Retired Bishop of Kabgayi Diocese, Smaragde Mbonyintege’s 2003 tribute to Archbishop André Perraudin— published in Urumuri rwa Kristu N°39, is not simply an obituary.
It is a masterclass in narrative laundering—a slow, thoughtful operation that seeks to render an ecclesiastical actor immune from historical scrutiny while cloaking political complicity in the soft robes of pastoral devotion. To call it "selective memory” would be an understatement.
What Bishop Mbonyintege did, is an exercise in the pseudo-science of absolution—turning controversy into sanctity, ideology into mere misfortune, and political consequence into "storms” beyond human agency.
Linguistic hypnotism
From the very opening line— "I would like to bow before this Great Shepherd”—Mbonyintege signals the tone and expectation of reception. A reader is instructed—through the architecture of language, to kneel down in reverence before the memory of a man who was far more than a mere pastor.
Perraudin is framed as a conduit of "physical, affective and spiritual energies” in service to Christ. History of Perraudin in Rwanda, in this opening act, is already banished. Storms will rage, political upheavals will occur, but they are mere background noise to the serene portrait of ecclesiastical devotion.
And what a strategic move it is. Perraudin did not preside over calm decades. He was at the helm of Rwanda’s Catholic hierarchy during one of the most politically transformative periods of the 20th century: the end of the Belgian colonial rule, the birth of a new Rwandan state, and the rising tide of ethnicized politics—under his own baby PARMEHUTU that would culminate decades later in the most horrific genocide of the century.
The Church, far from being a passive bystander, was a powerhouse of moral formation, social organization, and educational authority. Seminaries churned out the elites.
Pastoral letters shaped ethical norms. Catholic networks mobilized communities and influenced the political imagination. And yet, according to Mbonyintege, Perraudin navigated only "tourmente politico-sociale”—storms. Storms, we are invited to understand, have no architects. Storms, conveniently, absolve.
The language of meteorology replaces ideology. Criminal responsibility is dissolved into the weather. "Dangerous twists and turns,” "bitterness to drink,” and "difficult times” become the metaphors of choice. The genius of this move is in its egalitarian absolution: everyone suffered; everyone struggled.
Accountability is democratized into anonymity. Who, then, can be blamed? Certainly not the shepherd. Certainly not the Church. Certainly not the machinery of colonial power and ecclesiastical authority that shaped Rwanda’s emergent social hierarchies.
The narrative’s soft absolution is dreadful. Mbonyintege assures us that the Perraudin "poorly mastered the language” and lacked full grasp of "socio-cultural sensitivities.”
An image of a compassionate foreigner, fumbling in the middle of complexity—a man whose limited comprehension, we are told, excuses whatever consequences his power may have produced.
But here, the narrative collapses under its own logic. One cannot claim both immense moral authority and limited cultural fluency without addressing the obvious question: when a foreign bishop navigates the Church’s ideological and moral course during decisive political years, what are the consequences of this imbalance? To frame power as pastoral care is to sanitize it; to reduce historical action to intention is to gaslight posterity.
Mbonyintege briefly gestures toward controversy, acknowledging Perraudin’s "personal sensitivities” and noting that some expected him to support particular political positions.
But the tribute immediately retreats into ecclesiastical insulation: "For him, the interests of the Church came first.” This is the fulcrum of narrative protection. What were "the interests of the Church” in Rwanda during the late colonial and early postcolonial period? Were they neutral? Were they detached from the social categories hardening into ethnic consciousness?
History answers this more sharply than devotion: The Church’s institutions, educational platforms, and pastoral messaging were profoundly entangled with the moral legitimation of emerging racialized politics. To hide behind "the Church’s interests” is to elevate organizational positioning into sanctified inevitability, a move that absolves actors while disregarding structural consequences.
Testimonial intimacy is deployed next as a moral shield— that Perraudin had an open door, no protocols, patience with priests, tenderness of heart. The reader is to conclude that personal kindness equals moral righteousness.
