“As we forgive…”

Apr 14, 2019 News

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Rwanda: Part VI: The way of church and men, bewilderingly twisted sometimes; singularly inspiring on others

It is Holy Week, and the hour of a supreme and perfect sacrifice draws near. A 1st century killing of the willing culminates on the bleak hilltop of Calvary, near faraway Roman Jerusalem. In 12th century England, the most fabled killing in a holy place is one straight out of history. Archbishop Thomas Becket is brutally martyred on the High Altar of Canterbury; a victim of royal rage, intrigue and instigation.
That was one pious man; one murder only in the cathedral. But for sheer concentrated fury and the resulting slaughter, it is widely believed that more met a bloody end in and around churches in Rwanda than in any other places during the genocide. Rwandan churches were transformed into the greatest killing grounds.
Unspeakable human outrages committed in Rwanda were sparked by the inferno of the burning wreckage of the aircraft that carried Hutu President Juvenal Habyarimana and others. All aboard perished. Powerful longstanding animosities were inflamed to the boiling point, where they exploded into unparalleled wrath. Tutsi believers and worshippers – some unknowing, all desperate – became sitting ducks in the ecclesiastical sanctuaries to which they had rushed, and which now became inescapable death traps. How Christ must have cringed.
Tutsi parishioners felt the change in temperature, and tone from Hutu neighbours and fellow worshippers: one hand of Christ seemingly raised to bloody and mutilate the body of other members in his church. The sacred heart of Jesus quivered at the agonies of his flock, as administered by fellows in the faith, and by his own clerical shepherds now transformed into rampaging ravenous wolves.
There is that strange tension, that ominous chill and distancing from once friendly welcoming faces. It is distinctive to the discerning. Whether in the churches of Allah, Brahma, or Abba, it has been there; except that in the more ethnically diverse Christian denominations, it is more pronounced.
The precedent of Rwanda forewarns of the danger looming. Thus, the teachings and attitudes of all the faiths here must rise to insist upon the inspiration and protection of genuine brotherhood. As Jesus lived for, as he died.
In 1994 in Rwanda, this was not the case. Church friends and church leaders turned their backs on love of neighbour and became notorious for the extreme and calculated nature of their misdeeds. Some church shepherds and leaders have the terrible distinction of their names etched indelibly in the blood of the fallen and also the records of the UN’s International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda.
The riveting and appalling history of the genocide confirms that men and women of God were neither comforting nor protecting. Rather they were luring, inciting, and even participating in the genocidal terror. Churches became not just death traps, but enormous death camps of the most barbaric kind imaginable. Neither denomination nor gender were innocent; and so, too, did the perpetrators who ranged from junior to senior people of the cloth and flock.
Writer Catherine Larsen noted this specific instance during her account of survivor, Rosaria’s horror. “He was…full of hate, dressed…in a flak vest and with a gun.” He was to face charges when the killings were all over for “aiding the militia and rape.” He was a senior priest; this episode occurred at the Holy Family Church, the largest cathedral in Kigali, where desperate thousands sought hoped-for shelter. The Hutu militia came to the cathedral two nights later armed with their list of many names, their machetes, and their guns for the hiding Tutsis. The young parish priest had done his most un-Christlike work well; the killings followed quickly.
Then there was the church at Nyamata. To this place of God came a fear-ridden and fleeing Devota with her two young children. The faces were unsmiling; no greeting. She overheard a deacon telling another man inside the church, “They are saying that all Tutsi must die.” The sacred space, this once holy patch, was no longer a place of refuge; only a charnel house in waiting. It was time to move; she would lose both children.
Within the next three days (three days only), approximately ten thousand Tutsis would be murdered in that same church at Nyamata, at a hospital nearby, and at another church in Ntarama, a couple dozen kilometres away. Other accounts identify priests, pastors, nuns, and others, who willingly participated in the slaughter by either inciting hunters or turning away those seeking shelter.
Were there no men of God left in this hell? Where was the peace of Christ (and true men of God)? Earlier there was pastor and mediator Gahigi. Now recall Joy and that Sonrise School she attended that opened its doors to all orphans (Tutsis and Hutus) of that massive civil strife. It is time to revisit its architect, Bishop John and to really meet this genuine shepherd of God. Who is he? And how did the events of 1994 transform him?
John had been living in neighbouring Uganda at the time of the 1994 genocide. He had been forced into exile since 1959, during that bout of ethnic turmoil. Uganda provided a new life with family and as a minister. Who needed the stress and grave distress of Rwanda?
In 1997, the calls came from his stricken homeland: “Rwanda needs you.” John resisted at first; but the calls were insistent and stirring. God stirred him back to Rwanda and a bishopric followed quickly. Just as quickly, a brutal wakeup call came reminding of the perils: a niece partially skinned alive and gang-raped; her mother raped and her mother’s brother killed. And then both women, too. Oh lord! Why lord? Why? Why me? The agony of Gethsemane relived through a piercing in the heart.
From this personal purgatory, Bishop John allowed God to mend his weeping heart, his grieving soul. He, in turn, reached to mend the hearts of men in prison, whose hands had killed others, as his own had been weeks before. Bishop John could see Jesus on the Cross in terrible agony and still praying, “Forgive.” He could see and live Holy Week. That became his own message, his life’s work: to preach repentance, to encourage forgiveness, and to practice healing on an individual, community, and national scale. One killer at a time. There were others who did similarly tireless healing work like Bishop John to save their country and themselves.
In this journey of Palm Sunday and Holy Week, churches of all walks could use many genuine Bishops John. Torn, bitter, divided, and unforgiving societies need the kind of caring and empathy that Bishop John shared with such revitalizing miraculous force.
For Christians in this time of emptying through surrendering before God, there has to be word followed by deed: one perceived enemy, one negative thought, and all walls made to crumble through honest, devoted searching for the essence and perfection of Christ in the glory of God.

Next week: Final installment: The Umuvumu Tree Project (and Gacaca Courts)

 

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