Editor,

RE: "Outrage as Catholic Church honours Genocide convicts” (The New Times, June 27).

The Catholic Church has just confirmed as unambiguously as could be that it remains firmly with its genocidaires against their victims. The timing couldn’t be more striking as their announcement about their plans to honour these Genocide convicts was almost on the same day as Pope Francis was in Armenia condemning Turkey for its official policy of denying the 1915 Genocide of the Armenians.

The sheer hypocrisy of condemning events of more than 100 years ago while concurrently honouring convicted authors of an even much more recent genocide, especially one in which so many of your own clergy and adherents were massively complicit, shows how this institution has lost any modicum of morality—if it ever had any.

I continue to be shocked at the deafening silence of ordinary Rwandan Catholics at the lack of any practical mea culpa from the Catholic Church and virtually all levels of its hierarchy.

Please remember, qui ditrien, consent (silence is consent). By not standing up to demand that your Church admit and seek forgiveness and redemption for its unimaginable sins of commission and omission related to the Genocide against the Tutsi before, during and after the facts, you are yourself guilty by association. Do you really feel comfortable in that role?

Mwene Kalinda

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Catholics in Rwanda – probably including even poor bishop Simargde Mbonyintege- actually cannot do anything that’s contrary to the dictates of Vatican.

It’s just a pity, but that’s the way it’s. I heard that the Vatican has been secretly urging their leadership here to press our government to remove all remains of Genocide victims in the different churches that have been turned into memorial centres and have them buried somewhere else.

This, by all means, is one way of trying to erase the fact that these people were killed in their churches, and in most circumstances, their killing instigated or committed by the same priests they had run to seeking protection against the Interahamwe militia.

I have heard that they have even offered to fund the construction of new memorial sites in case a concession is made to have the remains removed from these churches. An absurd dirty deal!

My friends, the battle is beyond what you think is just this simple jubilee act. Personally, I think it is part of the same meticulous plan that was hatched over half a century ago.

Frank Shumbusho

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Let’s face it, the Catholic Church has been involved in a multitude of despicable deeds the world over and they are documented (the pedophile case in the US, is an example).

While they will apologise when victims are Caucasian, they do not even want to acknowledge that something so horrendous was planned and physically carried out in their "holy” places of worship all over Rwanda.

Joe

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The Church must, of course, admit where any wrongdoing has occurred and ask the forgiveness of those who have suffered, especially when at the hands of clerics.

But I’m called to give a Bishop the benefit of the doubt in such a case as this. He has stated that the inclusion of the two men in question was not a decision of the Church, and that they would not be included in the official list.

While I agree that this, in itself, is not enough, when it comes to healing the deep wounds of the Genocide, it seems hardly justified to claim as this article does that these two men were included at the request of the Bishop.

So, yes, unless there is evidence that the Bishop himself included the two men, I am bound to accept that it happened without his approval, and I assume that he will take steps to ensure that this is made clear to all in his diocese.

Radical Catholic