Abstract
Edited by three Rwandan Jesuits, this essay collection’s focus is on the history and current potential of the Catholic Church in that country, defined in relation to its 14 weeks of genocide in 1994. Involving the murder of close to a million people, a tidal wave of extremist Hutu attacks decimated the Tutsi majority and hollowed out every Rwandan social institution in the process. Among those, the authors agree, was a complicit Catholicism that still needs to reinvent itself and which was, notably via one of its colonial religious orders, itself the origin of the pass laws and (European) notions of racial supremacy that drove the genocide’s slaughter.
As the book’s arguments proceed, how well the Church is judged to have done and what succour it may now offer Rwandans depend somewhat on the position of each essayist and/or their lived experience. For example, academic, clerical and episcopal authors have contrasting inflections while nine contributions out of 24 are written by survivors.
There are good chapters on schools, on attempts to use the model of traditional village courts as a vehicle for reconciliation, on the new evangelization, memorialization, and a brave comparative reflection on the Rwandan and Jewish experiences of extermination. All are to be welcomed, especially given the grave challenges that remain in Rwandan society to speak of what passed and to name how what was in the past actively shapes interpersonal relations and public leadership today.
It is hard to understand, though, how a book such as this could not have at least one essay on Church and state before and after 1994. The competition between them was previously raw and remains in flux. Likewise, what are the consequences for Rwanda’s communion with Rome when the steady flow of papal social and other encyclicals before and since 1994 look to have been little touched by the ontological and political catastrophes that genocides represent?
Indeed, if this book has a weakness, it is that it is not as deeply Rwandan as it sets out to be. A reinvented Rwandan theology might be stronger on the enduring colonizations faced by the Church in the land of a thousand hills; it might articulate more powerfully a distinctively new encounter with Christ; and it might have more to say about particular accounts of resurrection and the current Rwandan social context. Just as the authors edge closer to such local vistas, and the possible universal insight they may offer, a kind of generic framing Catholicism sometimes creeps in that can distract from Rwanda itself. Some interdisciplinary contributions might have helped in this regard, along with a wider exposure across the essayists’ reading to the full breadth of social scientific and historical literature exploring the shape and consequences of genocides outside the European metropolis and in Rwanda itself.
Notwithstanding such observations, this is an important and ground-breaking contribution that deserves recognition, especially as a first critical step in exploring the challenges and the hopes of Rwandan Catholic futures.