Cover
story Faith, Hope and Heroes
By JOHN L. ALLEN JR.
NCR Staff Rome
As Rwandan troops poured into the
eastern part of what was then Zaire in the fall of 1996, Archbishop Christophe
Munzihirwa issued a final, fervent plea for help.
We hope that God will not abandon us and that from some part
of the world will rise for us a small flare of hope, he said in his Oct.
28 message, broadcast to anyone, anywhere, who might have been listening.
As it turned out, no one was.
The civil and military leaders of the region, representing the
last shreds of the crumbling autocratic regime of Mobutu Sese Seko, had fled
weeks before, knowing that Mobutu was doomed and the Rwandans were unstoppable.
Those Rwandans were largely members of the countrys Tutsi minority who
blamed Mobutu for harboring Hutu militants, and as their armed bands moved east
they were killing anyone who got in their way.
Munzihirwa, bishop of the diocese of Bukavu in eastern Zaire since
1993, was thus all that stood between hundreds of thousands of Hutu refugees
and potential annihilation. He had long criticized all parties to the
regions violence. His last hope, shared with the handful of missionaries
and diocesan personnel who stayed behind with him to shelter the refugees, was
for rapid intervention by the international community.
It was not to be. Less than 24 hours later, in the afternoon of
Oct. 29, death came for the archbishop.
Munzihirwa, a Jesuit who called himself a sentinel of the
people, was shot and killed by a group of Rwandan soldiers, his body left
to decay in the deserted streets of the city of Bukavu. (It was more than 24
hours before a small group of Saverian seminarians was able to recover the body
and prepare it for burial). Munzihirwa had surrendered himself in the hope that
two companions might be able to get away in his car; they, too, however, had
been caught and executed.
At his Nov. 29 funeral, someone recalled Munzihirwas
favorite saying: There are things that can be seen only with eyes that
have cried.
So many of them
The death of Christophe Munzihirwa, as harrowing as the details
are, forms but a single episode in one of the most sweeping Christian dramas of
the century just ended: the resurgence of martyrdom on a vast scale.
On May 7, 2000, as part of his celebration of the Great Jubilee,
Pope John Paul II led a service of remembrance at the Roman Coliseum for what
he called these new Christian martyrs -- Catholics and members of
other Christian denominations.
There are so many of them! the pope exclaimed.
They are men and women of every land. They are people of all ages and
callings. John Paul called them countless unknown soldiers who
fought for the great cause of the gospel.
A commission created by the pope had identified some 13,000
Christians who, in some sense, had sacrificed their lives in the 20th century
for the faith. Most came from Europe -- some 8,700, almost all victims of
communist regimes.
In recent years, however, a Vatican commission said, the primary
killing fields for Christians have shifted to the Third World, and in the
1990s, to Africa.
Africa was, in many ways, the success story of the 20th century
for the Catholic church, at least as measured by statistics. The number of
Catholics grew from 2 million to 116 million, representing 15.6 percent of the
total population. Thirty-seven percent of all baptisms in Africa today are of
adults, considered a reliable measure of evangelization success since it
indicates a change in religious affiliation. The worldwide average, by way of
contrast, is 13.2.
Yet this growth has come at a price. Western missionaries find
themselves in danger as shifting waves African conflicts lap up against their
schools, clinics and convents. Native Catholics, without the same degree of
backing from global religious communities and Western governments, are even
more vulnerable to instability.
In Munzihirwas region of Central Africa, for example, at
least 1.8 million people (some estimates run as high as four million) have died
since 1996 in what is really the continents first major continental war,
involving the armies of eight nations and an ever-shifting constellation of
rebel groups. Other conflicts in the Sudan, in Algeria, in Angola, in Sierra
Leone -- in a bewildering series of trouble spots scattered across the
continent -- continue to claim hundreds of thousands of lives.
Inevitably, killing on such a vast scale creates martyrs, people
of faith who lose their lives because they refuse to turn away from danger.
