The 1994 Rwandan genocide was the last great bloodletting of the century
that came to define organized mass killing. 800,000 Tutsis were murdered
by their Hutu countrymen, ordinary citizens joining in the killing
alongside militia and army. The violence was driven by incendiary
politicians and generals. But one global institution stands accused of
complicity in the mass killings and protecting some of the murderers to
this day.
The Catholic church should have been at the forefront of moral
opposition to the massacres. Instead it was virtually silent as churches
across Rwanda were turned into human slaughterhouses, compromised by an
archbishop closely allied with the politicians behind the genocide. Some
clergy courageously resisted the killers but their bishops were not
there to back them. Other priests and nuns joined the murderers,
overseeing the torture and slaughter of citizens who had turned to the
church for refuge. After the violence ended, the Vatican spirited guilty
members of the clergy out of the country, and over time, quietly worked
them into parishes across Europe.
Chaplains of the Militia is the extraordinary story of those priests
accused of complicity in genocide. Chris McGreal takes us from Rwanda in
1994, where he stood among the bodies at one of the many massacres in
churches, to modern-day France in pursuit of a priest notorious during
the genocide for wearing a gun and selecting victims for the
machete-waving militia. He investigates the roots of the Catholic
church's complicity in the ideology that underpinned the mass killings,
confronting bishops and priests with a past some would rather forget.
And, in an echo of the scandal over paedophile priests, he exposes the
Vatican's continued protection of clergy with blood on their hands.