But let us be clear: pastoral warmth toward individuals cannot mitigate public complicity in shaping narratives that embolden extremism. A bishop can have a soft heart in private and a profoundly impactful hand in the public sphere. Kindness is not a counterweight to ideology. It is, at best, a comforting distraction.
The tribute’s most insidious rhetorical maneuver is the claim that one should not "reduce his episcopate” to political opinions. Politics, in Mbonyintege’s framing, is peripheral.
Yet in a country where the Church controlled the educational apparatus, mediated public morality, and influenced political legitimacy, politics was not an accessory to episcopal authority—it was central. To treat it as a mere footnote is not neutrality; it is a deliberate act of narrative shielding. Mbonyintege becomes an efficient manipulator.
Racialized exoneration is similarly evident. Perraudin is presented as a well-meaning white missionary navigating an African "storm” of political chaos. Rwanda becomes the problem; the missionary, the innocent, caught in winds beyond his comprehension. The framing inverts historical power. Structural influence is minimized, moral authority is sanctified, and European responsibility is conveniently outsourced to fate.
This is no crude denial. It is narrative sleight of hand— precisely the sort of intellectual and moral obfuscation that allows hagiography to substitute for accountability.
Perraudin is not a stranger
Historical record complicates this portrait of a clean cleric. In his Lenten pastoral letter "Super omnia caritas” or "Charity above all”— of February 11, 1959, Perraudin explicitly declared: "In our Rwanda, social differences, and inequalities are largely connected with racial differences, in the sense that wealth, political and even judicial power are really—to a considerable extent—in the hands of people belonging to the same race.”
Here, the "race” and "racial differences” Rwandans as opposed to Belgian colonizers or a Swiss like him, the "same race” meant Tutsi. But pose and imagine Rwandans having races among themselves. At this juncture, anti-Tutsi sentiment is not a simple ambient storm but articulated belief. The Church was not neutral; it participated in ideological consolidation.
Perraudin’s collaboration with Belgian priest Chanoine Ernotte—who helped shape the extremist racial politics behind the March 24, 1957 Bahutu Manifesto—further embeds him within the ideological frameworks of Hutu Power. Perraudin himself is credited with the creation of the "Social Hutu Movement” in 1957, and its political offshoot, PARMEHUTU— which would be led by none other than Grégoire Kayibanda, future President of Rwanda.
Perraudin’s entanglement is neither accidental nor incidental. He lent moral, institutional, and ideological sanction to movements that would transform racist politics into instruments of power. According to Leon Saur in his work ‘Catholique belges et Rwanda, 1950-1965’ Perraudin’s discourse in February 1959, acted as a detonator’ of bloody events in November that year and beyond.
This declaration openly racialized inequality, transforming socio-economic disparities into biologized political categories. It marked a departure from earlier missionary paternalism toward moral legitimation of racial majority political claims. Although the Pastoral letter did not openly call for violence; by entrenching inequality within racial language, it naturalized the ethnic political binary.
Although authored by nine Hutu intellectuals (including future President Grégoire Kayibanda), the Bahutu manifesto emerged within Church-sponsored educational and intellectual networks. Kayibanda had previously worked as editor of the Catholic newspaper Kinyamateka, which functioned within Church structures.
Part of the manifesto reads: "The indigenous problem in Rwanda is above all a problem of race... The political and economic monopoly is held by the Tutsi.” The language in the manifesto mirrors Perraudin’s racial framing two years later. It called for "double liberation”: from colonialism and from Tutsi domination.
Perraudin was part of the clerical machinery which invented "Hutu grievances”. His pastoral letter sacralized its political vocabulary. Once inequality was framed as racial injustice from the pulpit, political mobilization acquired theological legitimacy. Logically, PARMEHUTU did not merely emerge from colonial resentment—it emerged from a convergence of: Colonial racial taxonomy; catholic social teaching reframed in racial terms; and emerging elite Hutu political class trained in catholic seminaries. The later mutation into Hutu Power required radicalization—but its moral grammar was already available.
