ituri Province had recorded at least 80 deaths and over 240 suspected Ebola cases, with two confirmed cases already in Kampala — one of which was fatal. The WHO declared a global health emergency the same weekend. The Uganda Episcopal Conference cancelled the Namugongo gathering entirely on May 26 and asked the faithful to celebrate in their home parishes instead.

This is why I was at Our Lady of Lourdes, Namilyango this morning, in the Lugazi Diocese, rather than somewhere on the Kampala-Namugongo road. And honestly, it turned out to be exactly the right place to be thinking about what pilgrimage means.

Scale of what was cancelled In a normal year, over 813,000 people visit Namugongo for Martyrs Day — 563,940 at the Catholic shrine alone. People come from Tanzania, Kenya, Rwanda, and yes, the very DRC that this year sent us Ebola instead of pilgrims. The event generates between Shs29 billion and Shs43 billion in economic activity for the area. This year the Catholic shrine hosted a maximum of 400 invited guests. The vendors who plan twelve months for this one day felt that number. I am not making light of it.

❦Who We Are Remembering

Pilgrims at Namugongo on a normal June 3rd. Some of these people walked from Tanzania. From Kenya. From Rwanda. The DRC pilgrims who set off this year made it as far as Kasese before the cancellation found them.

Because I think many of us have been saying "Uganda Martyrs" for so long that we have stopped seeing the actual people behind the name, let me put a few things down.

Forty-five young men, 22 Catholic and 23 Anglican, were executed between 1885 and 1887 on the orders of Kabaka Mwanga II. They were pages in the royal court — young, educated, trusted. On May 25, 1886, Mwanga separated the Christians from the rest of his court. When every one of them said they intended to remain Christian, he sentenced them to be burned alive. They were marched 37 miles to Namugongo. Three were killed on the road. The rest waited in captivity for a week while the executioners collected enough firewood. On June 3, 1886 — a Thursday, and also the Feast of the Ascension — they burned.

Charles Lwanga, their leader, was separated and burned alone, slowly, from the feet upward. His last words to the man lighting the fire: "It is as if you are pouring water on me. Please repent and become a Christian like me." Twenty-six years old.

The youngest was Kizito, fourteen. He had been begging the missionaries to baptize him for months. They kept saying he was too young, too restless, not settled enough in the faith. It was only in a prison cell, the night before the death sentence, that Lwanga finally baptized him — no church, no priest present, just the two of them and whatever words Lwanga could remember in the dark. So when Mwanga asked the next morning: are you Christian? Kizito had been Catholic for less than twelve hours. He said yes without hesitation. The missionary priest Fr. Lourdel, watching them be bound and led away, wrote that he saw "little Kizito laughing merrily at this, as though it were a game." Kizito's last words at the pyre: "Goodbye, friends. We are on our way."

A fourteen-year-old, baptized nine days before his death, walking into fire laughing. I have been Catholic my whole life and I want to be careful about claiming I have anything close to that.

The detail that stays with me Lwanga promised Kizito before the march: when the moment comes, I will take your hand, and if we die for Jesus, we will die together, hand in hand. And they did. This is not Catholic legend. This is documented history. Charles Lwanga was canonized alongside the other martyrs by Pope Paul VI on October 18, 1964. He is the patron saint of African Catholic youth. The boy whose hand he held is the patron saint of children. They are still holding hands, in a manner of speaking.

❦What Pilgrimage Actually Is

St. Paul, writing from prison, told the Philippians: "Forgetting what is behind and straining toward what is ahead, I press on toward the goal." That pressing on — that physical, effortful movement in a direction you have chosen — is what pilgrimage is. The body agreeing, out loud, with what the soul has already decided. You put your feet on a road and say with your whole physical self: I am going somewhere because I believe something. The walk is not the preparation for the prayer. The walk is the prayer.

That is why people walk hundreds of kilometres to Namugongo every year. Pilgrims from Nebbi diocese started their foot journey on May 15 last year — a 450-kilometre walk, started nineteen days before June 3. Not because the Church forced them. Because there is something the body needs to do that the mouth cannot fully say. One of the Martyrs himself, St. Luke Baanabakintu, used to walk 60 kilometres each way just to attend Mass. He was not doing it for the exercise.

