Journal of Global Catholicism — Enculturation, Inculturation, and Agency — Vol 6 Iss 1

Journal of

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GLOBAL CATHOLICISM FALL 2021

ENCULTURATION, INCULTURATION, and AGENCY Burundi, Argentina, and the Philippines

ARTICLES • Mathew N. Schmalz / Editor’s Introduction • Jodi Mikalachki / Fraternity, Martyrdom and Peace in Burundi:The Forty Servants of God of Buta • Gustavo Morello, SJ / Catholicism in Context: Religious Practice in Latin America • Antonio D. Sison / Manila’s Black Nazarene and the Reign of Bathala

Cover image by Arnulfo Fortunado

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M AT H E W N . S C H M A L Z

Enculturation, Inculturation, and Agency: Burundi, Argentina, and the Philippines

Mathew N. Schmalz is Founding Editor of the Journal of Global Catholicism and Professor of Religious Studies at the College of the Holy Cross. He received his BA from Amherst College and his PhD in the history of religions from the University of Chicago. He has published more than fifty articles and essays that engage global Catholicism (particularly in South Asia), Catholic theology and spirituality, Mormonism, and The Watchtower movement. He is co-editor of Engaging South Asian Religions: Boundaries, Appropriations, and Resistances (SUNY, 2012, with Peter Gottschalk) and author of Mercy Matters: Opening Yourself to the Life Changing Gift (OSV, 2016). Schmalz has also written more than one hundred opinion pieces that have appeared in On Faith, Crux, The Huffington Post and in the print editions of The Washington Post, Commonweal Magazine, US Catholic, The National Catholic Reporter, the Providence Journal, and the Telegram & Gazette.

He has provided expert commentary to USA Today, The New York Times, ABC's Good Morning America, NPR, CNBC, Hardball with Chris Matthews, and U.S. News & World Report, among others.

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T

he three articles in this edition were originally written independently and

not as part of an issue focused on a particular theme or geographic space.

Nonetheless, together they present fascinating vignettes into different ways

Catholics and Catholicism work in and through individual and collective agency and enculturated forms of religiosity.

The first article is Jodi Mikalachki’s ethnographic study of the story of Burundi’s

Buta martyrs. Incorporating accounts of survivors into her discussion, Mikalachki

describes how Tutsi and Hutu seminarians stood with each other during a savage attack on the minor seminary at which they were studying. By the end of the

attack, forty students had been killed and twenty-six seriously wounded. Within days, the murdered Buta seminarians were being called “martyrs” who had achieved

“a poignant victory of fraternal love over the ethnic manipulation of the civil war.”

Mikalachki argues that enculturated African Catholic visions of solidarity, when

combined with the heroic agency of the young seminarians, presented a vision of “non-violent masculinity” that bore important witness in a country torn by ethnic strife.

The second article, written by Gustavo Morello, SJ, interrogates conventional

understandings of Catholic identity. Morello introduces us to Norma, a resident of Córdoba, Argentina, who meaningfully employs a wide range of religious sym-

bols and practices from a variety of traditions, while self-identifying as a Catholic.

Morello uses Norma’s example to reflect more broadly beyond conventional un-

derstandings of religious identity and modernity as construals that often do not provide enough nuance to understand the agency and complexity of individuals such as Norma.

The third article, authored by Antonio Sison, focuses on the Quiapo Black

Nazarene of the Philippines. Sison argues that the dynamics of devotion to the

Quiapo Black Nazarene are deeply linked to “the hidden regions of the Filipi-

no psyche where the vanquished religious beliefs of a primal religion have beaten all odds.” In his discussion, Sison himself journeys to Quiapo and reflects upon the Filipino concept of “pagdama” or “felt-experience.” He also most interestingly

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Editor’s Introduction

—and for some provocatively—connects devotion to the Black Nazarene to indigenous Filipino religion, particularly to belief in the enchantment of the world under the influence of the Godhead Bathala. It is not a case of parallelism or syncretism that Sison examines, but the rootedness of devotion to the Black Nazarene in indigenous and living Filipino memory and agency.

Taken together, these three articles could be said to discuss the dynamics of incul-

turation—a Catholic neologism and version of the word “enculturation” meaning to adapt to, or adopt, the norms of a new and different culture. But the processes

discussed in all three articles are not those of the official Catholic Church consciously encouraging or allowing specific integration of local practices into ver-

nacular Catholicism. Instead, Mikalachki, Morello, and Sison all emphasize the multi-faceted register on which—or against which—a variety of different kinds of agencies work to make Catholicism not just diverse, but also deeply meaningful.

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On the cover: Young people show off their own statues of the Black Nazarene at the January 9 feast in Manila.

Photo by Arnulfo Fortunado. See more at https://www.catholicsandcultures.org/philippines/feast-black-nazarene

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JODI MIKALACHKI

Fraternity, Martyrdom and Peace in Burundi: The Forty Servants of God of Buta1

Jodi Mikalachki is Associate Professor of English at the University of Burundi’s Institute of Applied Pedagogy in Bujumbura. She has written extensively on gender and nationalism. Her current project focuses on nonviolent responses to grief and loss in post– independence Burundi. Her essay, “Narrating Violence in Burundian Genocide and Civil War Literature: Pacifique Irankunda’s Playing at Violence,” appeared in Emerging Trends in Eastern African Literatures and Cultures (Galda Verlag, 2020). She has also translated two Burundian works engaging with the nation’s cycles of political violence: Zacharie Bukuru’s We Are All Children of God: The Forty Young Martyrs of Buta—Burundi (Paulines Africa, 2015) and Antoine Kaburahe, Hutsi: In the Name of Us All (Iwacu, 2019).

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“I think not only of the need to remember the atrocities, but also all those who, Figure 1. Altarpiece in the Sanctuary of the Martyrs

amid such great inhumanity and corruption, retained their dignity and, with of Fraternity of Buta, Burundi, by Moïse Liwali gestures small or large, chose the part of solidarity, forgiveness, fraternity.”

