Tom Ndahiro
Africa-Press – Rwanda. It is a disturbing irony that one of the most celebrated ecclesiastical documents of the 20th century, the Pastoral Constitution on the Church in the Modern World or Gaudium et Spes (1965), would, in its Section 27—3rd paragraph, display a breathtaking moral and philosophical confusion regarding the gravest of crimes.
Drafted in the aftermath of the Holocaust, at a moment when the world had seen the abyss of human cruelty, the document manages—almost incomprehensibly—to place genocide on the same moral shelf as abortion, euthanasia, and even prostitution.
This is not purely a failure of language or theology; it is a profound ethical miscarriage that reveals the drafters’ lack of comprehension of what genocide is and what it means in the moral order of crimes against humanity.
The text reads: “…whatever is opposed to life itself, such as any type of murder, genocide, abortion, euthanasia or willful self-destruction, whatever violates the integrity of the human person, such as mutilation, torments inflicted on body or mind, attempts to coerce the will itself; whatever insults human dignity, such as subhuman living conditions, arbitrary imprisonment, deportation, slavery, prostitution, the selling of women and children; as well as disgraceful working conditions, where men are treated as mere tools for profit, rather than as free and responsible persons; all these things and others of their like are infamies indeed..”
On first glance, this statement may appear as a righteous condemnation of evil. But closer examination reveals a disturbing flattening of moral categories, one thick soup that is neither philosophically rigorous nor theologically sound.
Mocking God’s creation
To equate genocide—the intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial, or religious group—with other morally controversial or even deplorable acts is not only misleading; it is ethically and morally outlandish.
Let us start with the obvious: genocide is not merely another form of murder. It is a crime of intention, scale, and ideology. Genocide is not just about taking life; it is about eliminating identity, erasing memory, and destroying the very fabric of a people. It is the theological equivalent of attempting to un-create what God has created.
The crime of Genocide, to believers in Judeo-Christianity, mocks the Imago Dei—the image of God in humanity—not just by destroying individuals, but by asserting that an entire group is unworthy of existence. To place this crime in a generic list that includes prostitution, poor working conditions or even euthanasia is to reveal a dreadful lack of discernment, a moral and intellectual blindness to the specific evil that genocide represents.
To better understand the obscenity of this conflation—consider this: red streets in Amsterdam or Geneva or Hamburg—and a gas chamber are both considered signs of human depravity, but only one was designed to erase the existence of a people. One is a symptom of moral degradation; the other is an instrument of ideological annihilation.
By mentioning both in the same breath, the drafters of Gaudium et Spes have not clarified but desecrated the very language of evil. One traffics in exploitation; the other manufactures mass death. One destroys dignity; the other obliterates existence.
Thoughtfully, Gaudium et Spes Sect. 27 collapses under the weight of its own moral relativism. It purports to condemn all violations of human dignity, but in doing so, it undermines its capacity to speak meaningfully about the most radical of such violations.
The list format employed—in which genocide is nestled neatly between abortion and self-destruction, and later equated with arbitrary imprisonment and subhuman living conditions—reads like a bureaucratic inventory of social sins rather than a serious theological reckoning with evil. This moral laundry list is not just inadequate; it is more offensive.
Where is the moral gradation? Where is the recognition that certain crimes are categorically worse than others, not only in effect but in essence? The drafters appear either unwilling or unable to acknowledge that there is a hierarchy of moral evils.
Even secular law recognizes degrees of crime—from petty theft to mass murder. But somehow, in Gaudium et Spes, the Church’s magisterial voice becomes tone-deaf, incapable of differentiating between the systemic, ideologically motivated extermination of a people and, say, “disgraceful working conditions.”
To be sure, the Catholic Church has long spoken against abortion and euthanasia, and many will affirm the sanctity of life in all its stages. But the moral language appropriate to the tragedy of abortion as they believe cannot, and must not, be applied to genocide.
The former, in Church teaching, may be seen as a grave sin against individual life, but genocide is a sin against collective existence. The former is personal, the latter is political, ideological, and cosmic in its implications. One attacks a life; the other attempts to erase a people.
