History

Alokolum’s story begins in 1953, when the White Brothers — Norbert McAuliffe, Oswin Home, and Joachim Parr — arrived from the United States and established a house of formation for African candidates to religious life in Gulu. The young men trained here took up the ecclesiastical vows of poverty, chastity, and obedience, preparing for lives as religious brothers rather than priests. Like much of the Church’s early work in the region, the venture proved fragile: the formation house closed once for lack of vocations, and again later for financial reasons.

The Uganda Episcopal Conference gave it new life in 1969, reopening it as an H.S.C. College under the patronage of the Uganda Martyrs. The turning point came in 1973, when the UEC converted it into a full major seminary. This was a response to a wave of vocations in the 1970s that had begun to overwhelm the capacity of Uganda’s two existing major seminaries of the time, Katigondo and St. Mary’s Ggaba. Alokolum formally opened as the country’s third National Major Seminary under its first rector, Fr. Nazareno Irinya (Arua Diocese), with just 40 students and six staff members.

The seminary’s most difficult chapter came with the Lord’s Resistance Army insurgency that engulfed Northern Uganda, and this prompted the Seminary’s temporary exile to Katigondo in Masaka in 1987, where she stayed up to 1992, when she returned to Alokolum. By 2003, the violence had made it impossible again to continue safely at Alokolum, and staff and seminarians relocated south to Bukalasa, near Masaka. Two years later, as the security situation improved, the seminary reopened its doors at Alokolum. Archbishop John Baptist Odama, who welcomed the community back and celebrated its reopening, called it “a sign of hope for the future of the Church and peace in this region”, a description that has stayed attached to Alokolum’s identity ever since.