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As we were going to press with this issue reports came in of an apparent mass suicide or homicide by a doomsday religious cult with hundreds dead. In the preceding weeks, cult members sold all their possessions and received a book of matches each day at prayer time, practicing lighting them. The night before they held a "last supper" that featured Coca-Cola as the drink of choice-70 cases in all. On the day of their deaths they were given ceremonial robes, a book of matches, and candles as they entered the church. Religious scholar J. Gordon Melton, from the Santa Barbara-based Institute for the Study of American Religion ([email protected]), posted this statement on March 19.
This weekend we were all saddened by the news of the deaths of the members of the Movement for the Restoration of Ten Commandments of God. As I write, this is a breaking story about which we will learn far more in the days ahead, though enough data has come forth that some initial observations are possible.
The Movement for the Restoration of Ten Commandments of God was a small (only 235 registered members) new religious movement founded in the mid 1990s by Credonia Mwerinde, a former prostitute. She was joined by Joseph Kibweteere, a former Roman Catholic priest, known for his activism, who left the church in 1994. Among the leadership were three other former priests-Dominic Kataribabo, Gredeina Mwerindi and John Kamagara-and two nuns, all of whom had been excommunicated from the Roman Church. The break with Rome and the founding of the new Movement appears to have been occasioned by some apparitions of the Virgin Mary, Joseph and Jesus in the early 1990s.
The membership in the group was drawn largely from former Roman Catholics who lived in and near Kanungu, a remote town/ trading center in the Rukingeri district. Kanungu is located just 25 miles from the border of Rwanda and 10 miles from the Republic of the Congo. In Kanungu, the group had built a boarding school that at one point housed as many as 300 pupils, but...