Catholics who know Africa caution that much of this new martyrdom
would not pass the most rigorous traditional tests of what being a
martyr signifies. The faithful are not being asked to sacrifice to
idols, or sign off on a kings illicit divorce. More often they are just
in the wrong place at the wrong time.
I was once confronted by a guy in Liberia who wanted to
steal our car, said African Missions Fr. Kiernan OReilly. I
could have been stubborn and gotten myself killed. I suppose the folks back
home in Ireland would have said, How wonderful! He died for the
faith, but the truth is I would have been dead because I didnt want
to give up the keys. This guy couldnt have cared less if I was an
Anglican priest or a Buddhist monk or whatever.
Pressed on the point, however, OReilly acknowledged that his
choice to be in a place where such confrontations are the stuff of daily life
-- and similar choices by missionaries and native religious, priests, sisters
and laity in Africa -- was itself a matter of faith.
Presence is the key point, he said. Its a
gospel principle.
Most observers who know African Catholicism stress that it is not
a forlorn, suffering church. Time and again people interviewed for this report
underscored the vitality, the joy, they find in African Catholics, in African
culture generally. Some worried that a focus on martyrs might distort
impressions of a church bursting with new life.
Yet in modern Africa, life and death usually stand side by side,
the latter often giving purpose and urgency to the former. The martyrs are thus
very much part of the story of the living African church.
Symbol of hope
Like the better-known Oscar Romero of El Salvador, also slain by
military assassins, Archbishop Christophe Munzihirwa has become a symbol of
hope and resistance in his country, now called the Democratic Republic of
Congo.
Born in Lukambo, in the Bukavu diocese, in 1926, Munzihirwa was
ordained a priest in 1958 and joined the Jesuits in 1963. He studied social
science and economics in Belgium, but returned to his country in 1969 to become
the formation director for Jesuits in the Kinshasha province.
His prophetic streak surfaced in 1971, when the government of
CIA-backed dictator Mobutu Sese Seko responded to a youth protest movement by
forcibly enrolling university-age persons, including seminarians, in the
military for two years. Munzihirwa insisted on being enlisted alongside his
novices, much to the embarrassment of the regime.
Munzihirwa became the Jesuit provincial superior for Central
Africa in 1980. In 1986 he was made a coadjutor bishop in Kasongo, and in 1993
he became archbishop of Bukavu.
Munzihirwa earned fame for his refusal to accept patronage from
Mobutu. That occasionally created obstacles for him, as in 1995 when a Catholic
missionary and members of an international solidarity movement were arrested in
Kasongo. When Munzihirwa demanded their release, military officials taunted him
for not being a friend of Mobutu.
Munzihirwa solved the problem by saying that until the group was
let go, he would sleep outside their cell. They were freed that evening.
Like Romero, Munzihirwa was unafraid to denounce what he
considered military misconduct. During a mid-1990s Mass to install a new bishop
in Kasongo, in a time in which Mobutu had ordered the city sacked because he
believed it was harboring dissenters, Munzihirwa said: Here before me I
see these soldiers. I see the colonel. Stop troubling the people! I ask you, I
order you: Stop it!
The commander wanted Munzihirwa taken into custody, and he
replied: I am ready. Arrest me. Other bishops present, however,
intervened and prevented the arrest.
Despite that gesture of solidarity, Munzihirwas criticisms
of Mobutu at times left him isolated within Zaires bishops
conference. In 1995, a missionary asked him why the bishops were not more
outspoken, and he replied: Father, you cant imagine. We are just a
short distance removed from being part of the presidential
mouvance, a French term meaning inner circle.
After the genocide began in Rwanda in 1994, Munzihirwa became an
outspoken protector of the Hutu refugees who flooded his diocese. He recognized
that a few had committed atrocities against Tutsis, but regarded most as
innocent victims. He called for healing across ethnic boundaries.
In these days, when we continue to dig common graves, where
misery and sickness appear along thousands of kilometers, on routes, along
pathways and in fields
we are particularly challenged by the cry of
Christ on the Cross: Father, forgive them, Munzihirwa said
in an August 1994 homily.
