Today Rwanda is a much different place thanks, in part, to this man””Anglican Bishop John Rucyahana
Bishop JOHN RUCYAHANA (Chairman, Prison Fellowship Rwanda): People are smiling because they have the hope, but the wounds and the healing is a process that we’ll continue to engage deliberately to tell people that they just can’t cover it up. We need to be able to unearth it and deal with it head on.
[LUCKY] SEVERSON: That’s what the bishop has been preaching from the pulpit of his beautiful church in northern Rwanda since the killing stopped: deal with it head on. And it was personal for him. How could it not be after so many members of his extended family were murdered, including his niece?
Bishop RUCYAHANA: I have forgiven those who killed my niece, and they peeled off the flesh off her arms to the wrist, and they left bare bones, and they gang-raped her, and I forgive them because forgiving is not only benefiting the criminal, it benefits me.
This raises a question that often came up among Holocaust survivors: have they the right to forgive? Has the bishop the right to forgive? Or does this belong only to his niece? What can it mean that he forgives the perpetrators?
Isn’t the forgiveness only insofar as it concerns their own hurt, anger and suffering, at least as much for their own heart’s ease as for those who killed (which is not to say that offering it wouldn’t be difficult).
For that matter, it can be offered even if (as the American pastor’s daughter comments later) some of the professions of repentance are insincere. Absolute forgiveness – a different matter entirely – is reserved for the Creator.