—Francis, Fratelli Tutti2

O

n April 30th, 1997, during Burundi’s 1993-2005 civil war, Buta Minor Seminary was attacked at dawn by a large armed force. Ordered at gunpoint to separate by ethnicity—Hutus over here, Tutsis over there!—stu-

dents in the senior dormitory chose instead to join hands and affirm their common 1 I am grateful to the Africa in Oxford Initiative for a travel grant to conduct secondary research for this article and to the Newhouse Center for the Humanities at Wellesley College for a fellowship that allowed me to complete it. Comments from conference participants at The Oxford Research Center for the Humanities, the IRIBA Center for Multimedia Heritage in Kigali, and the Symposium on Genocide and Human Rights Research in Africa and the Diaspora at Northeastern Illinois University in Chicago were also helpful. At the University of Burundi, I am particularly grateful to Professor Melchior Mukuri of the History Department for discussion and feedback on writing-inprogress and to Dr. Audace Mbonyingingo, Chair of the English Department at the Institute of Applied Pedagogy, for his encouragement of my research. My greatest debt is to those who granted me interviews, particularly survivors of the Buta massacre and parents of the martyrs. Father Zacharie Bukuru, whose award-winning book on the Buta Martyrs is the foundation of all research on the subject, has been an invaluable guide. I am also grateful to Brother Emmanuel Mbonyingingo of Mary Queen of Peace Monastery at Buta for interpreting interviews conducted in Kirundi.

2 Francis, Fratelli Tutti, accessed October 18, 2020, Vatican.va, 249. https://www.vatican.va/content/ francesco/en/encyclicals/documents/papa-francesco_20201003_enciclica-fratelli-tutti.html.

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(1998). Photo by Jodi Mikalachki.

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Fraternity, Martyrdom and Peace in Burundi: The Forty Servants of God of Buta

identity as children of God. Over the next four hours, they fell to gunfire and a gre-

nade. During this chaotic assault, as attackers moved in and out of the dormitory, able-bodied students bound the wounds of their injured classmates, carried them to safety and listened to their final words. Dying students chanted psalms, prayed

the rosary, and made peace with God and their classmates. Several were heard

asking God to forgive their assailants. Ultimately, forty students were killed and twenty-six others seriously wounded. By the time of the students’ funeral Mass two days later, their solidarity had begun to turn the massacre into a triumph—a poignant victory of fraternal love over the ethnic manipulation of the civil war. At the

partial lifting of mourning ceremony twelve days after the attack, the term “martyr” was first used publicly to describe the fallen students when local Bishop Bernard

Bududira announced his intention to build a sanctuary to the Martyrs of Fraternity

of Buta. Personally financed by Saint John Paul II, the sanctuary was completed a year later. It quickly became a pilgrimage site for Burundians and international

visitors, drawing tens of thousands a year, some walking or keeping vigil all night in the bitter cold of the mountainous interior to honor the memory of the Martyrs of Fraternity. Testimonies to the effectiveness of the martyrs’ intercession are

abundant. Commemorative Masses draw hundreds of worshippers in Burundi and

abroad; between four and five thousand participated in the twentieth anniversary Mass at Buta in 2017. In 2019, the Congregation for the Causes of Saints opened its investigation of the Forty Servants of God of Buta, together with a Burundian priest and three missionaries who also bore ultimate witness to the love of Christ

in the face of genocidal violence. Their collective cause has been postulated as the

Martyrs of Fraternity of Burundi, invoking the phrase that has popularly designated the Buta seminarians since their death in 1997.

In this article, I discuss the testimony of the Martyrs of Fraternity Buta as an example of nonviolent masculinity rooted in fraternal love. The Buta seminarians’ witness to fraternity is particularly remarkable in that it was offered during a civil war

that mobilized young men and youth for violence, often targeting schools. Though not immune to the ethnic manipulations of the civil war, the Buta seminary community drew on Burundian cultural values and practices to re-align qualities often

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perseverance. I explore this passage from politicized aggression to fraternal love in the ongoing story of the Buta martyrs, which includes the seminary’s program to

foster a culture of peace in the early years of the civil war, the students’ testimony to fraternal love during the 1997 attack, and Burundian accounts of the continuing importance of their witness in the reconstruction of the nation. Drawing on fifty

interviews conducted from March 2018 to February 2021 with survivors, parents of the martyrs, neighbors, religious leaders and other Burundian intellectuals, I examine how Burundians understand the significance of the Buta martyrdom to their own country and the world.3 As the global Church increasingly opens to the

witness of martyrs in Africa,4 the Buta story is of great interest, highlighting the role of African Catholics and Catholic institutions led by Africans in address-

ing genocide. The Buta seminarians’ sacrificial witness to fraternity demonstrates the effectiveness of enculturated African Catholicism in mobilizing youth to resist genocidal manipulation and inspiring others to transform its legacy of division

and trauma. As surviving student Nicolas Nyabenda, now a priest and professor of philosophy, asserts, “the martyrdom of Buta is the fruit of an educative process built on human values and Christian values.”5

The October 2020 release of Fratelli Tutti, the Papal Encyclical Letter on Frater-

nity and Social Friendship, renders the story of the Martyrs of Fraternity of Buta all the more valuable to a communion seeking to contribute to the rebirth of a

universal aspiration to fraternity without borders. Though it testifies to the univer-

sal human value of fraternity, the witness of the Buta martyrs is deeply rooted in Burundian culture and history. As I explore their story, I focus on the intersection of Burundian cultural values and practices with the Christian tradition of martyr-

dom, both in preparing the seminarians’ witness to fraternal love and in framing the ongoing reception of their testimony in Burundi. In particular, I consider the 3 4 5

Almost all interviews were conducted in French. I use my own English translations for quotations.

Interviews in Kirundi were interpreted into French, which I have translated into English for quotations, examining the Kirundi original where possible.

The 2018 canonization of the Martyrs of Algeria has reinforced the more established veneration of the Martyrs of Uganda, officially recognized since 1964, and contributes to a growing recognition of the collective witness of African martyrs in the Church’s calendar.

Nicolas Nyabenda, Letter to the author, November 11, 2018.

