Eucharist offers alternative to hatred, killing – Burundian

- CNS photo/Moussa Faddoul, sj, Catholic Times Marguerite Barankitse speaks June 21.

By LAURA IERACI
Catholic Times Montreal
Quebec City

Marguerite Barankitse remembers the exact day, even the exact moment, when her vocation came to life. It was Oct. 24, 1993, and she was staring at the face of death.

It was near the start of Burundi's 12-year civil war, fueled by deep-seated hatred between the Hutu and Tutsi tribes in her country.

Confronted by Tutsi rebels in her native Burundi to turn over dozens of Hutu people she had been harbouring in the diocesan offices where she worked, Barankitse refused. A Tutsi herself, Barankitse knew that if she turned over the Hutus they would be killed.

"I am a Christian before I am a Tutsi," she defiantly told the rebels.

Infuriated, the rebels bound her and set the offices ablaze. Then they started executing the Hutu people. Seventy-two people died.

But Barankitse managed to free herself and escaped with 25 children from the burning building.

She took her sorrow to God and prayed: "Lord, teach me from now on how to carry that message of love to my brothers and sisters in Burundi who have accepted to hate each other because of their ethnic origins and who have forgotten that their origins are found in the most noble family, the family of the children of God."

The following day she fled the city with the children. They lived on her family's land. One year later the local bishop offered her a former school building, where she established Maison Shalom, Shalom House, to assist child victims of war. Shalom is the Hebrew word for peace with justice.

"I built Shalom House where I have put Hutu and Tutsi and Congolese together, and I told the children your ethnic origin is shalom," she told 10,000 pilgrims at the Eucharistic Congress June 22.

Saying she was born in a country "where people are not afraid to kill," Barankitse described her work as being grounded in the Eucharist.

"I am witnessing to the Eucharist in the world in which eucharistic values do not exist," she said.

She said bishops who visited Shalom House in its early years either had questions about her spirituality or urged her to found a religious order.

"Some bishops thought I was crazy, but now it is the bishops who are inviting me to be crazy with all of you," she said to a laughing crowd.

"Will we have the audacity to be crazy for the Eucharist?" she asked the congress pilgrims. "We need to stop writing and describing the Eucharist. The Eucharist is not found in writings, in pastoral letters, in the convents. We are the Eucharist.

"We must take the Eucharist into the marketplace. Let us have the audacity to open up to our families, to go out to others," she said before walking off the stage singing God's praise.

At a press conference, Barankitse said children at Shalom House learn to be messengers of reconciliation.

Shalom House is not an institution, she said. Rather, it is a network of villages that helps children of war establish their own homes and livelihoods. Since it opened, Shalom House and two other centres have helped 50,000 children, she said.

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