Our lady of the assumption parish church Mitala-Maria.

Abstract

The dogma of the Assumption resonates with the Aristotelian argument that “Men create gods after their own image, not only with regard to their form, but with regard to their mode of life”(D’Holbach 2008:308) because it promoted the cult of the Virgin from the vantage point of hero worship that led to the creation of new deities and to deification from the cult of the person. In this study, the dedication of Our Lady of the Assumption parish church Mitala-Maria demonstrated that the parish church was an embodiment of the missionaries’ crusade to sway African believers to the Virgin as a deified heroine in the archetypal image of a guardian deity or mother goddess that resonated with the believers. The parish church absorbs meaning through three fundamental elements which resonate with its visuality that gave it character to impress itself upon believers’ hearts and minds: Titular; iconography; and, pitch. It has a parallel devotion of St. Balikuddembe, an African martyr of equally heroic stature in patronage role with mortals. The devotional images are discussed in the effort to read into the intentions for the dedications, and the study evaluates their implication in terms of a better understanding of the cult of the Virgin in Uganda popular devotion.