Gods mercy, which breaks the chain of vengeance, is
hurtful to militants on every side. But in reality, that is the only thing that
can definitively shatter the infernal circle of vengeance.
His martyrdom was not unexpected, at least not to him. Munzihirwa
had written in an Easter meditation: Despite anguish and suffering, the
Christian who is persecuted for the cause of justice finds spiritual peace in
total and profound assent to God, in accord with a vocation that can lead even
to death.
His impact can be summed up in the words of Saverian Fr. Francesco
Zampese, an Italian missionary who worked closely with Munzihirwa. Zampese told
NCR: He was the voice of his people.
Five American sisters
Sometimes the heroism of martyrs is not expressed in dramatic
denunciations of injustice, but in a simple, even stubborn, unwillingness to go
when the going is good. Such was the case with five American sisters from Ruma,
Ill., members of the Adorers of the Precious Blood of Christ order, killed in
Liberia in October 1992.
Shirley Kolmer and her cousin, Joel Kolmer, 61 and 58 at the time
of their deaths, Barbara Ann Muttra, 69, Agnes Mueller, 62, and Kathleen
McGuire, 54, were all caught up in the violence that gripped Liberia in the
early 1990s as the regime of President Samuel K. Doe collapsed.
Doe was the first president of Liberia who did not descend from
the families of freed American slaves that had dominated the country since
1821. Doe had seized power, in fact, by having the last Americo-Liberian ruler,
William Tolbert, disemboweled with a bayonet in 1980.
In turn, Doe was killed by a band of rebels in 1990, his body
tossed into a wheelbarrow and rolled around Monrovia, the capital, so that
people could slash his corpse with knives.
Soon another rebel army rose up under the command of Charles
Taylor, who had served under Doe and later fled under charges of financial
corruption. Taylor had been arrested in the United States and spent 16 months
in a Massachusetts prison, until one night he used a hacksaw and bed sheet to
escape.
He made his way to Libya, where he was trained and funded by
Muammar Kaddafi, then made his way back into Liberia as a self-styled
freedom fighter. Taylor quickly acquired a reputation for
recruiting child soldiers, hooking them on heroin, and turning them loose on
opponents, carrying teddy bears and automatic weapons. (Taylor is also reputed
to be the main source of support for a rebel group in neighboring Sierra Leone
whose trademark move is hacking off the limbs of its opponents).
It was in the context of Taylors ultra-violent climb to
power that the five American missionary nuns met their deaths.
Shirley Kolmer taught at St. Patricks High School near
downtown Monrovia. Joel Kolmer, Agnes Mueller and Kathleen McGuire all taught
at St. Michaels elementary and high schools, also in Monrovia. Barbara
Ann Muttra ran a health clinic in Kle, 25 miles north. The five women lived
together in a convent in Gardnersville, on the Eastern outskirts of the
city.
The women were said to enjoy a close relationship with the local
people and a grudging respect from the armed patrols that constantly harassed
them. In reference to Muttra, in fact, a Western reporter once heard a
gun-toting Liberian remark in refererence to Sr. Muttra, That ol ma
is full of rice. The comment is considered high praise in the local
dialect.
For months it had been clear that the deteriorating situation
posed grave danger to the nuns, for that matter to anyone in the way of the
shelling and the vicious hand-to-hand combat that distinguished Taylors
westward advance. The sisters resolved to stay in order to serve the people who
had nowhere to go, fully conscious of the danger. On a trip home in the summer
of 1992, Mueller gave away her most prized possessions, obviously wanting
things settled, just in case.
Despite a climate of foreboding, the five nuns were anything but
dour. According to other sisters in the order, the nuns always asked U.S.
visitors for three things: U.S. currency, good chocolate and good liquor. Each
was a free spirit in her own way. Joel Kolmer, for instance, before her arrival
in Liberia, had played guitar in a band with three other nuns. The band was
called Bad Habit.