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Burundian understandings of fraternity (umuvukano) and Burundians’ associations

of martyrdom with the traditional value of ibanga, or absolute commitment to a

social role or responsibility whatever the cost, and the intore or warriors dance that was taught at the seminary and figures in liturgies commemorating the martyrs

of Buta. Concepts of ibanga and intore were historically associated with Burundian military sovereignty and a warrior ethos of noble masculinity. In the Buta

martyrdom, however, they express a nonviolent masculinity that displays graceful

alternatives to aggression. Woven into an enculturated Christian training at the

seminary, umuvukano, ibanga and the intore dance give human particularity to

the Buta testimony of fraternal love, both within Burundi and globally. As Francis suggests in Fratelli Tutti, “A country that moves forward while remaining solidly grounded in its original cultural substratum is a treasure for the whole of human-

ity.”6 Anchored in the rich ground of Burundian culture, the Buta martyrs’ witness to fraternal love in the face of genocidal violence is indeed a treasure for the global Church and the world.

By exploring the role of Burundian cultural values and practices in resisting geno-

cide, I also address what Patricia O. Daley has described as “a pervasive image of

inherent dysfunctionality in African societies” in the scholarly literature on African conflict.7 Introducing her important study, Gender and Genocide in Burundi: The Search For Spaces of Peace in the Great Lakes Region, she argues that the challenge

for scholars “is to shift the paradigm on warfare from that belonging to an ideation

system which devalues African lives to one whose starting point is the reassertion of the humanity of African people.”8 The Buta story in fact charts a course from

the genocidal devaluation of African lives to the reassertion of the humanity of African people, both in the testimony of the martyrs and its ongoing effects. Survivor Nicolas Nyabenda, who was critically wounded in the attack after carrying

an injured classmate to safety, observes both these poles in the Buta story: “Giv-

en the historical situation and the sociopolitical conjuncture of the country, the 6 Francis, Fratelli Tutti, 137.

7 Patricia O. Daley, Gender and Genocide in Burundi: The Search For Spaces of Peace in the Great Lakes Region (Oxford: James Currey, 2008), 5.

8 Daley, Gender and Genocide in Burundi, 6.

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martyrdom of Buta symbolizes on the one hand all crimes resulting from discriminative ideologies. On the other hand, it symbolizes the stripping of self that an-

other may live.”9 Congolese historian Jacques Depelchin has observed this general paradox in African conflicts. In Silences in African History, he contends that “ethics

are alive and well within African societies, even among those which, as in Rwanda and Burundi, have gone astray,” suggesting that “the sense of ethics can be highest

in the very arenas from which it seems to have completely disappeared.”10 Indeed, one may argue that African societies that have been repeatedly destabilized by political violence may also produce eloquent examples of how to transform these cycles and renew human solidarity. This process conforms to Francis’s concept of

solidarity as “thinking and acting in terms of community,” in which solidarity becomes “a way of making history.”11

The solidarity of the Buta students in the midst of a genocidal civil war is the more remarkable in that they were completely undefended and vulnerable. Schoolboys

fired upon in their beds at dawn, they repeatedly refused to separate into the ethnic

identities mobilized by the civil war and forcefully invoked by their armed assailants. The students’ youthful vulnerability figures large both in survivors’ recollec-

tions of the attack and in assessments by other Burundians of the power of the Buta testimony. The potential of vulnerability to transform cycles of violence is a central

proposition of Judith Butler’s Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence, in which the American philosopher asks whether experiences of vulnerability and

loss must necessarily lead to violence and retribution. Butler’s extended meditation on vulnerability, mourning and violence is of interest here, not because the Buta

story requires a framework drawn from western philosophy, but rather because of how thoughtfully she engages with her personal grief and the collective anger of Americans in response to the national trauma of the 2001 attack on the World

Trade Center in New York. The trauma of the Buta massacre is also personal and national. “If we are interested in arresting cycles of violence to produce less violent 9 Nyabenda, Letter.

10 Jacques Depelchin, Silences in African History: Between the Syndromes of Discovery and Abolition (Dar es Salaam: Nkuki na Nyota, 2005), 29.

11 Francis, Fratelli Tutti, 116.

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outcomes,” Butler posits, “it is no doubt important to ask what, politically, might be

made of grief besides a cry for war.”12 The Buta martyrs’ experience of vulnerability and loss did not, in fact, lead to military violence and retribution, despite an established pattern of reprisals during Burundi’s civil war, especially following school

massacres. Their story thus responds to a global need for nonviolent responses to grief and loss. To understand the full value of the Buta testimony, however, it must

also be considered as a contextualized example of violence and its transformation in contemporary Africa.

BURUNDIAN POLITICAL VIOLENCE AND SCHOOLS Burundi’s 1993-2005 civil war, during which Buta Minor Seminary was attacked, resulted from three decades of politicizing Hutu and Tutsi identities through state violence and repression. Though Burundi made a relatively peaceful transition to

independence in 1962, its political stability had already been undermined by the 1961 assassination of Prime Minister Louis Rwagasore. Widely popular, Rwagasore had collaborated with Hutus, Tutsis, the princely class of Ganwas to which

he belonged, and Swahili-speaking Muslims to forge a multi-interest party with broad representation. UPRONA, or Unité pour le progrès national (Unity for Na-

tional Progress), the party they founded, would govern Burundi for the next three

decades. Rwagasore’s assassination a month after the 1961 elections led to divisions

within UPRONA leadership, which took on an increasingly ethnic cast as the “social revolution” unfolded in neighboring Rwanda, driving tens of thousands of

Rwandan Tutsis into exile, including 50,000 in Bujumbura alone.13 By 1965, the social categories of Hutu and Tutsi had been thoroughly politicized in Burundi.14

A 1965 uprising of marginalized Hutu members of UPRONA, though confined to a single province and quickly put down, was followed by indiscriminate massacres

of local Hutu civilians and a general purge of Hutu officers in the armed forces.

12 Judith Butler, Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence (London: Verso, 2004), xii.

13 René Lemarchand, Burundi: Ethnocide as discourse and practice (Cambridge, Cambridge UP, 1994), 60.

14 René Lemarchand, Rwanda and Burundi (New York, Praeger, 1970), 197-227; Jean-Pierre Chrétien and Jean-François Dupaquier, Burundi 1972: Au bords des génocides (Paris, Karthala, 2007), 18-29.

