The Catholic Worker in Africa: ‘We Need It Now More Than Ever’

Like many other Catholic Workers, Michael Sekitoleko has spent a few weeks in jail. But while most Catholic Workers’ incarceration stems from acts of civil disobedience, his six-week imprisonment was retribution for his work helping rural villagers foil an illegal land grab.

He traveled to the village with two lawyer friends.

“These are very poor people,” Sekitoleko told me during a Zoom interview in August. “They don’t know what the law says. So, my lawyer friends explained to them that the law says nobody should be taking land away from them.”

After meeting with the residents, Sekitoleko encouraged them to follow up if they needed more assistance. It looked like the land grab had been thwarted.

The next day, though, the police asked him to come to the station for an “interview.” He wasn’t worried, because he had a good working relationship with them, sometimes even collaborating on community meetings promoting nonviolent conflict resolution.

But when Sekitoleko showed up at the police station, they jailed him, saying that he had held an illegal meeting and was inciting violence.

“And they are telling me, ‘Michael, we know you, but you know, we also have needs. You’re innocent, but you need to, you know, you need to pay something and we will letyou go,’” he explained.

His lawyer friends, meanwhile, pushed the police to formally file charges so the matter could be resolved in court. Instead, the police retracted their allegations and let him go.

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That 2017 incident highlights just one of the many challenges Sekitoleko has faced since he and two friends started the Uganda Catholic Worker in early 2011. Besides corruption and police harassment, he’s also endured hunger, bouts of malaria and typhoid, multiple evictions, skeptical Church officials, and a brutal COVID lockdown that filled his house of hospitality to capacity, killing one guest.

And as the only Catholic Worker in Uganda, he knows loneliness, too. A handful of communities in western countries send him newsletters, but with poor Internet access and no funds to travel to international Catholic Worker gatherings, he feels cut off from the rest of the movement.

He didn’t have to choose this lifestyle. Raised in a middle-class family, he is college educated and took part-time freelance work to support the community in its early years.

He could probably land a good job, but decided to become a “fulltime Catholic Worker” years ago; he considers it a lifelong vocational calling. A devout Catholic who isn’t shy about his faith, Sekitoleko at one time planned to enter the seminary to become a priest. That didn’t work out; instead, he has spent whatever evangelical zeal he might have brought to the priesthood on serving those on the margins of Ugandan society: newly released prisoners, abandoned children, HIV-positive people, victims of domestic violence, refugees, people suffering from mental illness. He tends to the spiritual works of mercy, too, mainly through a peace and nonviolence program that he has brought to six hundred schools across the country.

Ultimately, he would like the Uganda Catholic Worker to become a “model” for the development of other Catholic Worker communities across the continent. (The only other African community is Catholic Friends of Mentally Ill in Kenya.)

“With the troubles that we have, Africa, and Uganda specifically, needs the Catholic Worker more today than it has ever needed it,” he said.

That’s quite the aspiration for a man whose Catholic Worker community disbanded in early 2023 after it was evicted from its sixth rented house of hospitality. But given everything he has accomplished and endured in the past thirteen years, it’s not so hard to believe that he could pull it off.

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I first became curious about Sekitoleko’s story after Jim Dowling, co-founder of the Peter Maurin Farm outside Brisbane, Australia, sent an appeal to the national Catholic Worker e-mail list on behalf of the Uganda Catholic Worker back in June, 2023.

“Dear Friends,” he wrote, “I am appealing for my friend Michael in Uganda who is trying to raise funds to buy a Catholic Worker Farm. … If you know anyone you think might like to help please pass this on.”

Intrigued, I began following the progress of the GoFundMe; over the next six weeks, it barely budged. I reached out to Dowling, who explained that the fundraiser was an attempt to get the community up and running again, this time on more stable footing. I reached out to Sekitoleko to float the idea of writing a “quick story” about the Uganda Catholic Worker. Only when I began interviewing him in August did I realize his story was too interesting to be “quick.” Most Catholic Workers are White, middle-class, college-educated people living in affluent countries. Could the Catholic Worker be adapted to an African context? And if so, what would that look like?

I met with Sekitoleko on Zoom over three days in late August. He traveled two and a half hours from the rural village where he lives to Kampala, the capital, so he could get a decent Internet connection. He spoke to me from a noisy, expensive Internet café for our first two meetings, and from the street with the help of his brother’s cell phone for our third meeting. Later, he sent me three videos elaborating on our interview, and this month, we connected again for an update—this time from a shop selling baby supplies. (He sat in front of a shelf of skin creams, shoppers’ arms coming into the picture occasionally to grab an item or two.) The tonality of his native language, Luganda, shone through his fluent English.

Throughout our interviews, Sekitoleko was perpetually upbeat, the sort of person who prefers to laugh rather than cry when he’s telling you about his troubles, the sort of person whose default expression seems to be a smile. He became intensely serious, though, leaning forward with raised eyebrows and wide eyes, whenever he got going on one of his hot-button issues: the epidemic of illegal land grabbing; how refugees should be treated with dignity; the need for “internal healing” for poor Ugandans who struggle to survive day to day; and his beloved Catholic faith.

Here’s his story.

Beginnings: ‘We Just Have to Live What Dorothy Teaches’

Born on June 6, 1980, Sekitoleko was raised as the second of five children in a devoutly Catholic middle-class family; his father works as a property valuer and his mother works in mixed agriculture and small-scale catering. His siblings all hold white-collar jobs: engineering, accounting, transportation. Sekitoleko himself graduated from Makerere University Business School with a degree in business computing.

It was during his time at university that he first heard about Dorothy Day, Peter Maurin, and the Catholic Worker. He attended a charismatic retreat sponsored by the Catholic campus ministry at the university, and during the retreat, the chaplain gave a talk about Dorothy Day.

