Rwanda before the Genocide: Catholic Politics and Ethnic Discourse in the Late Colonial Era by J. J. Carney (review)

As a tragic failure of Catholic leadership the role of bishops in the 1994 genocide in Rwanda is unique in the history of the Church. This does not make it easier to emancipate Rwanda's historiography from contemporary attempts to condemn or defend the Church. Carney brings both diligent scholarship and theological insight to a range of sources, deploying what Alisdair MacIntyre defines as the core virtues in politics and ethics: generosity, justice, truth and—a degree of—intellectual courage ( Ethics and the Conflicts of Modernity, p. 97).

"Courage" because Church history on Rwanda is invariably scrutinized for evidence supporting the defense or prosecution. My co-author of Christianisme et Pouvoirs au Rwanda(Karthala, 2001), Guy Theunis, W.F., a few years ago, was pulled off a flight transiting in Kigali to spend a considerable time in a Rwandan jail for his liberal approach, prior to the genocide, to editing a journal of record expressing political opinions, some extreme. This qualified him for allegations of complicity in genocide.

Was leadership failure a product of a defective anthropology of a feudal society in transition, flawed ecclesiology allowing a lapse into a triumphalist caesaropapism, or an inherent problem in the missiology of inculturation? I would tick all of above.

Carney makes the Swiss missionary Archbishop Andre Perraudin of Kabgayi exemplar of his major thematic critique: the Church's acceptance of the colonial and trusteeship administrators' account of the nature of Tutsi and Hutu identities. Social differences and inequalities were "for a large partlinked to racial differences" (p. 97, my emphasis in his 1959, pastoral letter " Super Omnia Caritas"). But the sense is ambiguous. Linked by whom?

There is much evidence that all three factors colluded to jeopardize preventative action by the Church. The racialization of the two identities was a product of a transition in a socio-economic relationship fast-forwarded by the Belgian trusteeship government. Perraudin missed that. Archbishop Vincent Nsengiyumva served on the central committee of President Juvenal Habyarimana's Mouvement Révolutionnaire Nationale Développement(MRND). He was forced off by Pope John Paul II, visiting in 1990, but retained a direct phone line to the President's office.

Nsengiyumva took to extremes Perraudin's informal advisory relationship to Gregoire Kayibanda, who became President thanks to the Hutu revolution of 1959. The friendship was informed by a shared commitment to Catholic Social Teaching—evoked by the injustice done to the Hutu majority. Perraudin saw it as an antidote to the inter-racial tensions evoked by Rwandan nationalism.

Where Carney particularly takes the Rwandan Church story forward from my own Church and Revolution in Rwanda(Manchester, 1977) is in his counterfoil to Perraudin: a sympathetic portrayal of Archbishop Aloys Bigirumwami, a noble of mixed Hutu-Tutsi ancestry from Gisaka. Against a stereotype of a pro-Tutsi traditionalist— mea culpa—he sets convincingly a complex picture of a prophetic leader alert to the dangers of ethnicism and fearful of politically induced violence. Bigirumwami represents for Carney the nearest the Rwandan hierarchy got to what Guy Theunis calls "a prophetic charism in service to the Gospel of Peace" (pp. 203).

Finally, Carney's outstanding book raises two theological questions. Like Cavanaugh he wants a Catholic politics that is the praxis of Theunis' "prophetic charism." So Perraudin was not "political enough."

But prophets end up in the wilderness rather than negotiating peace settlements where to prioritize the virtues of peace and justice, one over the other, is often unavoidable. Then comes the dilemma of inculturating the Church in divided societies where in Cardinal Roger Etchegaray's words "the blood of tribalism ran deeper than the waters of baptism." Northern Ireland for example.