Two other bloggers, Simeon in the Suburbs and Salty Vicar have noted that a Rwandan Anglican bishop who was visiting St Louis, Missouri recently compared the actions of the ECUSA GC 2003 to the 1994 Rwandan genocide. The original St Louis Post-Dispatch article Rwandan bishop’s visit here underscores division reports that:
The Right Rev. Josias Sendegeya, Anglican bishop of Kibungo, Rwanda, and his wife, Dorothee, were in neighboring Burundi during the genocide that took place in their country 10 years ago. Dorothee’s mother and father, brother, sister and eight nephews and nieces were all murdered by Hutu extremists.
Sendegeya draws a parallel between the atrocities committed in Rwanda in 1994 and what happened to the Episcopal Church USA in 2003, when American bishops consecrated an openly gay man as bishop of New Hampshire. The move was seen as a repudiation to more conservative elements of the global Anglican church who oppose the consecration of homosexuals, and it especially offended Anglican bishops in Africa.
“The Rwandan people know what it is to suffer,” said Sendegeya, speaking in French through a translator on a recent trip to St. Louis. “We experienced genocide and the horror that no one in the world came to help us. What has happened in the Episcopal church feels like a genocide, too. But it is spiritual rather than physical.”
Sendegeya believes that the Anglican diocese of Rwanda has come to the rescue of some conservative Episcopal communities in the United States through one of its arms, called The Anglican Mission in America. In 2000 the Rwandan church began establishing footholds in the United States through its mission by usurping the authority of the local American bishop who was typically considered unsatisfactorily liberal by some conservative congregations in his diocese.
Sendegeya is the provincial secretary of the Rwandan church and was in the U.S. for an Anglican Mission in America conference in South Carolina. He then traveled to Memphis and St. Louis to visit individual churches that are based in the United States but are under the authority of his country’s church.
Note that it particularly hypocritical of the Anglican Church in Rwanda to make this, or any, comparison to genocide after their complicity in the genocide in their own country.
A great many news reports and other resources are compiled in the report Anglican Complicity in the Genocide in Rwanda and Lessons for the Anglican Communion Today at: http://www.rci.rutgers.edu/~lcrew/dojustice/j245.html
James Alison once remarked to a group of Gay Catholics that of course the Catholic Church felt like it was Germany, 1933 with the Gay Issue. Alison suggested that they just continue to ask if such a comparison was true.
I mean, its always good to save people, but does the bishop understand that these churches aren’t being saved from anything, but merely hiding from other Christians?
_No comment_ same goes for +Peter Akinola’s “Poverty is not an issue, human suffering is not an issue”).
The ‘phobes, man: give ’em enough microphone cord, and they’ll . . .
I commend to you the Rev’d. Susan Russell’s posting on Every Voice Network, titled “A California Yankee in King Arthur’s Communion.” She is recently returned from meeting with Canon Gregory Cameron and other inclusion minded Anglicans, by Canon Cameron’s invitation to include the voice of gay and lesbian Anglican Christians in the responses to the Windsor Report soon to be considered by the primates. I apologize for not knowing how to establish a link to that web site or that posting.
Wow…one would like to think that genocide is free from belittlement. I guess not. Politics makes fellows strange, bed or no bed.