Establishing the heritage value of the Roman catholic parish church in Ugandan Christian visual culture.

Abstract

The parish church was not only a product of Christianity’s imprints on Ugandan civil society but it also broadened the concept of heritage value in the country beyond the religious realm. It has historic, social, scientific/psychological, nationalistic, commercial aspects, and so forth. It is exactly these aspects that give heritage value and cultural significance to the Roman Catholic parish church. This discussion invokes The Burra Charter (2013) in the narrative of the parish church in Ugandan Christian Visual Culture. Using an empirical historical investigation, including participant-observation, the thesis establishes that heritage value was incidental to the parish church’s role in the lives of the community where it blossomed, and an improved way of understanding the predicament of the parish church emerges through knowing what it was meant to achieve in the community. The research intervenes in the implication of the parish church as agency to engaging the Roman Catholic Church and the Ugandan civil society. Adopting a community-centered rather than a believer-centered perspective demonstrates the demythologizing of the historiography of the parish church in the Ugandan cult of images.