One cannot forget the tragic irony that a Catholic priest, Athanase Seromba, did not merely bless weapons or incite violence during the 1994 Genocide Against the Tutsi in Rwanda—he actively participated in it. He ordered the demolition of a church filled with 2,000 Tutsi civilians seeking sanctuary.
Seromba, like other genocidaires—did not see the Tutsi as people created in God’s image but as a group that had to be extinguished. When Gaudium et Spes lists genocide alongside prostitution, does it do justice to Seromba’s monstrous act? Or does it subtly suggest that he is no worse than a woman forced into sex work to survive? That is the moral absurdity and cruelty at the heart of this paragraph.
What makes the treatment in Sect. 27 so particularly infuriating is that it was written in the historical shadow of Auschwitz, Treblinka, Nyarubuye, Murambi, and countless other sites of mass slaughter. The ink had barely dried on the 1948 Genocide Convention.
The world had heard the testimonies of survivors. The evidence of gas chambers, killing fields, and machete-wielding militias was known. And yet, the Church’s highest pastoral voice at the time could not rise to meet the moral weight of the moment.
Instead, it dodged to an undistinguishable catalogue of woes, as if genocide were just another social ill, like bad housing or child trafficking. This is not moral teaching. It is moral malpractice.
The Genocide Convention preamble states with moral clarity: “Genocide is a crime under international law, contrary to the spirit and aims of the United Nations and condemned by the civilized world.”
It is, as Raphael Lemkin who coined the term argued, the “crime of crimes”—one that aims to destroy not just people but culture, language, and memory. For Lemkin, genocide was a spiritual and moral catastrophe that demanded specific, unambiguous naming. To fail to do so, as Gaudium et Spes does, is to betray that clarity.
Insensitive drafters
One cannot help but ask: what were the drafters thinking? Did they truly understand the theological implications of what they were saying? Were they so fixated on issuing a comprehensive denunciation of all evil that they forgot that not all evils are equal?
Or worse, did they believe that lumping all sins together would somehow elevate their condemnation of lesser evils by association? If so, the result is not elevation, but defilement. When genocide is mentioned in the same breath as prostitution, it is not prostitution that is scandalized—it is genocide that is diminished.
After all, genocide is an international crime whereas prostitution is legal and regulated in some countries.
Theologically, this reductionism is appalling. For real believers, genocide is not merely an affront to human dignity; it is a blasphemy against the Creator, a direct rebellion against divine providence. To attempt to extinguish a people is to claim divine prerogative—to decide who deserves to exist.
The crime is committed to usurp God’s role as Creator and Judge. Genocide says, “These people should not have been made.” What greater insult could there be to the sovereignty of God? That the Church would mention this crime in a list alongside “selling of women and children” and “arbitrary imprisonment” shows that its theological imagination, at least in this passage, failed appallingly.
German philosopher Karl Jaspers, in The Question of German Guilt, warned that moral failure begins with the refusal to call evil by its proper name. “That which has happened is a warning. To forget it is guilt. To make light of it is a crime.”
The drafters of Gaudium et Spes did not forget genocide—but in making light of it by moral equivalence, they committed a subtle crime of theology: the crime of concealing evil.
This is not to say that prostitution or child trafficking are minor matters. They are grave moral sins. But they do not seek to annihilate a people. They do not engineer bureaucratic structures of death. They do not create propaganda machines to dehumanize whole populations. They do not enlist the machinery of the state, the law, the Church, and the academy to justify mass slaughter.
Genocide is sui generis. And the refusal to treat it as such is, in itself, a kind of complicity in its denial.
This passage of Gaudium et Spes also betrays a troubling clerical detachment. One imagines robed theologians in ivory towers debating moral principles, utterly removed from the blood and cries of victims.
There is a sterility here, a moral antiseptic that wipes away the horror of genocide and replaces it with abstract condemnations. This is not the voice of shepherds who smell like their sheep; it is the voice of administrators who file evils into tidy folders. What is needed is prophetic indignation, not bureaucratic classification.
The Catholic Church must do better. Its moral voice matters precisely because it is supposed to transcend political convenience and speak eternal truths. But when that voice fails to distinguish the Genocide from prostitution, it ceases to be prophetic and becomes ordinary. And banality, as Hannah Arendt reminded us, is the handmaiden of evil.