Yet Mbonyintege frames this record as controversy to be excused, not accountability to be addressed. Shame!
Self-indictment
To understand the depth of Perraudin’s alignment with genocidal narratives, one need only read his own writings. In Un Évêque au Rwanda... / A Bishop in Rwanda..., he asserts that the Tutsi’s "fierce determination to retake power is the key to all the events that bloodied Rwanda, including the genocide of the Tutsi which began the very evening of the assassination of President Habyarimana on April 6, 1994.” Here is a textbook example of ideological gaslighting: the victims of genocide are re-cast as the provocateurs, and mass murder becomes a secondary consequence of political ambition.
Perraudin elaborates: "I must record here the conversation I had on April 8, 1995, with an acquaintance of mine, a thoroughly credible person who was in Kigali at the height of the 1994 massacres. I met this person in Europe. He recounted a conversation he had in 1994 before the genocide with one of the major propagandists and leaders of the RPF. My acquaintance told him: ‘With your attacks on Rwanda, you will cause all your compatriots inside the country to be massacred.’ The response of the RPF leader was cynical: ‘After Chernobyl, there were still survivors.’
This meant, quite clearly, that for the RPF, the massacre of the Tutsi inside the country was secondary; in its eyes, what mattered was the conquest of power, even if the price to pay was the assassination of thousands of Tutsi living in the country.
The argument often advanced and exploited—that they were protecting Tutsi inside—was only a pretext: the real motive of the attackers was the conquest of power. This cannot be said often enough: it explains everything.”
It bears emphasizing that this is not neutral reportage. It is the codification of Hutu-Power narratives. Quoting unnamed sources to validate genocidal theoretical convictions is not scholarship; it is intellectual complicity. Had he been in Rwanda in the early 1990, Perraudin would have joined the Coalition for the Defence of the Republic (CDR) party.
Perraudin further insists: "Without hesitation, one must affirm that the first and principal cause of the genocide of the Tutsi in April 1994 was the attack on the country by the Tutsi themselves. Without October 1, 1990, and everything that followed, particularly the assassination of President Habyarimana, there would have been neither the genocide of the Tutsi nor that of the Hutu, whether before or after the RPF’s takeover of power in Kigali in July 1994.”
The inversion of victim and aggressor here is clear. The moral and historical logic is outrageous: genocide becomes the consequence of ambition; mass murder becomes justified reaction.
If we wish to understand the origins of this ideology, President Kayibanda’s message of March 11, 1963 to Rwandan emigrants or refugees abroad is illuminating:
"Even if, against all odds, you were to seize Kigali by force, how will you reckon with the chaos of which you would be the first victims? I will not dwell on it—you can foresee it yourselves; otherwise, you would not act as desperate henchmen! You yourselves say it among your ranks: it would mean the total and sudden end of the Tutsi race. Who, then, is committing genocide?”
Perraudin, praised as a good listener by Mbonyintege, must have been Kayibanda’s speechwriter. To celebrate him without acknowledging this complicity is not pastoral; it is scandalous.
History repeats itself in the 1964 massacres following the December–January 1963–1964 killings. Perraudin writes:
"One might wonder why I recount at such length this episode of December–January 1963–1964. I have done so because it was decisive: as I wrote above, it disrupted the beginnings of the young Rwandan Republic and clearly revealed the intentions of Tutsi leaders abroad. It also explains why the issue of the return of refugees could not at that time be approached calmly, even by Church authorities.
Finally, it was necessary to react against the monstrous accusations that well-orchestrated media were making against the leaders of the young Republic and even against the Church and against myself in particular.”
