2013 was a year of letters. When Sejjusa wrote one, Daily Monitor was temporarily closed. Fr Anthony Musaala too wrote one and it earned him suspension. Fr Musala wrote a controversial open letter to the bishops, priests and three years later, he is till facing the consequences.
The letter in which Fr Musala sighted the failure of celibate chastity among the diocesan priests ended up leaking to social media and subsequently earning him an indefinite suspension from priesthood. He claimed that some priests had failed in their vow of celibacy and had wives and children, something that ruffled feathers with the higher authorities.
Despite having joined the Brazilian Catholic Church which fell out from the Roman Catholic Church in order to allow it’s priests to marry and have a family, Fr Musala maintains that he is ready to continue his Roman Catholic priesthood. He regrets the leaking of the letter to the media albeit not regretting its content.
According to Monitor, in their response to the letter, leaders of Kampala archbishops led by Archbishop Dr Cyprian Lwanga have asked Fr Musala to write a letter that he has been excommunicated to which instruction Musala is adamant. “I think that it (the ex-communication) is invalid because I have not excommunicated myself. It’s them, but it’s like in politics. They feel I should not be in the Catholic Church yet they don’t want to appear that they have thrown me out,” Fr Musala said.
In the controversial letter, Fr Musala alleged that the Catholic institution has a systematic immorality hypocrisy called celibate diocesan priesthood, “Unfortunately celibacy also serves certain vested interests in the power structure of the church, and of course celibate priests are cheaper and easier to deal with, even to manipulate, by ecclesiastical authority, but I believe that in time we will be freed from this unnecessary yoke, unhelpful as it is, which is all the more severe in Africa where family and family ties are so crucial to one’s psychological equilibrium,” reads part of the lengthy letter.