That talk made a deep impression on Sekitoleko, who began reading whatever he could about Dorothy Day and the movement. He appreciated its practical personalism, the idea that people should take responsibility for helping one another instead of waiting for the government to do it.

It was through this reading that he first learned about nonviolence, which he began studying more generally. Day’s emphasis on the need for structural social change resonated, too, especially in the context of Uganda, given the huge income gap and what Sekitoleko says is the all-too-common practice of displacing the poor from their land.

“When you look at the country in which I was born and raised, the country of Uganda, for me, the works of mercy are part of the solution” to its unique problems and challenges, he said. “We just have to live what (Dorothy Day) teaches and our community will start to get transformed.”

Two of his friends who were also at the charismatic retreat were similarly intrigued by the Catholic Worker. Together, they decided to start their own community, right there in Kampala. They spent a year educating themselves about the movement and working various gigs to save up money.

Eventually, they rented a house, paying six months’ rent in advance.

“Everything was good, and we let the word out that we had a Catholic Worker house that was providing hospitality to the homeless,” Sekitoleko said.

Not that people knew what the Catholic Worker was or much cared about its philosophy. They were mostly interested in the services it provided. In those first years, three areas of focus emerged: sheltering the homeless; peace and nonviolence outreach, especially in schools and youth communities; and clothing collection and redistribution.

Sekitoleko and his companions mostly supported themselves with occasional side jobs. They also received financial support from a few friends and family members.

Some of those friends and family members questioned their decision, though. That’s a common experience among young adults committing to a Catholic Worker lifestyle, but in Uganda, there is the added pressure of cultural expectations.

“Our parents, our friends, and our relatives wanted us just to get jobs to get money and then take care of them,” he said. “They aren’t going to be like, ‘Okay, Michael is living more of a missionary life, so he’s off the hook.’ No! They expect you to meet your responsibilities as a son.”

That has made the support of his own family even more meaningful. “The only people who love me unconditionally are these people, my family,” Sekitoleko said, pointing to his brother, Jonah, who joined him on the third day of our interviews. And then, with a mischievous laugh, he added: “Because they don’t have much of a choice!”

A Little Help from Australia

The new community was an instant success, in the sense that demand for their help—and the work they were doing—grew quickly in the first year. Despite side jobs and some support from friends and family, though, it quickly became clear that they didn’t have the resources to keep the community afloat for long.

“We believed in God’s providence,” he said, “and we did a lot of praying.”

Those prayers were answered in 2012 when the Uganda Catholic Worker found a financial sponsor in Jim and Anne Dowling, longtime Catholic Workers at Peter Maurin Farm outside of Brisbane, Australia.

Dowling explained that he and Sekitoleko connected with one another through a mutual friend who was visiting Catholic Worker communities around the world. For more than ten years, the Dowlings were the main source of financial support for the Uganda Catholic Worker, donating $2,000 AUD every three months or so.

Sekitoleko calls Jim Dowling his “Catholic Worker father,” a mentor figure who has both advised and inspired him. “Without Jim, probably I would have given up already,” he said. “There’s a lot I’ve learned from him.”

Over the years, the Dowlings have stayed in touch with Sekitoleko by e-mail and occasional video chats.

“The thing that has inspired me is that Michael is very keen on the Catholic Worker ideals of nonviolence and hospitality,” Dowling told me, adding that the idea of the Catholic Worker taking root in a country like Uganda is “pretty interesting.”

‘We Don’t Need Voluntary Poverty Here’

“Interesting” might be one way to describe the many challenges that come with running a Catholic Worker community in Uganda. While many Catholic Workers rely on donations of food, money, and talent from their wider community, that kind of support is absent in Uganda. The idea of rescuing good food from Dumpsters—a practice Sekitoleko has read about in other Catholic Workers’ publications—made him laugh with wonder.

Although parts of Uganda are developed, grinding poverty is widespread, especially in rural areas. Some 41 percent of Uganda’s 44 million people live on less than $1.90 a day, according to Opportunity International. Almost half the population is under the age of 15, with only about half completing primary school. Uganda also hosts Africa’s largest refugee population, about 1 million displaced people.

“In Uganda, the people who come to the Catholic Worker are the people that are in the gravest of need, the most hopeless people of our country,” Sekitoleko says. “When we talk about voluntary poverty in the Catholic Worker, wow, the Catholic Worker should visit Uganda! People almost don’t need voluntary poverty because it is already here! I mean, they only need to make that choice to be part of it and, you know, embrace it as a blessing.”

Sekitoleko has embraced voluntary poverty in a big way, at times owning only two changes of clothing and eating two meals a day—or one, when things get especially thin. It’s one of the reasons he isn’t married; besides the fact that he couldn’t support a family, “the ladies run away from a broke guy like they’re running from an epidemic,” he joked.

Despite the financial help from the Dowlings, the Uganda Catholic Worker soon had to leave its rented house in Kampala, relocating to more affordable rented quarters.

Then, in 2015, the two friends who had co-founded the community with Sekitoleko decided to move on to other things, leaving him to run the peace and nonviolence education programs and the house of hospitality with its dozen guests.

“You can’t imagine having to take care of the responsibility of the community alone,” he said, recalling those days. “Everything is on you.”

Sekitoleko had a decision to make: He could leave the Uganda Catholic Worker for a more secure path, or he could double down. He chose to double down, giving up his part-time work to become a “fulltime” Catholic Worker.

Now, he only needed to figure out how to make it all work.

“The Catholic Worker in Africa” series will continue next week with part 2: At the Uganda Catholic Worker, Healing and Hope. To contact Michael or donate money for a new house, see the Uganda Catholic Worker listing in the Community Directory.

Cover photo: Anne Noel Duquette with Michael Sekitoleko in 2014.