The Rev. Ubald Rugirangoga was counseling inmates in a Rwandan prison in the wake of the country’s 1994 genocide when he was forced to truly practice what he was preaching.
His mother, brother, and around 70 members of his extended family had been killed in the slaughter that claimed more than 800,000 lives, mostly minority Tutsis, over 100 days, at the hands of Hutu extremists.
Speaking mostly through an interpreter Tuesday to the Worcester County Bar Association, the priest said the man who killed his mother happened to be in the prison, but he didn’t know who he was. He said the man sought him out and explained what he had done. He asked Rev. Rugirangoga for forgiveness.
“It was difficult,” he said. “I had preached to forgive, and I had to practice what I was preaching, so I had to search deep down in my heart. And I went up to him and I told him, I forgive you.”
Even though he forgave him, the man who killed his mother still had his doubts. To further prove his forgiveness, Rev. Rugirangoga reached out to the man’s children, who were left without parents after the man’s wife died. Rev. Rugirangoga said that after forgiving the man, all the pain and anger just left.
“I was free,” he said.
Speaking in the jury pool room at the Trial Court building on Main Street, Rev. Rugirangoga told another story of forgiveness, in which a Tutsi woman took in the daughter of a girl, even though the girl’s Hutu father murdered most of her family. The two families had been neighbors, Rev. Rugirangoga said. The woman’s surviving son at first didn’t understand why the woman would take in the daughter of the man who made her a widow, but later he came around. And in a surprising twist, he ended up marrying the girl years later.
Rev. Rugirangoga has been running schools in Rwanda where he mixes children of victims of the genocide and children of perpetrators of the genocide.
He said it’s important to start early with children. He said the government has used his schools as a model.
“I try to bring them together,” he said. “Hopefully in the future, with the history in our country, this will not happen again because I have to stand with these children.”
He said it is a burden to carry anger around, and said if you can’t forgive, you are slowly dying inside.
“If you carry anger around, you can even get sick, not knowing why,” he said. “It can lead to depression.”
Asked a question about developed countries’ inaction during the genocide, Rev. Rugirangoga, who fled Rwanda by foot during the genocide but later returned, said he was not angry.
“At the time of the genocide we were in survival mode, we couldn’t hear what was going on, who was helping or not,” he said.
“But you have also, the U.S. and other countries that have shown support with the help they’ve offered us. If we’re forgiving the killers, then we need to forgive the grudge that nobody helped us.”
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