Here is the theological justification for defense of genocide: the Church, the episcopate, and Perraudin himself were under siege by "biased” reporting. Truth, he insists, is not to be found in the testimony of survivors or in international observation; it is to be found in the protection of power.
Vatican Radio, he complains, committed a sacrilegious sin by reporting the obvious: "Since Hitler’s genocide of the Jews, the most terrible systematic genocide is taking place in the heart of Africa. Thousands of men are dying every day. The Batutsi have no press to defend them. According to Protestant missionaries, 150,000 Batutsi in Burundi and neighboring countries are in urgent need of material aid.”
Perraudin’s response is a catechism of denial: "To speak of ‘genocide’ without having proof in hand is a gravely rash judgment. To speak of ‘the most terrible systematic genocide’ is in effect to say it was organized by the country’s authorities and to condemn them without proof.”
"The comparison with Hitler is monstrous and gravely offensive to a Catholic head of state.”
"To assert that the Batutsi had no press for their defense is a grave error: they were heard at the United Nations as early as 1959; the reports attest to this. They lacked neither newspapers in Africa nor in Europe. They were able to make themselves heard on radio, especially Radio Cairo.”
Pause there. A Catholic head of state. As though confessional identity was an inoculation against criminality. As though the sacrament of baptism rendered one incapable of organizing mass violence. The theological confusion is staggering. Christianity does not sanctify political authority. It judges it.
When a bishop’s first reflex is to defend power rather than interrogate violence, something fundamental has gone wrong.
The moral tragedy deepens when Perraudin recounts, approvingly, an anecdote suggesting that the Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF) allegedly accepted the possibility of Tutsi deaths as collateral damage in pursuit of power: "After Chernobyl, there were still survivors.” This is more than a criminal comparison.
Scandalous tribute
Perraudin presents this second-hand claim as an interpretive key: "This cannot be said often enough: it explains everything.”
Everything? Does it explain roadblocks? Lists of targeted people? Identity cards? Radio incitement? Machetes? Organized militias? Or does it function as ideological shorthand to shift the locus of blame?
Genocide is not an emotional outburst. It is organized. It is planned. It requires structures, propaganda, and authorization. To frame it as reactive inevitability is to empty it of agency. And to empty perpetrators of agency is to absolve them. Which is what perpetrators and their supporters Perraudin do.
The most troubling dimension, however, is the long life of the narrative. Perraudin did not express these views in youthful ignorance. He maintained them across decades. He defended the 1960s criminal regime. He protested media accounts of massacres. He later reframed 1994 in language that mirrored the ideological grammar of Hutu Power. Consistency, in this case, is not virtue. It is an indictment.
What, then, does it mean to celebrate such a figure without reckoning? It means normalizing theological and historical amnesia. It means teaching younger generations that pastoral gentleness outweighs public consequence. It means implying that ecclesiastical authority should be shielded from scrutiny because it is sacred.
But sacredness without accountability becomes idolatry. The Gospel does not protect shepherds from critique. It demands more of them. "To whom much is given, much will be required.” A bishop presiding over ideological transformation bears responsibility not only for private virtue but for public impact. If his words legitimize exclusion, if his alliances strengthen ethnically defined political movements, if his narratives rationalize genocide, then his legacy must be evaluated accordingly.
To praise Perraudin without addressing his defense of regimes that carried out massacres, without confronting his reframing of genocide as consequence, without examining his role in shaping racialized politics in the late 1950s, is to elevate historical distortion into devotional memory. And that is dangerous.
A Church that cannot name its own failures risks repeating them. A clergy that treats ideological complicity as pastoral nuance undermines its moral credibility. A tribute that canonizes selective memory teaches believers that holiness consists in loyalty to institution rather than fidelity to fact.
In a country where genocide is not abstraction but lived memory, the stakes are not academic. Language matters. Narratives matter. Authority matters. If shepherds become apologists for power, then sheep will learn to mistake ideology for doctrine.