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Continuing marginalization of Hutu intellectuals led to another armed uprising

in April 1972, when Hutu bands collaborating with mercenaries from Zaïre killed 800-1,200 Tutsis in the south of the country.15 Though this terrible anti-Tutsi violence was quickly contained and put down in the south, state reprisals were mas-

sive, spreading throughout the country and targeting Hutu males in particular, from government ministers to high school students. Between 80,000 and 250,000 Hutus were killed, representing 3.5 to 5% of the country’s of 3.5 million people.16 A

further 100,000 or more were driven into exile, where many would spend a gener-

ation in UNHCR camps in Tanzania.17 The United Nations 1985 Whitaker Report categorized the 1972 state killings of Hutus as genocide.18

UPRONA military leaders ruled Burundi for the next two decades in a single-

party system using the party coup as their only mechanism of regime change.19 In the early 1990s, the government of President Pierre Buyoya, under pressure

from international partners, began to incorporate Hutus into the civil service and softened state sanctions against freedom of expression and affiliation, ushering in

the 1993 multiparty elections that brought to power Melchior Ndadaye, Burundi’s first civilian and first Hutu president. Ndadaye’s party, the multi-ethnic but pre-

dominantly Hutu FRODEBU, or Front Pour la Démocratie au Burundi (Front For

Democracy in Burundi), also won a landslide victory in the legislative elections that followed.20 An attempted military coup was put down shortly before President 15 Chrétien and Dupaquier, Burundi 1972, 132-7.

16 René Lemarchand and David Martin, Selective Genocide in Burundi (London, Minority Rights Group, Report No. 20, July 1974), 5. Chrétien and Dupaquier calculate that nearly ten percent of Hutu men were killed, bereaving an estimated 70,000 widows and 150,000 to 250,000 orphans; Chrétien and Dupaquier, Burundi 1972, 282.

17 Liisa Malkki, Purity and Exile: Violence, Memory and National Cosmology Among Hutu Refugees in Tanzania (Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1995), 38-9, https://doi.org/10.7208/chicago/ 9780226190969.001.0001; Daley, Gender & Genocide, 174-82.

18 United Nations Economic and Social Council (UNESC) Commission on Human Rights, Sub-Commission on Prevention of Discrimination and Protection of Minorities, Revised and Updated Report on the Question of the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide (Whitaker Report), Thirty-eighth session, Item 4 of the provisional agenda (E/CN.4/Sub.2/1985/6) (July 2, 1985), 24.

In the same paragraph, the Whitaker Report also categorizes the 1965 reprisals against Hutus as genocide.

19 Melchior Mukuri, Dictionnaire Chronologique du Burundi, Vol. 2: 1966-1993, L’Ere des Coups d’Etats (Bujumbura, Université du Burundi, 2013), 3.

20 Mukuri, Dictionnaire Chronologique du Burundi, 373, 380.

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Ndadaye’s inauguration on July 10, but three months later, on October 21, 1993, the President was abducted and assassinated by officers of the Burundian army. The news of Ndadaye’s murder spread quickly to the countryside, provoking Hutu mas-

sacres of Tutsi civilians, to which the army responded with indiscriminate reprisals against Hutus. A 1996 report of the United Nations Security Council’s Commission of Inquiry for Burundi concluded that acts of genocide against Tutsi civilians

had been committed in the four-day period following President Ndadaye’s assassi-

nation “at the instigation and with the participation of certain Hutu FRODEBU functionaries and leaders up to commune [county] level.”21 It also reported that

“indiscriminate killing of Hutu men, women and children was carried out by the Burundian Army and Gendarmerie, and by Tutsi civilians,” during the same four

days, and that “no effort was made by the military authorities at any level to stop, investigate or punish such acts.”22 Indeed, the Commission observed that the Burundian army, though nominally under the command of the civilian president, was

generally admitted to be a “power unto itself,” publicly accused not only of responsibility for the assassination of President Ndadaye and “the deadly repression that

followed,” but also of being “at present engaged, with total impunity, in the large scale killing of civilians.”23

The FRODEBU government’s attempts to stabilize the country in the months

following President Ndadaye’s assassination suffered a major setback in April 1994 when President Cyprien Ntaryamira, Ndadaye’s successor, died in the shooting 21 United Nations Security Council (UNSC), International Commission of Inquiry for Burundi, Final Report, (S/1996/682) (August 22, 1996), 483.

22 International Commission of Inquiry for Burundi, Final Report, 486. In its analysis of testimony, the Commission notes that the Burundian army and gendarmerie set out from their bases on October 21, the day of President Ndadaye’s assassination, and that by October 22, both the killing of Tutsis

by Hutus and the killing of Hutus by soldiers had spread out from points on the main roads to less accessible rural sites; cf. ibid., 468-469.

23 International Commission of Inquiry for Burundi, Final Report, 24. The UNSC report repeatedly expresses frustration at the non-cooperation of the Burundian Defence Ministry and armed forces, particularly with regard to the investigation of President Ndadaye’s assassination, a tactic that prevented the Commission from going beyond circumstantial evidence to identify “the persons that should be brought to justice for this crime;” cf. ibid., 213. The Commission also noted that its security detail of uniformed and armed Gendarmes (under army command) undoubtedly discouraged Hutus from coming forward to testify, both in Bujumbura and the rural interior, thus giving disproportionate weight to Tutsi testimony; cf. ibid., 49, 54, 257, 307.

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down of Rwandan President Juvénal Habyarimana’s plane over Kigali. Seeing the

civilian government unable to control the official army, a faction within FRODE-

BU created an armed wing, the FDD or Forces pour la Défense de la Démocratie (Forces for the Defence of Democracy), which eventually developed into the

CNDD-FDD party (Conseil National Pour la Défense de la Démocratie—Forces pour la Défense de la Démocratie/National Council for the Defence of Democracy—Forces for the Defence of Democracy) that has governed Burundi since the first post-conflict elections in 2005. The CNDD-FDD is the force that attacked

Buta Minor Seminary on April 30, 1997, less than a year after President Pierre Buyoya and his UPRONA party had returned to power via a military coup. Under regional sanctions, Buyoya’s regime proved unable to end the civil war and agreed

to begin negotiations with armed Hutu movements in 1998. Facilitated successive-

ly by Julius Nyerere and Nelson Mandela, these negotiations led to the signing of the Arusha Peace and Reconciliation Agreement in August 2000 by the National