But I want to be honest about something, the way I think the Martyrs deserve honesty more than ceremony. Not everyone who walks to Namugongo walks there to pray. Some go for the crowd. Some go because a million people in one place does something to your nervous system that has more to do with atmosphere than the Holy Spirit. And there is nothing entirely wrong with community — God made us for it — but we should not confuse the festival with the pilgrimage. The Martyrs chose to die rather than blur a distinction that mattered to them. The least we can do is keep our own distinctions clear.

Okugenda awatuukirivu si buli omu agenda n'omwoyo ogw'omutuukirivu. Going to a holy place does not mean you arrive with a holy heart.

❦Two Kinds of Dying

The Basilica exterior. Twenty-two copper domes — one for each Catholic martyr. The altar inside stands on the exact ground where Charles Lwanga was burned.

The late Archbishop Cyprian Kizito Lwanga — born in this very Lugazi Diocese, and named after the laughing fourteen-year-old I just described — used to speak about two kinds of martyrdom.

Red martyrdom is what the court pages of Mwanga did. The body given entirely, once, in fire. You do not come back from it. Most of us are not being called to it, and the Church is not asking us to go looking for it.

Pink martyrdom is the rest of us. It is the daily dying. The quiet kind that requires no executioner and no feast day. It is the moment you stay honest when a comfortable lie was right there. The confession you made even though the priest was going to recognize your voice and remember. The Sunday morning when the bed had a better argument than Mass and you got up anyway. It is, as St. Paul put it, presenting yourself as a living sacrifice — something that breathes and chooses, every morning, to stay on the altar.

And here is the thing that I keep returning to: all sacramental life is, in some form, martyrdom. Every baptism is a drowning on purpose — you go under and come up different and you are supposed to mean it. Every confession is the death of the pride that wanted to keep the sin secret. Every Eucharist is the admission that you do not live by your own strength. The Martyrs did not do something strange and unrepeatable. They did what the sacraments rehearse, week after week, for every Catholic paying attention. They just did it finally, loudly, and with Mwanga watching.

Martyrdom starts in the heart — not in the flames. The fire at Namugongo only confirmed what had already happened inside those young men long before the march began. Which is the question they ask us, quietly, every June 3rd

So the question they ask us is not: could you die the way we did? The real question is smaller and harder. Are you doing the pink martyrdom? Is anything in you actually on the altar, or is everything very comfortable? Because if we say we believe what they believed — which we do, at least on Sundays — then the same Spirit that carried Kizito laughing into fire is available to us too. Not to burn, but to change. To make us people who mean what they say when they say they believe.

❦At Our Lady of Lourdes, Namilyango

So this morning I sat in Namilyango. Same walls as every other Sunday. No procession, no atmosphere of a million people, no vendors on the road. Just the parish, doing what parishes do, except today it was for the Martyrs — and without the spectacle to fill the space, the questions arrived more directly than usual.

Because here is the thing: the Martyrs were not first celebrated at Namugongo. They were burned there. There was no ceremony, no crowd, no programme. There was a king who was afraid of what he could not control, and young men who had decided something in their hearts that was not going to change regardless of what he did, and a God who the whole kingdom of Buganda was about to find out could not be burned.

The shrine, the basilica, the copper domes, the annual million — that is all a later addition. The faith came first, alone, in a prison cell, in the dark, with a teenager asking to be baptized because he had decided he would rather die as a Christian than live as something else. St. Paul, in chains, still wrote letters full of joy. Kizito, bound and marched to his death, was still laughing. Something was happening inside these people that the outside situation simply could not reach.

That is the invitation. Not to be dramatic about it. Not to perform it. Just to ask, seriously, whether there is anything in you that the outside situation also cannot reach. Whether your faith is in you, or only around you.

I sat with that question this morning at Namilyango and I did not come up with a clean answer. But I think the asking, done honestly, is already the beginning of the walk. And a walk, as we have established, is already a prayer.

Keep going. Selah.

⁂

P.S. – To the vendors who lost this year's Martyrs Day earnings, I hope the year is generous in other places. To the DRC pilgrims who were already walking when the cancellation came through and were received at Kabuyiri Shrine in Kasese instead - you were already on your way, and that counts more than the destination.

IMAGE CREDITS: Aerial view of Namugongo Basilica — Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 4.0 (Tusk Media); Pilgrims at Namugongo — Wikimedia Commons; Basilica exterior — Wikimedia Commons. All images used under open licence.