The moment that Pope John announced his plan to convoke an Ecumenical Council, interest centered on the question of what the Council could accomplish for Christian unity. Some, both Catholics and non-Catholics, impetuously talked of achieving unity in the Council itself. But most observers quickly realized that its immediate aim could not be the union of
By the second April 10, as the African Synod opened in Rome--the official title for this meeting is 'The Special Assembly for Africa of the Synod of Bishops"--details had just reached the outside world of the slaughter in Rwanda. Among those killed in the wave of "ethnic cleansing" were 19 Africans gathered at the Jesuits' Christus Centre in the Rwandan capital, Kigali: nine young Rwandan sis¬ters of the congregation "Vita et Pax"; the Rwandan cook; a Rwandan social worker who had apparently sought refuge there; five Rwandan diocesan priests meeting at the center, and three Rwandan Jesuit priests.
At Jesuit headquarters in Rome, African bishops who had arrived for the synod joined the Jesuits' superior general and young African Jesuits studying in Rome to pray for all the victims of ethnic violence in central Africa and for the restoration of justice and peace. The Jesuits who died were remembered precisely for their work at the Christus Centre, which was dedicated to ethnic reconciliation and the protection of the vulnerable.
The term "ethnic cleansing," as we know all too well from former Yugoslavia, is a European coinage. There is nothing specially African about either the euphemism or the reality. As in the Balkans, so in Rwanda, efforts to understand what is happening fall back on terms like "ancient hatreds" and "historic grievances," but there is nothing predestined or inevitable about it. As in the Balkans, so too in Rwanda, unscrupulous and weak-minded politicians--in this case, not hard-line Serbs but hard-line Hutus--have seized upon an unsettled moment to grab more power for themselves and their party by killing off political opponents, mostly Tutsis, but also Hutus working for political reconciliation. Waving the ethnic banner, as in the Balkans, the hard-liners have unleashed ignorant men to massacre the "others," and by
