The redemption of the Church

On March 20, 2017, Pope Francis recognised the Catholic Church’s role in the Genocide against the Tutsi in Rwanda, and said he hoped “this humble recognition of the failings of that period, which unfortunately, disfigured the face of the Church, may contribute to a purification of memory, and renewed trust”. With these words, the Pope raised himself and the Church to a surer moral ground and he should be commended for taking this step. We must meet his step by seeking the courage to face the terrible truth that the Genocide was more than a political event. Of course it was fed primarily by politics, particularly the politics of manipulation and lust for power. Yet it was more. At the core of the Christian faith is Jesus being sacrificed as a scapegoat for our sins, which are then absolved and humanity offered a new chance. Rene Girard, the great Catholic thinker, argued — in regard to the figure of the scapegoat — that even as Jesus suffered on the cross, our knowledge of his innocence and love forever frees mankind from the need to sacrifice a scapegoat as a way of making a new world. The Genocide against the Tutsi was a scapegoating event. The 1,074,017 innocent people murdered over those 100 days were sacrificed as scapegoats in violence that is so innate to man but needs to be framed in the language of an ideology. So much of that ideology made use of the Catholic Church’s politics in colonial and post-colonial Rwanda. The Pope’s statement is a profoundly important step, which we must understand deeply if we are to root out, and forever bury, the immense violence that was unleashed in 1994 and the preceding years. We must start by acknowledging that this Pope has opened this space of honest inquiry following the stance of his predecessors. Pope Francis’s stance is a direct contradiction of his two predecessors. On March 21, 1996, Pope John Paul II declared in a letter that, “the Church itself cannot be held responsible for the misdeeds of its members who have acted against evangelical law.” This letter denying institutional responsibility was signed by Cardinal Josef Ratzinger, who later became Pope Benedict XVI. This after a colonial and post-colonial history when the Church used its altar, its seminaries, its prestige, to promote and defend the ideas of racism and ethnocentrism that maintained control over the people. The Church struck a Faustian pact with the colonialists and the post-colonial governments of GregoireKayibanda and Juvenal Habyarimana. Colonialism was an enterprise founded on racial superiority. The colonialist of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century believed that humanity was organised in a natural, scientifically proven hierarchy in which the white race sat at the apex and the African at the very bottom. This fiction was a convenient instrument of divide-and-rule in Rwanda for the people were separated into racial categories. Tutsi became “Hamites”, descendants of an alien race from a foreign land, non-Africans. The Church agreed with this thesis and promoted it. The leading ethnologists who championed the idea of Tutsi as an alien race were Catholic priests. In his book, published in 1950, to mark the 50th Anniversary of the White Fathers in Rwanda, “Genealogies de la noblesse des Batutsi du Rwanda”, Fr Leon Delmas writes of Tutsi as Hamites, more North African than Rwandan. The pact between the Church and state is revealed in the preface to the book being written by Georges Sandrart, the resident colonial governor for Rwanda. The Rwandan politicians and ideologues who preached and provided the intellectual underpinning of a permanently opposed Rwandanness were almost without exception educated by Catholic missionaries. According to Prof René Lemarchand, who has researched and written extensively on 20th Century Rwanda, “the main asset of the Hutu leadership was the almost unconditional support they received from the Catholic Church, which enabled them, among other things, to gain control over the vernacular press and the daily newspaper Temps Nouveaux d’Afrique … as a vehicle for the diffusion of their ideas among Europeans and literate Africans.” In his doctoral thesis, ‘Genocide as Revelation: Religion, Race and the 1994 Rwandan genocide’, Martin Kimani states, “The genocidaires, the planners and their audience, had religion as an important store of metaphors for their real–world aims.” Writing the first so-called Ten Hutu commandments, in 1959, Joseph Gitera a leading Hutu politician and activist, not only wraps his anti-Tutsi language in biblical language, he also takes up the theory of Tutsi as an alien race foreign to Rwanda. It is no coincidence that both Gitera and Hassan Ngeze, who in 1990 would amend Gitera’s ‘commandments’. For them genocide is a religious mission, encouraged and supported by the Catholic Church. The first parish of the Catholic Church in Rwanda was established in Save, in 1900. Coincidentally, Gitera’s home was this birthplace of Christianity in Rwanda. For Gitera, as for his fellow ideologues, there could have been no better way of reaching the minds of his audience, than couching his message in biblical terms. The first of his ‘ten commandments’ instructs his audience, “from now on have faith and hope in God only, and in yourself, and never in Tutsi.” In other ‘commandments’, there is also real defilement of the biblical Decalogue to generate an ensemble of Tutsi antipathy. Here are some examples to show biblical evocations in Joseph Gitera’s Decalogue: “Thou shalt not commit adultery especially with a Tutsi woman”; (6th) “Thou shalt not tell lies like a Tutsi;” (7th) “Thou shalt not steal like a Tutsi;” (8th) and “Thou shalt not covet other people’s property like a Tutsi.” (10th). And it was no mere coincidence that the Church authorities’ kept a discreet, encouraging silence on both Gitera and Ngeze’s perversions of the biblical Decalogue. Gitera was considered a good Catholic, a former seminarian, and anti-Tutsi hate language was in line with the colonial position and therefore that of the Church. Exactly two months after publication of Gitera’s ‘commandments’, on November 27, 1959, Gregory Kayibanda, told a political meeting that Tutsi and Hutu in Rwanda were “two nations in a single state…two nations between whom there is no intercourse and no sympathy, who are as ignorant of each other’s habits, thoughts and feelings as if they were dwellers of different zones, or inhabitants of different planets.” Kayibanda had been trained in Catholic Church schools, going on to attend a seminary before becoming a staff writer for two of the most important Church publications, L’Ami, and Kinyamateka. It is from this base that he was groomed by the Church to become the first President of post-independence Rwanda. Kayibanda’s virulent hatred of Tutsi becomes more complex when one considers that he was married to a Tutsi woman, with whom he bore several children. In his book ‘Christianity and Genocide in Rwanda’, Prof Timothy Longman says: “The conception of ethnicity and of Rwandan history propagated by the missionaries, colonial administrators, and indigenous elite and the discriminatory practices of both Church and State ultimately affected how Rwandans perceived their own identities.” According to Célestin Buhuru’s article ‘The Heritage of the Catholic Church in Rwanda’ (Rwanda-Renaître N° 1, July 1995), the White Fathers worked more for the welfare of the colonisers than for the unity of the converted people. Thus, with time, the Church became an accomplice of dictatorial and murderous regimes. Buhuru, who was a Catholic priest before abandoning the mission years later, notes that during the 1994 Genocide against the Tutsi, certain religious persons supported directly or indirectly the violence of the genocidaires. And, he added, the Church, which was a partisan of the discredited regime, had known members who never hid their hatred towards the Rwandese Patriotic Front (RPF) and its so-called accomplices, the Tutsi inside Rwanda. Pope Francis’s statement is an extremely significant step, mostly because it can open up further enquiry in how crucial the institution of the Church was to the colonial project in Rwanda, a project that would not stop at genocide to hang on to power. It is critical that an inquiry into this tragic history be established with the full support of the Church of Rome. It will, at a minimum, provide a cautionary tale to the entire world. At a time when there is a dangerous trend toward the use of religious sanction and prestige to destroy entire countries and peoples as we see in the Middle East. Ideally, such an inquiry would build on the Pope’s courage to demonstrate the moral courage of the Church. It would teach Catholics throughout the world that an act of such loving courage is the basis of lasting redemption, and would be a shining light in a world that needs one. The writer is a genocide scholar and former journalist.

Opinions

The redemption of the Church