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In this book, I analyze why Bishop Aloys Bigirumwami prioritizes the use of the native language and the value of primal religions in spreading the gospel. According to Bigirumwami, the gospel should be taught in the native language, because it is the people's heart language. On the other hand, when the message is spoken in non-native languages, the gospel may spread but it does not reach the hearts of the people. As for the primal religions (tradition religions), for Bigirumwami they are part of what Jesus came to fulfill rather than abolish. In Rwanda, Western missionaries neglected the Rwandan primal religions by demonizing them, and the result was that the gospel was not planted in the good soil; the reason why the genocide against the Tutsi was executed in 1994 in a country where 91 percent of its population were Christians. A part of exploring the Christian mission history in Rwanda, this book points out the need to continue where Bigirumwami and others of his time left off in their effort of inculturation of the Christian faith in Rwanda and Africa in general.
In 1994, as his country descended into the madness of genocide, Anglican Bishop John Rucyahana underwent the mind-numbing pain of having members of his church and family butchered. John refused to become a part of the systemic hatred. He founded the Sonrise orphanage and school for children orphaned in the genocide, and he now leads reconciliation efforts between his own Tutsi people, the victims of this horrific massacre, and the perpetrators, the Hutus. His remarkable story is one that demands to be told.
The 1994 Rwandan genocide was the last great bloodletting of the century that came to define organised mass killing. 800,000 Tutsis were murdered by their Hutu countrymen, ordinary citizens joining in the killing alongside militia and army. The violence was driven by incendiary politicians and generals. But one global institution stands accused of complicity in the mass killings and protecting some of the murderers to this day. Reviews “An essential and damning work. McGreal’s investigation of the priests who took part in the genocide in Rwanda, and of the criminal complicity of the Vatican and other churches that continue to shelter their blood-stained clergy from the law, is a sober and sobering indictment of the betrayal of humanity in the name of God. The story it tells should be read widely.” - Philip Gourevitch, author of ‘We Wish to Inform You that Tomorrow We Will Be Killed with Our Families: Stories From Rwanda’ “The sheer evil of the Rwandan genocide and the hypocrisy, deceit and moral cowardice that defined the world’s responses to it are distilled in the story of the extraordinarily sinister Catholic priest around whom this gripping book is built. Chris McGreal, one of the great contemporary reporters on Africa, tracks the priest down and finds that, two decades after a horror in which he bloodily took part, he remains at large in France, still exercising his holy duties with the protection and blessing of his congregation, the Vatican and the French state.” - John Carlin, author of Playing the Enemy, basis for the film Invictus The Catholic church should have been at the forefront of moral opposition to the massacres. Instead it was virtually silent as churches across Rwanda were turned into human slaughterhouses, compromised by an archbishop closely allied with the politicians behind the genocide. Some clergy courageously resisted the killers but their bishops were not there to back them. Other priests and nuns joined the murderers, overseeing the torture and slaughter of citizens who had turned to the church for refuge. After the violence ended, the Vatican spirited guilty members of the clergy out of the country, and over time, quietly worked them into parishes across Europe. Chaplains of the Militia is the extraordinary story of those priests accused of complicity in genocide. Chris McGreal takes us from Rwanda in 1994, where he stood among the bodies at one of the many massacres in churches, to modern day France in pursuit of a priest notorious during the genocide for wearing a gun and selecting victims for the machete-waving militia. He investigates the roots of the Catholic church’s complicity in the ideology that underpinned the mass killings, confronting bishops and priests with a past some would rather forget. And, in an echo of the scandal over paedophile priests, he exposes the Vatican’s continued protection of clergy with blood on their hands. Reviews “An essential and damning work. McGreal’s investigation of the priests who took part in the genocide in Rwanda, and of the criminal complicity of the Vatican and other churches that continue to shelter their blood-stained clergy from the law, is a sober and sobering indictment of the betrayal of humanity in the name of God. The story it tells should be read widely.” - Philip Gourevitch, author of We Wish to Inform You that Tomorrow We Will Be Killed with Our Families: Stories From Rwanda “The sheer evil of the Rwandan genocide and the hypocrisy, deceit and moral cowardice that defined the world’s responses to it are distilled in the story of the extraordinarily sinister Catholic priest around whom this gripping book is built. Chris McGreal, one of the great contemporary reporters on Africa, tracks the priest down and finds that, two decades after a horror in which he bloodily took part, he remains at large in France, still exercising his holy duties with the protection and blessing of his congregation, the Vatican and the French state.” - John Carlin, author of Playing the Enemy basis for the film Invictus
John Cowart's history tells of a church's rise from the mire of apostasy, pornography, controversy, and loss to become a beacon drawing people to Christ, the light of the worl
Pioneering study of the role of the Christian churches in the Rwandan genocide of the Tutsi; a key work for historians, memory studies scholars, religion scholars and Africanists.
To many observers, Rwanda was a colony of the White Fathers. That Roman Catholic religious order, created in Algiers in 1868 by Cardinal Lavigerie, evangelized the country from 1900 onwards, effectively becoming the state church. To maintain its domination, the Roman Catholic Church's hierarchy supported the theory of the so-called hamite supremacy by selecting, educating, and establishing an elite among one of the three Rwandan social groups, the Batutsi, who were given the monopoly of power. Frustrations and recriminations that resulted from this injustice and its accompanying exclusion of other groups from power, led to the bloodshed of the uprisings of the 1959 revolution that preceded independence in 1962. Then, in 1959, the Roman Catholic Church abandoned the Batutsi in favour of the Bahutu majority. From 1973 to 1994, both Catholic and Protestant leaders entered into close political relations with the regime of the MRND (Mouvement RŽvolutionnaire National pour le DŽveloppement), which alienated them from the people of Rwanda when human rights abuses were widespread, culminating in the war in 1990 and the genocide of 1994. If the church's mission remains that of teaching and evidencing love, justice and righteousness (Micah 6:8), there is the need for it to recover its credibility so that it can play its part in the healing and reconciliation of the country, and this can only be done through its confession and repentance of it failures and complicity in the tragedies.