In light of this, a revision of Gaudium et Spes is not only warranted—it is urgently needed. The Church must find the courage to say what should have been said in 1965: that genocide is a unique moral abomination, a “supreme dishonor to the Creator” not just in general, but in a category of its own.
Until that is done, this part of Sect. 27 remains a monument not to moral clarity, but to confusion, blindness, and a deeply unsettling trivialization of one of the greatest evils in human history.
What makes this negligence all the more appalling—indeed, criminal in its own right—is that the drafters of Gaudium et Spes did not operate in a moral vacuum. They had access to information, to reports, to prophetic voices screaming into the post-Holocaust world that evil had not been buried in the rubble of Berlin but was alive and machete-sharp in the hills of Rwanda.
In early 1964, Vatican Radio itself, not known for exaggeration, joined reputable international media outlets in declaring that a genocide had taken place against the Tutsi. Bertrand Russell, no friend of theological drama, called it the first genocide since the Holocaust.
And yet, in a display of moral acrobatics so spectacular it deserves a cathedral of its own, the drafters of Gaudium et Spes—a year later—reduced that atrocity to a comma in a sentence, nestled comfortably between euthanasia and prostitution.
Unless, of course, they were taking their cues from men like Bishop André Perraudin, the Swiss ecclesiastic whose pastoral letters were practically blueprints for genocidal ideology in Rwanda. Perraudin, who criticized Vatican Radio for its “misleading” reference to genocide, may as well have written the footnotes to sect. 27 himself.
The omission is not just ignorance—it is complicity dressed in cassocks. It is the laundering of bloodstained history through the holy water of euphemism. It is a cover-up cloaked in conciliar Latin.
Survivors’ vigilance and a call to revise the document
To survivors of genocide, this is not merely a doctrinal oversight. It is a moral knife twisted into wounds still bleeding. Imagine a mother who saw her children hacked to death being told that their suffering is equivalent to a worker denied lunch breaks.
Imagine a priest blessing a bulldozer to flatten a church filled with Tutsi refugees—then imagine Church theologians in Rome deciding that genocide and brothels belong in the same theological paragraph. It is not just insensitive—it is diabolical. It is the sort of error that only occurs when theologians choose convenience over conscience, neutrality over truth, and diplomacy over decency.
As a survivor, I cannot ignore this grotesque lacuna. It is not a scholarly oversight to be debated in symposia; it is a stain on the Church’s soul. It is the institutionalization of silence. And when silence meets atrocity, it does not become wisdom—it becomes collaboration.
Until this part of the Encyclical is not merely revisited but publicly repented of, the Church’s voice on human dignity will continue to ring hollow to those who know what it means to be marked for extinction while heaven looked away—or worse, nodded politely and turned the page.
For a document that sought to engage the modern world with new openness and urgency, this failure is more than a theological misstep. It is a scandal. And until it is corrected, it will remain an infamy indeed—one committed not against life, but against truth itself.
How very benevolent of the drafters of Gaudium et Spes to elevate the prostitute, the sweatshop manager, the arbitrary jailer, and the genocidaire to equal standing before the tribunal of Catholic moral indignation.
One can only imagine the great cosmic courtroom where the gas chamber engineer sits shoulder-to-shoulder with the corrupt factory owner, both equally chastised for “poisoning human society.” This is moral democracy at its most grotesque.
And what a profound relief it must be to genocidaires everywhere—Hitler, Himmler, Bagosora, Bemeriki—to know that their crimes are not, in the eyes of this ecclesial work of genius, more horrifying than the evils of disgraceful working conditions or the sale of children.
They were, after all, just another manifestation of humanity’s broad spectrum of bad behavior. Perhaps they might even take solace in imagining their crimes shelved neatly between euthanasia and willful self-destruction in some celestial filing cabinet.
This isn’t theology. This is mockery masked as pastoral care. This isn’t moral clarity. It’s clerical indifference draped in the robes of universality.
If there were ever a passage that deserved to be buried in the deepest vault of ecclesiastical embarrassment, paragraph three of section 27 is it. It does not reproach malevolence. It gives it diplomatic equivalence. And that, dear reader, is not just scandalous—it’s sacred comedy at its worst.
Source: The New Times
For More News And Analysis About Rwanda Follow Africa-Press