True theology requires moral coherence. And true tribute requires honesty. Anything less is not piety. It is protection. And protection of falsehood is the opposite of love. Mbonyintege should remember and regret that he wrote this tribute when he was a Rector of the Major Seminary of Nyakibanda.
Catholicism as a shield
The claim that it was wrong for Vatican Radio to compare the massacres of Tutsi in Rwanda to the crimes of Hitler’s Nazis on the grounds that President Grégoire Kayibanda was a Catholic head of state reveals a deeply troubling moral logic. If the objection rests not on factual inaccuracy, not on historical disproportionality, but on the religious identity of the political leader involved, then what is being asserted is simple and stark: Catholic affiliation mitigates, or at least renders inappropriate, comparison with genocidal regimes.
That logic is indefensible. To suggest that Nazi comparison is improper because the head of state was Catholic implies that confessional identity functions as a moral buffer. It substitutes baptism for accountability. It implies that belonging to the Church creates a presumption against grave criminal comparison. In essence, it elevates religious affiliation above empirical reality.
But religious identity does not neutralize moral agency. It intensifies responsibility. The Gospel of Luke (12:48) states: "From everyone who has been given much, much will be demanded.” A Catholic head of state is not less accountable for injustice; he is more accountable, because he claims allegiance to a moral tradition that unequivocally condemns murder, persecution, and collective punishment.
The Second Vatican Council, in Gaudium et Spes (27), declares: "Whatever is opposed to life itself... whatever violates the integrity of the human person... all these things and others of their like are infamies indeed.” There is no footnote exempting Catholic rulers.
The idea that Nazi comparison becomes improper because the perpetrator is Catholic reveals a confusion between ecclesial loyalty and moral truth. Nazism is invoked historically as a paradigm of systematic, ideologically driven mass violence—the Holocaust. To compare an atrocity to Nazi crimes is not to label the perpetrator’s religion; it is to assess the scale and character of violence.
If massacres are systematic, identity-based, and politically organized, the analogy may be historically arguable. If they are not, the analogy can be rejected on evidentiary grounds. But to reject the analogy because the political leader was Catholic is to make religion a shield against moral classification.
That move is not only intellectually weak; it is theologically dangerous. Christianity does not function as reputational insurance.
Indeed, history provides sobering reminders that Catholic identity has never guaranteed moral rectitude. The presence of Catholic perpetrators in grave crimes — including figures later convicted by international tribunals, such as Jean Kambanda, Mathieu Ngirumpatse, Augustin Bizimungu or even clergy like Father Athanase Seromba — demonstrates that sacramental affiliation does not prevent participation in atrocity.
If religious identity were treated as exculpatory, then by that logic the crimes of any baptized individual would become categorically less comparable to other historical atrocities. A Catholic genocidaire would be shielded from analogy; a Protestant or Muslim perpetrator would not. That would be a grotesque double standard — a confessional distortion of justice.
Such reasoning would collapse under its own bias. The Catechism of the Catholic Church (1868) teaches that Catholics have responsibility not only for the sins they personally commit but also when they "approve” or "do not hinder” them when obliged to do so. The Church’s moral tradition does not soften judgment because the sinner shares the faith. It intensifies the scandal.
To argue that a comparison to Nazism was inappropriate because the leader was Catholic subtly shifts the conversation from the nature of the violence to the identity of the ruler. It asks us to protect the Church’s image rather than confront historical reality.
But the Church’s credibility has never been preserved by denial. It has been preserved, when it has been preserved at all, by reality.
Saint John Paul II’s public apologies during the Jubilee Year 2000 did not claim that Catholic actors could not be compared to historical wrongdoers because of their baptism. He acknowledged sin within the Church’s historical community. That was moral courage.
If anything, invoking Catholic identity as a barrier to comparison risks committing a form of idolatry — placing institutional reputation above moral clarity. It suggests that scandal lies not in the massacre but in the analogy.
