3 - Religion in the midst of the genocide

Summary

In Une initiation, Stéphane Audoin-Rouzeau suggested that the genocide against the Tutsi was to be seen not only as a phenomenon that negatively affected church life and religious practice but as a religious phenomenon in its own right. Put differently, we should ask ourselves whether the fact that numerous massacres took place in churches and that about a quarter of the church personnel were massacred by fellow believers was incidental or, on the contrary, central to the comprehension of the dynamics of the genocide. It is to this question that this chapter is dedicated.

The first task is to establish what happened. The subsequent debates on the role of the church in the genocide, with a flurry of attacks by genocide-memory activists and counter-attacks by church apologists, somewhat cloud the analysis. Using the typology of agents, victims and opponents of oppression elaborated by the authors of the South African TRC's report on the faith communities hearing, we shall examine how the bishops, priests, pastors, religious brothers or sisters and ordinary church members positioned themselves during the three months of the genocide. The churches were agents, victims and opponents. They contributed to the genocide, fell victims of it and opposed it. Sometimes, one should note, these categories overlapped. There are examples of genocide perpetrators who, strangely enough, saved Tutsi lives. In the last section of this chapter, we shall consider, with the oral and written sources at our disposal, what use the perpetrators and the survivors made of religious symbols and beliefs during this dark period of Rwandan history.

The story of St Vincent Minor Seminary in Ndera, east of Kigali, which César Murangira – a twenty-year-old Tutsi student who fled there with his family and hundreds of other Tutsi refugees on 9 April 1994 – narrated in a book significantly entitled Un sachet d’hosties pour cinq [A pack of altar bread for five], shows the diversity of Catholic clergy responses to the genocide. Six priests resided in the school, by then nearly empty because the students were on holiday: Alexis Havugimana, the rector; Ananie Rugasira, the bursar; Patrice Munyentwali, a recently ordained Hutu priest; Jean-Bosco Ntagungira and Jean-Baptiste Murengeranka, two young Tutsi priests; and Tito Oggioni Macagnino, a sixty-four-year-old missionary from Lecce in southern Italy.