Faith, Hope And Heroes

National Catholic Reporter, Feb 23, 2001 by John L. Jr. Allen

`There are things that can be seen only with eyes that have cried.'

As Rwandan troops poured into the eastern part of what was then Zaire n 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 country's 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 region's 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 Munzihirwa's 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 Munzihirwa's 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 continent's 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 king's 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 O'Reilly. "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 troth is I would have been dead because I didn't want to give up the keys. This guy couldn't have cared less if I was an Anglican priest or a Buddhist monk or whatever."