In volunteering for duty in Liberia, Mueller had summed up what
draws many a missionary to such places: Thats where God is. Right
there, in that struggle, in that hassle.
In October 1992, Taylors forces began an all-out push to
wrest control of Monrovia from the West African peacekeeping force, Ecomog that
had been administering the city. Fighting broke out all along the citys
periphery, and Taylors men set up check points to control the flow of
traffic.
The night of Oct. 20, a security guard at the convent said he was
worried about his family. Two of the sisters, Muttra and Joel Kolmer, agreed to
drive him home. On the way they picked up two Ecomog soldiers stranded by the
fighting. As the car pulled away, shots rang out, most likely fired by troops
affiliated with Taylor. Muttra and Kolmer were killed.
When the two nuns did not return to the convent, the others feared
the worst, but the fighting prevented a search party from going out. Besides,
there were a number of aspirants -- young African women hoping to join the
community -- who had to be looked after, along with locals who had sought
refuge at the convent.
The morning of Oct. 23, a band of Ecomog troops entered the
neighborhood to try to evacuate anyone who was left. They soon found themselves
under attack. The inhabitants of the convent were trapped.
That afternoon, Taylors soldiers arrived. Based on reports
from witnesses, the three who took the lead roles were named Mosquito, Black
Devil and Gio Devil. They demanded the keys to the car that remained at the
convent. McGuire handed them over and was shot. The soldiers then demanded
money from the other two sisters. Informed that there were no U.S. dollars at
the convent, the soldiers shot Mueller and Shirley Kolmer, killing both of
them.
To date no one has been brought to justice in the killings of the
five nuns. But their presence in Liberia lives on. In the villages of Kle and
Gardnersville, girls under the age of 2 today are likely to answer to Agnes,
Barbara, Joel, Kathleen, or Shirley.
These five angels of peace came to our country to minister
to our people, to heal our wounds, to educate our people, and to bring to our
people a fuller, fruitful and spiritual life, wrote Archbishop Michael
Francis of Monrovia in 1993. They died because they loved us.
When others left
Dominican Fr. Timothy Radcliffe, now nearing the end of his
nine-year term as master general of the worldwide Dominican order, says few
events during that time have left an imprint like the funeral of Bishop Pierre
Claverie in Oran, Algeria, in 1996.
He stayed when other people left, and when he knew his life
was threatened, Radcliffe recalled recently in an address in Rome.
Every day when we went alone around the diocese in his little car, he
wondered whether he would get back that night.
Claverie, 58 when he was killed in a bomb attack near his office,
was a member of the Dominican order.
There were thousands of Muslims at his funeral. At one point
someone said simply, He was the bishop of the Muslims. Then
everyone picked it up, repeating, He was the bishop of the Muslims.
I learned from that experience the extraordinary value of simple
presence, Radcliffe said.
Claverie had been born in Algeria into a family of French
expatriates. When two million Europeans fled Algeria after it acquired its
independence from France in 1962, he refused to leave. Since then Algeria has
become one of the worlds bloodiest points of conflict between the Islam
and the West.
Life became especially precarious for the countrys tiny
Catholic community in 1992, when the militant Islamic Salvation Front won
Algerias first truly democratic national elections, only to have the
results annulled and military rule imposed. Several waves of terrorist violence
ensued. It has resulted in 100,000 deaths and more than a million people
injured or made homeless, according to estimates by the Algerian
government.
Appointed bishop of Oran in 1981, Claverie made dialogue with
Islam one of the cardinal points of his career. He learned fluent Arabic, even
taught the language to the privileged classes of native Arabic Algerians who
had grown up speaking French exclusively.
That is probably what is at the basis of my religious
vocation, Claverie wrote in 1996, shortly before he was killed. I
wondered why, throughout my Christian childhood when I listened to sermons on
loving ones neighbor, I had never heard anyone say the Arabs were my
neighbors.
