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Article: Catholics & colonialism: the church's failure in Rwanda.
- Article from:
- Commonweal
- Article date:
- May 23, 1997
- Author:
CopyrightCOPYRIGHT 1997 Commonweal Foundation. This material is published under license from the publisher through the Gale Group, Farmington Hills, Michigan. All inquiries regarding rights should be directed to the Gale Group. (Hide copyright information)
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On April 6,1994, two ground-to-air missiles struck the jet carrying Presidents Juvenal Habyarimana of Rwanda and Cyprien Ntaryamira of Burundi. All on board were killed. Within hours, a killing rampage erupted in Rwanda that, over the next three months, would leave between half a million and a million dead. It is by no means insignificant that some of the first victims were Catholic priests, lay workers, and young retreatants at the Centre Christus in Kigali, Rwanda, and that attacks on the church continued throughout the massacres. Startingly, a majority of the killings in the genocide even took place within church buildings: Hutu militia turned these traditional places of ...