Healers vs. Prayer Teams : Contesting Deliverance and Healing among Ugandan Charismatic Catholics

This chapter explores the tensions between individual and collective approaches to charismatic deliverance and healing – that is, healers operating as gifted individuals versus working in prayer teams accompanied and supported by a larger group of charismatics. It focuses on the deliverance and healing practices of the Bakaiso, also known as the ‘Uganda Martyrs Guild’, a Catholic charismatic movement placed under the patronage of the Uganda Martyrs, nineteenth-century Ugandans martyred in the 1880s and canonized as Catholic saints in 1964. In recent decades, the group gained a reputation for using charismatic gifts to combat witchcraft and harmful spiritual possession. A controversy that erupted in 2016 in Saint James parish, a rural parish in Fort Portal Diocese, exposed fault lines within the group concerning the appropriate nature of deliverance and healing ministries. Three popular healers associated with the Bakaiso were censured by the parish priests.