Tie to Death Cult Stuns Those Who Knew Priest

At St. Anthony Catholic Church in El Segundo on Friday, the news that the leader of a murderous Ugandan cult had lived in the rectory and ministered to the congregation in the mid-1980s stirred feelings of shock and disbelief.

Dominic Kataribabo, 63, an excommunicated priest who studied theology at Loyola Marymount University in Los Angeles from 1985 to 1987, is one of six Ugandans wanted in connection with the worst cult-related mass murder in history.

Police in Uganda have so far found 924 mutilated bodies of members of the Movement for the Restoration of the Ten Commandments of God. A fire on March 17 inside the cult’s chapel in the town of Kanungu burned to death more than 500 members of the group--perhaps including Kataribabo.

At Kataribabo’s home, police found 155 additional bodies. Of those, 81 followers had been buried beneath the floor, some strangled with knotted cloth, others poisoned. An additional 74 corpses were found in his garden.

On Thursday afternoon, a spokesman for the Los Angeles Archdiocese said Kataribabo came to California from Uganda in the fall of 1985 and enrolled in a graduate program at Loyola Marymount as a student priest.

While studying religious education and development at the prestigious Jesuit university, Kataribabo lived at St. Anthony parish in El Segundo, where he was granted sacramental ministry to celebrate Mass and weddings, according to Loyola records and the memories of church officials.

The longtime pastor of St. Anthony Church, the Rev. James F. O’Grady, said Friday that a priest from Uganda, whom he remembered as Father Dominic and recalled as being reserved, had lived in the rectory from 1985 to 1987.

“He was a good priest, very attentive. There was nothing about him to indicate otherwise,” O’Grady said, adding that he was dumbfounded to learn of the connection to the cult.

Few details have emerged about Kataribabo since the fire. He is believed to have been third in command of the Movement for the Restoration of the Ten Commandments, which preached that the world would end on Dec. 31, 1999.

Father Greg Coiro, spokesman for the Los Angeles Archdiocese, said Kataribabo was recipient of a Loyola Marymount presidential scholarship for Third World priests. He was nominated for the scholarship by a bishop in the Kampala Archdiocese. His home address in Uganda was listed in his files as a post office box in the town of Mbarara.

Norm Schneider, director of public relations at Loyola Marymount, said that review of Kataribabo’s records yields little information. Although there has been a discrepancy on his age, his records at Loyola state his birth date as Dec. 20, 1936. Kataribabo enrolled in a graduate program in religious education that is no longer offered at the university, Schneider said. After earning a master’s degree in August 1987, he left Los Angeles and returned to Uganda. The Movement for the Restoration of the Ten Commandments is believed to have started in 1991.