The deeper question is this: Were the massacres systematic? Were they directed at a defined group? Were they politically organized? If so, then historical comparison to other instances of organized mass violence is not theological insult; it is analytical inquiry.
To reject such comparison solely because the political leader was Catholic implies that Catholicism functions as reputational armor. It does not. Faith does not exonerate crime. It magnifies accountability.
Any argument that appears to imply otherwise — however unintentionally — erodes both moral reasoning and theological integrity. And in matters of mass violence, integrity cannot afford such erosion.
There is a grave moral danger when Catholic identity becomes a lens that distorts judgment instead of clarifying it. When a political leader is defended not on the merits of his record but because he is "a Catholic head of state,” something has gone deeply wrong. And when a churchman is praised in sweeping terms while serious moral questions surrounding his reasoning remain unexamined, the danger compounds.
Conclusion
If a bishop defended a head of state from historical comparison to notorious regimes primarily because that leader was Catholic, the logic is troubling. Catholicism is not a moral inoculation. Baptism does not render a ruler incapable of grave injustice. The Church’s teaching on intrinsic evil does not soften when the perpetrator shares the faith.
But the problem becomes even more acute when another archbishop publicly praises such a figure without grappling with the moral implications of his arguments. The episcopal office is not a fraternity of mutual admiration. It is a burden of certainty. An archbishop is entrusted not merely with honoring predecessors, but with safeguarding moral clarity.
When praise appears unqualified — when it seems to flow from shared ecclesial status rather than from careful moral evaluation — it risks signaling that rank outweighs accountability. That is not fidelity. It is clerical solidarity elevated above justice.
The Church’s credibility depends on her willingness to apply the same moral standards internally that she proclaims externally. If Catholic rulers are defended because they are Catholic, and Catholic bishops are praised because they are bishops, regardless of the moral weight of their reasoning, then ecclesial identity has become currency — traded in place of ethical discernment. That pathway is spiritually hazardous.
An archbishop’s loyalty must first be to truth that saves humanity, not to titles; to victims of injustice—not to institutional memory; to moral coherence, not to hierarchical kinship. Anything less risks turning a sanctified office into protective insulation.
An archbishop is not simply a Catholic with rank. He is entrusted with teaching authority, moral discernment, and public witness. The episcopal office is not honorary; it is sacrificial. The mitre does not symbolize fraternity among clerics. It symbolizes responsibility for truth.
If an archbishop defends or refuses to scrutinize troubling reasoning offered by another bishop — particularly reasoning that minimizes, rationalizes, or morally distorts serious injustice — the question arises: is loyalty to the episcopal fraternity eclipsing loyalty to truth?
The danger is elusive but profound. The Church teaches that bishops are successors of the apostles, charged with guarding the deposit of faith and upholding moral clarity (cf. Lumen Gentium 25). They are not guardians of each other’s reputations. They are guardians of the Gospel.
When a successor of the apostles appears unable to acknowledge serious moral fault in a fellow prelate, especially in matters touching genocide or its justification, the problem is not merely personal. It is ecclesiological.
When episcopal solidarity becomes reflexive protection, the mitre ceases to signify pastoral courage and begins to resemble institutional insulation. This is especially grave when the matter concerns mass violence or historical interpretation of atrocity. In such cases, silence or defensiveness can function as moral minimization.
The Church does not need prelates who instinctively shield. It needs shepherds who can say, with humility and courage: "If wrong was done, it must be named.”
Anything less, turns the consecrated office into a shield against accountability. And that would wound the Church far more deeply than any honest admission ever could.
An archbishop’s first allegiance is not to the memory of a predecessor, nor to the prestige of the hierarchy. It is to justice, and the dignity of victims.
To appear incapable of acknowledging error in a fellow bishop because he was "one of us” is to reduce apostolic succession to corporate loyalty. That is not ecclesiology. It is clerical tribalism.