Assembly and the Government of Burundi, ten political parties and three armed

political movements. In 2005, after almost all parties to the civil war had signed, Burundi held its first democratic elections since 1993. These elections, judged to

be free and fair, marked the end of a twelve-year civil war that reached all regions of the country, killing 300,000, driving 400,000 into exile and internally displacing 800,000.24

Burundi’s 1993-2005 civil war was thus complex, initially pitting a democratical-

ly elected government against its own armed forces. It quickly degenerated into

interethnic violence perpetrated by, and visited upon, Burundians of all identities and affiliations, eventually involving more than twenty political movements.25 Al-

though the war was officially waged between armed Hutu political forces and the Tutsi-dominated regular army, civilians were its principal targets. A 1998 Human

Rights Watch Report noted that, “in practice, the contenders fight few direct bat-

tles and instead carry on combat indirectly through attacks on civilians.”26 Schools 24 Daley, Gender & Genocide, 107-34.

25 Daley, Gender & Genocide, 89-91, includes a table of twenty-three Burundian political parties, rebel movements and militias with their ethnic affiliations as of 2000.

26 Timothy Longman, Proxy Targets: Civilians in the War in Burundi (London, Human Rights Watch, 1998), 1.

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were privileged sites of violence. Daley calculates that by 1995, twenty percent of school and university students had abandoned their studies because of the dan-

gers inherent in attending educational institutions.27 State boarding schools were closed for four months following school massacres after the assassination of President Ndadaye.28 Even after schools reopened, students continued to be killed. The

FRODEBU government’s investigations into the security crisis in secondary edu-

cation indicate that by 1995, political violence had affected most of the state’s more than sixty boarding schools. Incompetent, partisan or simply overwhelmed school leadership was cited, with frequent changes in school administrators.29 Similar problems, including absenteeism, affected other school staff. A climate of suspicion

and mistrust charaterized the classroom. Succumbing to indiscipline, interethnic antagonism and mass reactions, students intimidated and terrorized one another

and at times their instructors, often manipulated by outside parties.30 Local pop-

ulations suffered the price of these manipulations, as the indiscriminate reprisals

that characterized the civil war generally were even more pronounced in response

27 Daley, Gender & Genocide, 111-16. Daley notes that as the war went on, children were also impressed into the regular army and rebel forces; by 2000, they represented an estimated 14,000 combatants. In 2003, Anna Obura found that school enrollments had declined by more than a third since the beginning of the war; cf Anna Obura, Staying Power: Struggling to reconstruct education in Burundi since 1993 (Paris: IIEP, 2008), 94. Peter Uvin calculates that nearly three percent of young Burundian males joined an armed movement during the civil war (179). Interviewing youth of both genders in three communes in 2006, he found that the average child lost four years of school during the war; cf. Peter Uvin, Life After Violence: A People’s Story of Burundi (London, Zed Books, 2009), 179, 91, https://doi.org/10.5040/9781350221130.

28 For a detailed account drawing on eye-witness testimony of the notorious Kibimba massacre of seventy Tutsi boarding school students in October 1993, cf. Nigel Watt, Burundi: Biography of a Small African Country (London: Hurst, 2008), 48-55.

29 Léonidas Ntibinonoye, principal of a state boarding school at the time of President Ndadaye’s assassination, claims that almost all state boarding schools had received new principals following FRODEBU’s 1993 election victory; cf. Léonidas Ntibinonoye (Buta neighbor, retired high school principal) in discussion with the author, May 2020. Some of the new appointments, he feels, may have favored ethnic polarization. Whatever the positions of individual principals, if it is indeed true that FRODEBU replaced almost all state boarding school principals in 1993, it would mean that most of these establishments were under the direction of people new to their job and in many cases the school community for which they were responsible when the civil war broke out.

30 Thaddée Siryuyumunsi, “L’école: Gestion des tensions dans les établissements secondaires,” Burundi, La Fracture Identitaire: Logiques de violence et certitudes “ethniques,” eds. Jean-Pierre Chrétien and Melchior Mukuri (Paris, Karthala, 2002), 171-8.

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to school violence.31 Students and staff at Buta Minor Seminary were well aware of these patterns of

school violence. Survivor Pasteur Manirambona, whose brother Patrick Nininahazwe was killed during the attack, recalls that the ethnic divisions created by

the civil war had made “a living hell” of other boarding schools.32 Burundi’s seven

minor seminaries, administered as state boarding schools under convention with the Ministry of Education, were not spared. Though the attempt to bring an armed

band into Mureke Minor Seminary in the northern diocese of Ngozi failed,33 Ciya Minor Seminary in the western diocese of Bubanza was successfully attacked by

the CNDD-FDD, the same force that would later assail Buta.34 Family stories about violence against students during the 1972 genocide also figured prominently

in the consciousness of Buta seminarians as ethnic violence again broke out in 1993. Zacharie Bukuru, the seminary’s rector, recounts that Tutsi students feared

being attacked by the local population, overwhelmingly Hutu, while Hutu students were afraid of the soldiers in the seminary’s security detail.35 It was in this national 31 Anatole Nahayo, “De la répression du génocide, des crimes contre l’humanité et des crimes de guerre commis au Burundi de 1993 à 2005” (MA thesis, University of Burundi, 2005), 14. For the general pattern of indiscriminate reprisals during the civil war, see Longman, Proxy Targets, 97-8 and Daley, Gender & Genocide, 111-13.

32 Pasteur Manirambona (student survivor, now priest) in discussion with the author, September 2019.

33 Siryuyumunsi, “L’école,” 171. Déogratias Bukobero, who was a priest on staff at Mureke Minor Seminary at the time, relates that the experience prompted him twenty years later to invoke the Buta martyrs’ testimony to fraternal love when politicized divisions again threatened Mureke students in 2015; cf. Déogratias Bukobero (priest and Spiritual Father at Mureke Seminary) in discussion with the author, October 2019.

34 Nicolas Nyabenda (student survivor, now a priest and professor of philosophy) in discussion with the author, October 2018. Some Ciya seminarians were abducted and forced to join the rebels in the bush until they were able to escape. During the Buta attack, four students from the junior cycle were also abducted and held by the rebels for several days, suffering beatings and imprisonment before they were able to escape; for an account of their ordeal, cf. Zacharie Bukuru, We Are All Children of God: The Story of the Forty Young Martyrs of Buta—Burundi, trans. Jodi Mikalachki (Nairobi: Paulines Africa, 2015), 79-81.