It is my conviction that humanity can only exist in the
plural. As soon as we claim to possess the truth or speak in the name of
humanity we fall into totalitarianism and exclusion. No one possesses the
truth; everyone seeks it.
Claverie saw the end coming and hoped it might prevent further
acts of violence. My murder would be a great coup, he said in 1995.
But must I leave and expose others to the same danger?
Claverie is one of several Western religious who gave their lives
in Algeria in recent years. Before he died, he celebrated a funeral Mass for
seven Trappist monks. The monks, from the southwestern part of the country,
were kidnapped in late March 1996. Their severed heads were found two months
later after a rebel band called the Armed Islamic Group announced and claimed
responsibility for the killing. Three heads were hanging from a tree near a gas
station; the other four had simply been tossed onto the grass.
The rebels executed the monks after the government refused a
request that they be exchanged for imprisoned members of the rebel group.
The monks had lived at the monastery of Notre Dame dAtlas in
Tibhirine, just over 60 miles south of the capital city of Algiers.
Proselytizing is forbidden in Algeria, and the Trappists did not seek
conversions. Instead they gave their Muslim neighbors part of the monastery to
use for daily prayer, taught them French, delivered their babies, and watched
over their health. The monks, in addition to being Catholic brothers, were
regarded as true Muslims, according to local observers.
In 1993, a band of militants showed up at the monastery demanding
money and logistical help. You have no choice, the soldiers are
reported to have said. The abbot responded, Yes, we do. Told they
were interfering with preparations for Christmas Mass, the soldiers departed.
It was a temporary retreat.
One of the Trappists, aware of that he might become a martyr,
wrote the following words on Pentecost Sunday in 1996, a matter of weeks before
his death.
If it should happen one day -- and it could be today --
that I become a victim of the terrorism that now seems ready to encompass all
the foreigners in Algeria, I would like my community, my church, my family, to
remember that my life was given to God and to this country.
I would like them to be able to associate this death with
so many other equally violent ones allowed to fall into the indifference of
anonymity. My life has no more value than any other. Nor any less.
I dont see how I could rejoice if the people I love
were indiscriminately accused of my murder.
I know the contempt in which
Algerians taken as a whole can be engulfed.
This is what I shall be able to do, if God wills: immerse
my gaze in that of the Father, to contemplate with him his children of Islam as
he sees them, all shining with the glory of Christ, fruit of His Passion,
filled with the Gift of the Spirit whose secret joy will always be to establish
communion and to refashion the likeness, playing with the
differences.
Killed in the monastery were Frs. Christian de Cherge, 59, prior;
Celestin Ringeard, 62; Christophe Lebreton, 45; Bruno Lemarchand, 66, who was
visiting from a monastery in Morocoo; and Brs. Paul Favre Miville, 57, Michel
Fleury, 52, and Luc Dochier, 82.
When Claverie presided over the monks funeral, he explained
their decision to remain in harms way. A good shepherd does not run
away when wolves come, he said. It was his decision as well.
Colonial policy
The ethnic fury that set Hutus and Tutsis to killing one another
in the mid-1990s in Rwanda created a contagion that quickly spread into the
surrounding nations of Uganda, Burundi and Congo. The consequence was killing
on an unimaginable scale.
Though presented by the worlds media as an ancient
tribal conflict, in fact the roots of the violence were as much in
Western colonial policy. In pre-colonial Africa, Hutu and
Tutsi were never clear-cut ethnic categories. Under German and
Belgian colonial rule in the 19th century, however, the distinction was
radicalized and racial identity cards issued to tell the groups apart. A policy
developed of discriminating in favor of the Tutsis. This apartheid-style policy
led some analysts to call the Hutus the Palestinians of the Great
Lakes, a majority living under virtual colonization of a minority
supported by the West.
A series of wars and rebellions followed the period of
de-colonialization, in which the Hutus and Tutsis jockeyed for power in several
Great Lakes-area nations. This area, in center-east Africa, focused on Lake
Victoria and a number of smaller bodies of water, includes Rwanda, Burundi,
Congo and Uganda.
