The March 13, 2017 Observer article by Denis Katebire titled ‘Fr Kibuuka’s tribulations expose Roman Catholic Church rigidities’, is blatantly deluding.

Supposedly challenging my earlier submissions inquiring about Fr Jacinto Kibuuka’s bishop, Dr Katebire fails to comprehend my posit. For one, he suggests Fr Kibuuka’s willful leaving of the Roman Catholic Church riled me.

He couldn’t be more wrong! In the least am I concerned about Kibuuka, but the unsuspecting faithful being misled. Any claim that Fr Kibuuka’s Evangelical Orthodox Church (had not declared, when I made my submissions) is in union with the Catholic Church led by the pope, is pure deception.

But, in a bid to prove a bit of knowledge about the Catholic Church, Katebire labors to define a rite, and as such alludes to the Evangelical Orthodox Church (EOC) as being in communion with Rome. A rite may be synonymous with a faith-community, inasmuch as it means a particular way a community may celebrate its faith mysteries.

Granted, there is an Antiochene (West Syrian) rite, whose specific Catholic Churches: the Maronite Church, Syriac Church, and Syro-Malankara Church, are only three of the 23 known Eastern Catholic Churches, in league with the Roman Pontiff. The Evangelical Orthodox Church is not one of them.

I would like to refer to the letter of St Ignatius, bishop of Antioch (c. 107AD), the first to use the term ‘Catholic Church’, and who Katebire also cites. Ignatius was writing to those in Smyrna, whose bishop, Polycarp, a student of John the evangelist, was in prison facing imminent execution because of proclaiming Jesus. He stressed the importance of succession.

Yet Dr Katebire faults me for pointing out that Fr Kibuuka should declare his bishop, for clarity of that unbroken cord of Jesus, running from the apostles. As a public figure, Kibuuka is duty-bound not to withhold such information, unless it be for unscrupulous reasons. After all, he publicly severed fidelity to his ordaining bishop, Dr Cyprian Kizito Lwanga.

Ignatius of Antioch (cradle of the Antiochian Rite, which Fr Kibuuka says he follows) cautions: “See that you all follow the bishop, even as Jesus Christ does the Father…Let no man do anything connected with the Church, without the bishop.”

Also, in the book ‘Christianity and Ethnicity in Canada, 2008’ edited by Paul Bramadat and David Seljak, it is expressly noted that the EOC is not organic to the Eastern Christianity. Rather, “it is a community of former Protestant Canadians, who gradually came to identify themselves as Orthodox…,” with roots in the US.

In 1973, Peter Gillquist in Chicago, with friends in the Campus Crusade, spearheaded the New Covenant Apostolic Order to supposedly restore the ancient form of Christianity. But, noticing they lacked the apostolic line, they changed into the EOC, leading their members to associate with the Antiochian Orthodox Christian archdiocese of North America in 1987, for “spiritual communion” with the ancient Eastern Christian Churches.

As Fr Ray Ryland, a convert from the Episcopal to the Roman Catholic Church, proposes, the attempt of these evangelicals was to bring their followers into historic mainstream of a New Testament faith.

Gillquist himself emphasized in an interview: “We were beholden to no one, but the Lord and each other. We were small, free to move, and free to change. Available to adjust to what we would find, we were committed to uphold nobody’s party line. We were unattached to any established Church. All we wanted was Christ and his Church. Instead of judging history, we were inviting history to judge us.”

Dr Katebire admits that discipline, in any community, supports faith and how the people live that faith. He even knows this is regulated by church law, but he questionably reduces it to rigidities; even negating that canon 32 §1 of the Code of Canons of the Eastern Churches unambiguously provides; no one can validly transfer to another Church sui juris (autonomous), without the consent of the Apostolic See. In other words, Fr Kibuuka does not belong to any three churches of the Antiochian Rite; therefore, he attempts indefensibly to follow their liturgy.

And for the avoidance of doubt, here are the Eastern Catholic Churches (following Eastern or Oriental Orthodoxy), besides the Antiochian three mentioned supra. The Alexandrian Rite comprises also three: the Coptic Catholic Church mainly in Egypt, the Ethiopian Catholic Church, and the Eritrean Catholic Church.

The Armenian Rite is used by the Armenian Catholic Church. Two churches also belong to the Chaldean or East Syrian Rite: the Chaldean Catholic Church, and the Syro-Malabar Catholic Church.

It is the Byzantine (Constantinopolitan) Rite with the biggest number of Eastern Catholic churches, 14 altogether: Albanian, Belarusian, Bulgarian, that of Croatia/Serbia/Montenegro, Greek Byzantine, Hungarian Greek, Italo-Albanian, Macedonian, Melkite Greek, Romanian, Russian, Ruthenian, Slovakian, as well as Ukrainian.

The author is a journalist and lawyer pursuing a master’s of Divinity degree.