35 Bukuru, Children of God, 34-5. In Buta’s southern diocese of Bururi, Hutu civilians had indeed killed Tutsis during the brief but terrible uprising in late April 1972. Conversely, the army targeted Hutu school boys as emerging intellectuals during the nation-wide reprisals, beginning with the Seventh Grade; cf. Chrétien and Dupaquier, Burundi 1972, 204-41. Liisa Malkki notes that Hutu refugees in Tanzania emphasized violence against school children in their narratives of the 1972 Burundi genocide; cf. Malkki, Purity and Exile, 76-7.

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and historical context of mutual fear and recrimination that Bukuru and his staff worked to develop the culture of peace and fraternal love to which the seminarians ultimately bore witness.

UMUVUKANO: FRATERNAL LOVE DURING A CIVIL WAR The Buta massacre is noteworthy—perhaps unique in the annals of Burundi’s 1993-2005 civil war—in that no reprisals were visited on the local population. This

absence of retributive violence is the more remarkable in that the Hutu CNDD-

FDD movement immediately claimed responsibility for the massacre over Voice of America and other media.36 Officers of the Tutsi-dominated army and government

were among the family members who gathered in Buta two days after the attack to bury the murdered students, and some came armed with grenades. Zacharie

Bukuru believes that if only Tutsi students had been killed, the mourners would

have razed the overwhelmingly Hutu region to the ground.37 What stopped them

was the testimony of fraternal love offered by the students, who had stood together, Hutu and Tutsi, refusing to separate under the threat and eventual execution of armed violence. Gaspard Nzeyimana, a local official whose son Pacifique Kanezere was among the martyred students, emphasizes that it was the students’ solidarity

that averted violence. “If these children hadn’t stayed together,” he says, “I don’t

know what would have happened to Hutus in this region.”38 Léopold Nsabiyumva,

who was a seminarian in the junior cycle (Grades 7-10) and is native to the region, affirms that “if we had separated and only one group had been killed, the vengeance on the people of the area would have been terrible.”39 With the exception of

two or three Tutsi families, the seminary’s local community of Kivuruga is entirely

Hutu. “Here in Kivuruga,” relates Jacqueline Ntakirutimana, who lived in teachers’ housing at the time of the attack, “there were a lot of Hutu people. If the young 36 Bukuru, Children of God, 112.

37 Bukuru, Children of God, 97.

38 Gaspard Nzeyimana (father of martyr Pacifique Kanezere, head of Muzenga Zone at the time of the attack, veterinarian) in discussion with the author, May 2018.

39 Léopold Nsabiyumva (student survivor, now a priest) in discussion with the author, September 2018.

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people hadn’t agreed to die together, it would have been a catastrophe, because these

children came from rich families in Bujumbura and all over. Those families would have come to take vengeance if the children had agreed to separate.”40 Augustin

Nzohabonayo, another teacher at the seminary, also identifies the students’ solidarity as critical in having saved the local population from massacre. He recalls that many of those who attended the funeral of the forty seminarians were armed, with

some announcing their intention of killing everyone in the area, even at the sacri-

fice of a few Tutsis who might be among them. “That’s why we have the right to say that our students are martyrs,” he asserts. “They saved a lot of people.”41

The political importance of their solidarity was not, however, foremost in students’ minds on the day of the attack. Rather, they were motivated by what survivor Léopold Nsabiyumva describes as “an impulse of fraternal love.”42 It is for

this fraternal love that the Buta martyrs are primarily remembered by Burundians.

“They loved one another,” says Teresa Banyankubusa, mother of martyr Alexis Nd-

ikumana. “These children died for fraternity, for the love of God—they left this testimony to love and fraternity.”43 Paula Nibigira, mother of martyr Jean-Thierry

Arakaza, understands their testimony in similar terms: “They died together, even

though people tried to divide them. They were willing to die together—umuvu-

kano.”44 Inscribed on the façade of the martyrs’ sanctuary, the gender-neutral term umuvukano translates as fraternity. It is derived from the Kirundi verb to be born

(ku-vuka) and the suffix -na (with, together), signifying the state of being born with or together that qualifies children of the same parents. Anthropologist Adrien

Ntabona explains the familial sense of the term as follows: “my brother is the one

who is born from the same womb as me, who prolongs the same human interiority

40 Jacqueline Ntakirutimana (English teacher at Buta Minor Seminary at the time of the attack, now the seminary’s accountant) in discussion with the author, December 2019.

41 Augustin Nzohabonayo (science teacher at Buta Minor Seminary, now and at the time of the attack) in discussion with the author, October 2018.

42 Nsabiyumva, discussion.

43 Teresa Banyankubusa (farmer, mother of martyr Alexis Ndikumana) in discussion with the author, May 2020.

44 Paula Nibigira (retired school secretary, mother of martyr Jean-Thierry Arakaza), in discussion with the author, November 2018.

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as me, and with whom I thus identify, with whom I am one.”45 In Burundian culture, he elaborates, the full meaning of umuvukano is captured in the phrase kwi-

tanga utiziganya, to offer oneself unsparingly, which in the familial context implies “the capacity to give one’s life in the consciousness that one thereby reaches the

culminating point of self-realization.”46 Though Ntabona emphasizes blood ties in

his discussion of umuvukano, he acknowledges that its virtues can also be extended to “the solidarity of good neighbors, of friendship and even social harmony in gen-

eral.”47 In his conclusions, he argues that a Burundian ethic of humanism “demands that the spirit of family be without borders to render people capable of extending

blood ties, of achieving a sense of neighborliness based on familial solidarity, of

procuring an unlimited openness to every person and every member of society. In

this way, one will be able to say to people of different origins and different ethnicities: “turi bamwe” (we are one).”48

In Ntabona’s formulation, fully realized Burundian humanism goes beyond the

familial sense of fraternity to encompass all human beings, including all ethnicities.

This is a poignant vision in the wake of Burundi’s decades of interethnic violence.