Two incidents in Burundi, where more than 150,000 people lost
their lives from 1993 to 1996, and where 62 percent of a population of six
million is Catholic, illustrate the ways martyrdom can happen in such a
context.
Archbishop Joachim Ruhuna of Gitega, some 50 miles east of the
capital of Bujumbura, was killed on Sept. 9, 1996. In a final testimony to
Ruhunas reputation for independence, both Tutsis and Hutus continue to
blame the other for the hail of gunfire that rained down on the
archbishops car, leaving him, two nuns, and four other passengers dead.
His corpse was never recovered, presumably having been flung into
the nearby Mubarazi River. It was the manner in which thousands of other
victims of Central Africas version of ethnic cleansing were
disposed.
Ruhuna was on his way back to Gitega from making a parish visit.
He routinely traveled without an armed escort, though he had been warned
repeatedly that such conduct might cost his life. Once, local sources say, a
band of thugs pounced on Ruhuna and announced their intention to kill him. The
archbishop calmly asked for a moment to make his peace with God. The act so
impressed the bandits that they let him go free.
Ruhuna was a Tutsi, and several members of his family had been
killed in a previous wave of Hutu-led violence in 1993. But Ruhuna never
flinched from condemning the excesses of the Tutsi-dominated military in
Burundi. At a memorial for Tutsi victims of a massacre in July 1995, he said:
Let me warn the killers and those who sent them -- your crimes are the
shame of humanity. And let me say to those who seek vengeance, if you too
become a killer, God will curse you just as surely as he curses the
others.
At that memorial service, Ruhuna was actually booed by his fellow
Tutsis when he warned that extremists were at work on both sides,
and demanded that the violence come to an end.
When news of Ruhunas death reached Rome, John Paul II
referred to the slain archbishop as a generous minister of God. At
Ruhunas funeral, the popes representative, Cardinal Josef Tomko,
called the slaying a torment for the consciences of everyone. ... My
voice joins that of your bishops, who recently have still had the courage to
appeal to reason and peace by condemning hatred and fratricidal
destruction.
Ruhunas death, precisely because he was a high-ranking
church official, made international headlines. With a daily toll of death in
the hundreds, if not thousands, it was inevitable, however, that many other
acts of martyrdom, equally stirring in their own way, would pass largely
unnoticed by the wider world.
Witness to Gods love
One such incident took place in Buta, in the southern Burundian
diocese of Bururi, on April 30, 1997. That night a band of armed men entered
the minor seminary in Buta, which housed seminarians in their high school
years, and demanded that the young men separate into groups of Hutus and
Tutsis. The obvious purpose was to execute the members of one of the groups and
conscript the other, though in the heat of the moment it was not clear which
group was targeted for death.
A seminarian who survived the incident later described what
happened.
There were very many of them, a hundred it seemed to me.
They entered our dormitory, the one of the three classes of the senior years,
and they shot in the air four times to wake us up.
Immediately they
began to threaten us, and moving between the beds they ordered us to separate,
Hutus on one side and Tutsis on the other. They were armed to the teeth:
rifles, grenades, pistols, and knives. But we stayed together as a group.
Then their leader lost patience and gave the order:
Shoot these idiots who wont separate. They fired the first
shots at the ones under the beds. As we lay in our blood, we prayed and begged
pardon for those who were killing us. I heard the voices of my companions who
were saying, Father, forgive them, for they do not know what they are
doing. Deep within, I uttered the same words and offered my life into
Gods hands.
This testimony was presented by Jolique Rusimbamigera during John
Pauls May 7, 2000, liturgy for the new martyrs. The pope said the
seminarians bravely bore courageous witness to Gods love.
One of the revolutions in the Catholic approach to missionary work
after the Second Vatican Council (1962-65) is a radically broadened definition
of what counts as evangelization. In place of a strictly
mathematical approach to evaluating the success of a mission -- how many
baptisms, how many confirmations, how many vocations -- many religious
communities who send members abroad have adopted other, more elusive measures,
such as presence, fidelity, and witness.
