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TRANSCRIPT

Welcome to Popeular History, a library of Catholic knowledge and insights.

Check out the show notes for sources, further reading, and a transcript.

Today we're discussing another current Cardinal of the Catholic Church, one of the 120 or so people who will choose the next Pope when the time comes.

Antoine KAMBANDA was born on November 10, 1958 in Nyamata, Rwanda, which is today part of the country's Eastern Province. Rwanda has somewhat famously had ethnic tensions between two out of three of their main tribes, the Hutu and the Tutsi. Antoine and his family were Tutsi, and, well, content warning, because today's episode includes a genocide.

Antoine studied internationally right from the start, doing primary schooling in neighboring Burundi and Uganda, followed by secondary school in somewhat more distant Kenya. His seminary training took place back in Rwanda, and in 1990 he was ordained a priest for the Archdiocese of Kigali, Kigali being Rwanda's Capital. He was actually personally ordained by Pope Saint John Paul II during his 1990 visit to Rwanda.

Fortunately for him Father Kambanda decided to pursue further studies and so left for the Alphonsian Academy in Rome in 1993, I say fortunately because while he was studying abroad his parents and five of his six siblings were killed during the 1994 Rwandan Genocide during which half a million people were butchered and hundreds of thousands more were raped, predominately Tutsi but also a fair number of Hutu and Twa who were less than enthusiastic about joining the murderous Hutu militias. And those are the more conservative estimates, the 2003 Constitution of Rwanda lists the death toll at over a million.

Let's just take a moment to pray, you can do reverent silence if that's your thing but my wife and I are going to say a quick Hail Mary.

In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, amen.

***Hail Mary, full of grace, the Lord is with thee. Blessed art thou among women, and blessed is the fruit of thy womb, Jesus.

Holy Mary, Mother of God, pray for us sinners, now and at the hour of our death. Amen.***

In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, amen.

For what it's worth I didn't plan for this to be a rough stretch, as a reminder I'm doing these cardinals in age order. Tomorrow's episode doesn't have a death toll.

As weird as it feels to get back to a normal narrative after that, get back we should, and Father Kambanda got back to things as well, obtaining a doctorate in moral theology in 1999 and taking on teaching at a minor seminary while also serving as the director of Caritas for the diocese. Caritas, a Latin term most often translated as “charity” but more strongly conveying the sense of selfless love, is an international confederation of organizations that effectively serves as the Catholic Church's in-house clearinghouse for charity initiatives, if I'm allowed to put it that way. Catholic Relief Services, for example, is one of the founding members of Caritas Internationalis, with 0 points going to anyone who can correctly guess what internationalis means.

In 2005, Father Kambanda began the first of two seminary rectorships, and we'll jump ahead to 2013, that's when he was elected bishop of Kibunga.

As a bishop, he joined his brothers in a difficult admission: The Catholic Church had been part of the genocide. Sure, the one Catholic Bishop who was formally charged with war crimes had been cleared, but he had also refused to shelter those who had sought refuge, and indeed many of the massacre sites were the churches themselves, including in the case of Father Athanase Seromba–and I mean seriously, fast forward 15 seconds if you need to–the hutu priest who ordered his church bulldozed when it was housing thousands of refugees, personally showing the driver the weakest points of the church, and by some accounts helping massacre remaining survivors found in the rubble.

In case you're speed listening or tuned out for a minute, just as a reminder I am not currently talking about our cardinal of the day, a Tutsi who was studying in Rome at the time of the genocide and whose family was by and large slaughtered. But I don't want to gloss over the Church's involvement in the genocide–an involvement which our Cardinal acknowledges as we will see. So we're looking at the tough cases, because I hope to God none of them are ever made Cardinals or we'd talk about them then.

Father Seromba was found guilty of genocide and originally sentenced to 15 years. He appealed to the tribunal, which found that oh yes, they had indeed failed to carry out justice in his case, upgrading his sentence to life imprisonment upon further review.

There's more to say about the Seromba case, especially how he was hidden by church authorities after fleeing, and I'll say more about it if Cardinal Kambanda makes it to the next round, but for today I want to get back to Kambanda, because he isn't even a Cardinal yet in our narrative.

In 2016, Bishop Kambanda cosigned a major statement from the Rwandan Bishop's Conference apologizing for the complicity of the Rwandan Catholic Church as an institution in the genocide, stating, quote:

“Forgive us for the crime of hate in the country to the extent of also hating our colleagues because of their ethnicity. We didn't show that we are one family but instead killed each other.” End quote

The statement, which was read in parishes across the country, was generally well received, though of course there are wounds that words cannot heal and there were understandable questions about why it took 22 years for such a statement to be made. A later statement asking for some clemency for elderly and infirm convicted perpetrators was less well received, though honestly pretty on-brand for the Catholic Church in terms of mercy. By that time, Bishop Kambanda was Archbishop Kambanda, having been transferred to Rwanda's principle see of Kigali.

In 2020, Pope Francis made Archbishop Kambanda Rwanda's first Cardinal, also naming him a member of the Congregation for the Evangelization of Peoples later that year. The next year, Pope Francis also added him to the Congregation for Catholic Education, and the year after that, 2022, he became head of the Rwandan Bishops’ Conference for a three-year term. More recently, in February of 2023, he was added to the Dicastery for Culture and Education. So, he's definitely not sitting around.

Antoine Kambanda is eligible to participate in future conclaves until he turns 80 in 2038.

Today's episode is part of Cardinal Numbers,

and there will be more Cardinal Numbers next week. Thank you for listening; God bless you all!

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