Perhaps for this reason, the Buta students’ self-offering is most meaningful to other

Burundians as a sacrificial witness to fraternal love that knew no ethnic bounds.

Godeliève Ntisezerana, mother of martyr Désiré Nduwimana, emphasizes the im-

portance of the students’ witness to fraternity in the midst of Burundi’s civil war.

“The children of Buta refused to separate by ethnicity,” she says, “though there was

an interethnic war going on in the country.”49 Survivor Melchior Ngowenubusa,

who was among the students in the senior dormitory, also situates the martyrs’ testimony in this sociopolitical context: “It’s a message that demonstrated the importance of fraternity between members of a nation,” he explains. “In the precise case of Buta Minor Seminary, this fraternity demonstrated itself in a country 45 Adrien Ntabona, L’Ubuntu (Humanité Réussie): Ses roses et ses épines au Burundi (Bujumbura: CRID, 2020), 38. I use my own English translations in all quotations from this work.

46 Adrien Ntabona, L’Ubuntu, 39-40.

47 Adrien Ntabona, L’Ubuntu, 35.

48 Adrien Ntabona, L’Ubuntu, 171.

49 Godeliève Ntisezerana (farmer, mother of martyr Désiré Nduwimana) in discussion with the author, December 2019.

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where people were looking daggers at one another, where they were killing each other on the basis of ethnic affiliation.”50 Ngowenubusa and other students in the

senior cycle (Grades 11-13) had their fraternity tested. Targeted and cornered in

their dormitory, they were ordered at least three times to separate. Some withstood individual pressure, including physical violence, to make them join the attackers.51

Their collective decision to stay together is central to the survivors’ understanding of what they experienced. Immediately after the attack, Stany Niyizonkiza, a student from the senior dormitory, cried out to the seminary’s rector, “Father, they

wanted to separate us, but we refused.”52 Other testimonies recount how students cared for one another during the attack without regard to ethnicity, some under-

going considerable risk to protect or carry wounded classmates to safety.53 Father Zacharie Bukuru, the seminary’s rector, shared that testimony two days after the

massacre when he addressed mourners at the funeral Mass, imploring them not to dishonor the memory “of these young people who died hand-in-hand forgiving

their assassins. . . . I beg of you, ask for the grace to forgive during the eucharist. Do not try to kill in your turn. You see where violence leads.”54

Because of the students’ solidarity, there were, in fact, no reprisals after the Buta massacre. Gaspard Nzeyimana, whose son was killed in the attack, was the ad-

ministrative head of the zone in which Buta is located. During the reception after the students’ funeral, which was attended by the president of the Republic and other high officers of church and state, he publicly called upon President Buyoya 50 Melchior Ngowenubusa (student survivor, medical doctor) in discussion with the author, October 2018.

51 Bukuru, Children of God, 85-90.

52 Bukuru, Children of God, 99.

53 Survivor Innocent Ndayiragije, who was injured in the knee and the back during the attack, reports that fellow students Edouard Nkeshimana and Pasteur Manirambona carried him down the stairs and hid him in the outdoor toilets. Though a cold rain was falling, Pasteur removed his own t-shirt and used it to bandage Innocent’s knee. Neither student who carried him was of his ethnicity; cf. Innocent Ndayiragije (student survivor, executive director of ALM-Buta), in discussion with the author, March 2018. Survivor Claude Minani, who ran into the bushes with three other boys from the junior dormitory, recalls how they pushed him into the middle of their hiding place so that he would not be seen by the attackers, since his ethnicity made him particularly vulnerable; cf. Claude Minani (student survivor, doctor) in discussion with the author, March 2018. For other examples of student solidarity during the attack, cf. Bukuru, Children of God, 86-92.

54 Bukuru, Children of God, 106.

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to protect the local population from reprisals, noting that as a Hutu himself, he would surely have removed his son from the seminary had he been complicit in the attack. Nzeyimana also appealed to Colonel Jean Bikomagu, the army chief

of staff regarded by many Hutus as responsible for President Ndadaye’s death

and military violence against Hutu civilians. Prompted by Nzeyimana, Bikomagu

personally removed Tutsi gang members who had come up from Bujumbura with the intention of killing local Hutus after the funeral, taking them to the Bururi

military base and dispatching them from there to the capital.55 A few days after

the funeral, Hutu staff at the school were alerted that outsiders were preparing a list accusing them of having brought the attackers to the school. They appealed to Salvatore Niciteretse, rector of the Cathedral Parish in Bururi, who persuaded the provincial governor and the commander of the local military base to intervene for

their protection.56 From the president to the governor to the army chief of staff and the base commander, these men had been engaged for years in violence against

Hutu armed movements and civilian populations. The fraternal love of the Buta

students in remaining together as Hutus and Tutsis prompted all these officers to

break an established pattern of indiscriminate reprisals against civilian populations, particularly after school massacres.

Now Bishop of Bururi diocese, Salvatore Niciteretse was one of the first people

on the scene after the attack, helping convey wounded students to hospital and sheltering their traumatized classmates in his own room that night. “The martyrs of Buta were ordinary seminarians like any others” he points out. “But then, in the name of their faith, they refused to divide ethnically into Hutus and Tutsis.” Re-

flecting theologically on their witness, he observes that in the testimony of the Buta martyrs, “faith is stronger than ethnicity. That’s what Jesus asks: he who prefers his

mother or father to me is not worthy of me. And there it is—in the name of this faith—another fraternity that goes beyond the fraternity of blood or family.”57 A

theologian specializing in the social doctrine of the Church, Niciteretse approaches the Buta martyrdom in terms of the social teachings of Jesus. In his analysis, the

55 Nzeyimana, discussion.

56 Henri Nizigama (student supervisor at Buta Minor Seminary) in discussion with the author, May 2020.

57 Salvatore Niciteretse (Bishop of Bururi and theologian) in discussion with the author, May 2020.

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students’ witness reframes the blood relationships that underlie concepts of kin-

ship, including ethnicity. By refusing to separate ethnically, the students offered an example of fraternity grounded in faith as a spiritual alternative to the divisionist

manipulation of ethnic identities. Their faith thus allowed them to transcend both

the political context of the civil war and the false premises of its fratricidal ideology.