At bottom, the idea is that it is perhaps less important to change
someones outward religious affiliation than to change hearts -- or,
perhaps better put, that the former is meaningless without the latter.
This approach to mission was vividly lived in Kenya for 36 years
by Mill Hill Fr. John Anthony Kaiser, an American who was killed by a shotgun
blast to the head on Aug. 24, 2000. His body was found under a couple of acacia
trees, his beat-up pick-up truck in a ditch nearby. He was 68.
Kaiser had lived and worked for the last five years of his life in
a remote rural village that neighbors the countrys world famous Masai
Mara Game Reserve, close to the Tanzanian border. He saw his mission not just
as building parishes and schools, though he did that with a vengeance, but also
as speaking out when vulnerable people were threatened by the powerful. Over
the years, his sharp tongue earned him some powerful enemies.
Kenya, though spared the waves of genocide that have rolled
through some other African nations in recent years, was characterized during
the 1990s by a continual state of low-intensity violence. Some was generated by
ethnic clashes, some by extra-judicial killings by police and military
officials trying to wipe out resistance to President Daniel arap Moi.
After nine years as head of a single-party state, Moi allegedly
returned multi-party democracy to Kenya in 1991. In fact, however, Moi and his
KANU party continue to dominate the political system. Moi also commands the
military services, controls the security, university, civil service and
judiciary and the provincial, district and local governance systems. Human
rights groups blame Moi for at-times brutal repression of dissent.
Some government sources have suggested that Kaisers death
was actually a suicide, a theory Catholic officials in Kenya have dismissed.
Episcopal conference chair Bishop John Njue told NCR that the church
will continue demanding to know who killed Kaiser and the motive behind the
act.
Kaiser had long denounced the tendency to violence among all the
ethnic groups in Kenya, and had likewise issued denunciations over the years of
the corruption and repression he associated with the government. He sparred
with Moi over issues of land rights and property distribution.
Some observers have suggested that Kaiser was killed because of
his advocacy on behalf of young Masai girls raped by male elders, including
prominent political figures. He had testified in private against a prominent
member of Mois cabinet, and was said to be compiling dossiers on three
more cases of rape committed by well-known public figures.
Kaiser had also come into the limelight in 1998, testifying before
a body called the Akiwumi Commission about tribal clashes in Kenya, identifying
several cabinet members and provincial administrators of promoting the
violence. He angered the powerful tourism, trade and industry minister,
Nicholas Biwott, and his counterpart in the Office of the President, William
ole Ntimama, for example, when he accused them of sending youths to Israel for
commando training.
In the wake of this activity, Kaiser had been told his work permit
in Kenya would not be renewed, and he went into hiding for a time to avoid
expulsion. Public pressure eventually forced the permit to be renewed, a move
that ironically brought Kaiser back into the open and led to his death.
Yet those who knew him say Kaisers heroism was not just a
matter of occasional prophetic outbursts. It was also the less dramatic stuff
of daily fidelity. Writing in America magazine in October, Dominican
missionary Fr. L. Martin Martiny said this:
The deeper story of Father Kaiser is about his 36-plus years
of almost anonymous toiling on behalf of his flock in rural areas of Kenya. The
Father Kaisers of the world leave home and family as young men and spend their
lives building churches, tending to the sick, burying the dead, bringing Mass
and the sacraments to remote communities.
Sometimes they face local hostility; most often they
confront the day-in, day-out fatigue and frustration of mechanical failures, no
electricity, transportation woes and sickness from diseases like malaria,
cholera and tuberculosis.
They live their lives, serve their flocks and in many cases
die in their adopted land. Some retire and return to their native soil for
their remaining years. Whichever the case, they are remembered for awhile by
the people they served, but forever in the mind of God.
The e-mail address for John L. Allen Jr. is
jallen@natcath.org.
National Catholic Reporter, February 23,
2001
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