Catholic Church has always harboured genocidal priests

Editor,Compare the spiritual values of these young girls of Nyange with those of the Catholic Church (as an institution up to the Vatican) which attempted every effort to thwart the course of justice for the victims of Father Seromba’s genocidal crime, including providing him with a new identity as Father Anastazio Sumba Bura and hiding him in deep rural Italy.

Monday, January 13, 2014
Twenty-year olds receive the Kwibuka (Remembrance) Flame as it made its way to Nyange Secondary School in Ngororero District on Friday on its first leg of a three-month nationwide tour ahead of the 20th anniversary of the 1994 Genocide against the Tutsi. The New Times/Timothy Kisambira.

Editor,Compare the spiritual values of these young girls of Nyange with those of the Catholic Church (as an institution up to the Vatican) which attempted every effort to thwart the course of justice for the victims of Father Seromba’s genocidal crime, including providing him with a new identity as Father Anastazio Sumba Bura and hiding him in deep rural Italy.Once this killer under clerical garb was flushed out of his bolt hole the same Catholic Church pulled out all the stops to keep him away from trial at the ICTR in Arusha. It then bleated about anti-Church efforts once his guilt was established and he was condemned and sentenced.We saw exactly the same stance from the Catholic Church after the arrest, during the trial and following the conviction of two Catholic nuns in Belgium.The Church’s stance and its virulent hostility against the Rwandan state that rose out of the ashes of the 1994 Genocide against the Tutsi and the Church’s role in creating the divisive environment that led to and aggravated the near planned extermination of the Tutsis mean I no longer feel any attachment to the Church of my parents.For spiritual sustenance, I turn to the young girls of Nyange instead. May they live longer in our memories as an example of the good on humanity!Mwene Kalinda, RwandaReaction to the story, "Seromba, the priest who rolled a bulldozer on his congregation” (The New Times, January 11)