IBANGA: SACRIFICIAL COMMITMENT TO THE VERY END Survivor Nicolas Nyabenda affirms that the martyrs’ testimony was a refutation

of the divisionist ideology of the civil war: “After at least four years of attempted ethnic division and failed ideological manipulation, the forty young seminarians

testified that we were educated for communion in life and in death. To do that, it was necessary for us to give primacy to the other.”58 This idea of gift, particularly the gift of self for the other, lies at the heart of Burundian understandings of

martyrdom. Léonidas Nitereka, Vicar General of the Diocese of Bururi and an anthropologist, defines Christian martyrdom in these terms:

Christian martyrdom is the encounter between two dynamics of gift. There

is Christ who gave himself for love, and this gift . . . constitutes a call. So the martyr has the grace to respond to the gift with another gift. It is really the

encounter between two gifts. In this sense, the martyr shows that a person is by nature gift, openness. The human person is this openness toward God who gives himself.59

The sacrificial gift of self for the other, Nitereka observes, has deep roots in Burundian culture. He links it to the Burundian concept of ibanga, which he defines

as “a sense of responsibility, of things done well, which gives you a certain dignity.

It’s the idea of sacrifice in order to attain the status of a worthy person, a person of honor. . . . You have a role in society and so you play your role to the very end.”60 58 Nyabenda, Letter.

59 Léonidas Nitereka (Vicar General of Bururi Diocese, theologian of anthropology) in discussion with the author, October 2018.

60 Nitereka, discussion.

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Anthropologist Adrien Ntabona defines ibanga as “the voluntary acceptance of a burden of responsibility, no matter how heavy.”61 He goes on to characterize ibanga

as both the anchor and the summit of Burundian humanism, identifying it as a na-

tional value that can enrich the world.62 Though ibanga was traditionally associated with a warrior’s duty to face combat, Ntabona argues that now “it is active nonviolence that must be privileged. But accepting death in the peaceful defence of a just

cause, that must remain de rigueur, even if it is costly.”63 As a virtue, ibanga has the capacity to create “a shared communal ‘me’” he elaborates, “through which one is

ready for sacrifice.”64 Ntabona recognizes this communal consciousness of ibanga in the Buta martyrs, asserting that “they prepared themselves together to testify to the very end to Christian fraternity.”65

The Buta students’ solidarity to the very end of their ordeal is often cited by Burundians as the seal of their martyrdom. Even after the attack had ended and the

regular army came to transport the wounded to hospital, it was the students themselves who carried their injured classmates down the dormitory stairs to the wait-

ing trucks. “They were covered in the blood of their fellow students,” recounts Henri Nizigama, a staff member who observed this operation. “They would keep

checking—Is he still breathing? That’s what proves their fraternity.”66 Sealed in the

blood of their living comrades, the survivors testified to the end to fraternal love for their classmates. With respect to those who died, César Sabushimike, another

staff member on dormitory duty during the attack, testifies that “I am convinced

that each one of them was faithful to the end, even to martyrdom. So I respect each and every one of them. . . . I knew them all well.”67 Pierre Nyandwi, father of martyr Désiré Nduwimana and a retired soldier, says that the Buta students are

martyrs because “they showed a spirit of unity among themselves without regard to 61 Ntabona, L’Ubuntu, 18.

62 Ntabona, L’Ubuntu, 25-28.

63 Ntabona, L’Ubuntu, 20.

64 Ntabona, L’Ubuntu, 26.

65 Adrien Ntabona, Letter to the author, 22 November 2018.

66 Nizigama, discussion.

67 César Sabushimike (student supervisor at Buta Minor Seminary) in discussion with the author, May 2020.

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ethnicity and especially because, by the grace of God, they held out until death.”68 Nyandwi defines martyrdom in general as accepting the ultimate duty or charge

(ibanga) one receives in baptism [ni ukwemera ibanga warayaronse ya batisimo].69 Marc Bigirindavyi, who taught at the seminary at the time of the attack, also understands

martyrdom in terms of the traditional virtue of ibanga, saying that “it is a question of defending and not yielding—whatever the trials to be faced—something one believes with one’s whole heart, something worthy of being safeguarded.”70

Survivor Nicolas Nyabenda invokes the phrase gupfira ibanga [to die for ibanga] as a pre-Christian articulation of martyrdom in the name of honor and devotion.71

A UNESCO manual on Burundian cultural values observes that gupfira ibanga

means to die in assuming one’s responsibilities.72 In discussing the Buta martyrdom, neighbor Gemma Murebwayira notes that in Burundian culture, “there are moments when people prefer to die rather than to default on their responsibilities.”73

Her husband, Léonidas Ntibinonoye, who directed another state boarding school at the time of the attack, defines a martyr as “someone who agrees to suffer for an idea by abandoning self to save a situation,” adding that “I insist on this idea of voluntary

suffering to the end.”74 He cites the Kirundi proverb, gusangira ugupfa no gukira [to

share death and life] in support of this value.75 Reflecting on the Buta martyrdom,

Liduine Bukuru, a neighbor who survived the general attack on the surrounding

area in 1997, ties this radical faithfulness to the Cross. “When I visit the tombs of 68 Pierre Nyandwi (retired soldier, father of martyr Désiré Nduwimana) in discussion with the author, December 2019. Nyandwi’s son, Désiré Nduwimana, was indeed faithful to the end. Survivor Pasteur Manirambona recalls that he was the first to respond to injured students’ pleas for help during a break in the attack while other seminarians hesitated to move for fear of being shot.

Désiré was killed when the attackers returned; cf. Pasteur Manirambona, discussion.

69 Nyandwi, discussion.

70 Marc Bigirindavyi (priest, former geography teacher at Buta Minor Seminary) in discussion with the author, September 2019.

71 Nyabenda, Letter.

72 United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO), Manuel sur les valeurs culturelles du Burundi (Bujumbura, August 2017), 93. The manual’s Burundian authors associate ibanga generally with a sense of benevolence and unfailing fidelity to friends and society; cf.

UNESCO, Manuel, 84-93.

73 Gemma Murebwayira (Buta neighbor, high school teacher) in discussion with the author, May 2020.

74 Ntibinonoye, discussion.

75 Ntibinonoye, discussion.

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Figure 2. