From Ft. Worth-
The teenagers gathered quietly, not sure what to expect of their African guest.
"My niece was killed the very day she left my house," the Right Rev. John Rucyahana, a visiting Anglican bishop from Rwanda, said at a private school in Fort Worth.
"She was raped. Her neck was cut."
The Southwest Christian School teens stared in silence.
Then Rucyahana told how, even at the height of the slaughter of 800,000 people in the 1994 Rwandan genocide, he turned to words spoken 2,000 years ago from the cross.
"Father, forgive them."
Rwanda’s ongoing forgiveness and reconciliation have become the centerpiece of a 2008 theater documentary, As We Forgive, and a public radio series, Against the Odds.
As one of nine bishops in Rwanda, Rucyahana, 63, has led not only his church’s but also his nation’s forgiveness.
He has led Tutsi orphans to forgive the Hutus who slaughtered their parents, and in turn led tens of thousands of Hutus to ask forgiveness.
He founded a school for the orphans left by the genocide and came to Texas on Wednesday on a fundraising tour, hoping to raise $1.6 million to start a university.
He is also a controversial figure in the divided U.S. Episcopal Church; he tried to help an Arkansas congregation align with conservative Anglicans over what he called U.S. teachings that "disgrace the Gospel."
But his Fort Worth visit was less about politics and more about America and Rwanda.
He talked about the healing nature of President Bill Clinton’s 1998 apology for not intervening in the slaughter.
He said Rwandans felt abandoned as "just humans. . . . There is no oil. No diamonds. So the decision was, let it go. Is that moral?"
More here-
http://www.star-telegram.com/242/story/1689745.html
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