Download Chaplains of the Militia: The Tangled Story of the Catholic Church During Rwanda's Genocide AudioBook Free
The 1994 Rwandan genocide was the previous great bloodletting of the hundred years that came to define planned mass eliminating. 800,000 Tutsis were murdered by their Hutu countrymen, normal citizens taking part the eliminating 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 safeguarding some of the murderers even today. The Catholic chapel should have been at the forefront of moral opposition to the massacres. Instead it was almost silent as churches across Rwanda were turned into human slaughterhouses, jeopardized by an archbishop closely allied with the politicians behind the genocide. Some clergy courageously resisted the killers but their bishops were not there to lower back them. Other priests and nuns signed up with the murderers, overseeing the torture and slaughter of citizens who had considered the chapel for refuge. Following the violence concluded, the Vatican spirited guilty participants of the clergy out of the country, and as time passes, quietly performed them into parishes across European countries. Chaplains of the Militia is the remarkable story of those priests accused of complicity in genocide. Chris McGreal takes us from Rwanda in 1994, where he stood one of the body at one of the many massacres in churches, to modern-day France in pursuit of a priest notorious during the genocide for using a gun and selecting subjects for the machete-waving militia. He investigates the root base of the Catholic church's complicity in the ideology that underpinned the mass killings, confronting bishops and priests with a recent some would prefer to forget. And, in an echo of the scandal over paedophile priests, he exposes the Vatican's continued safety of clergy with blood vessels on the hands.
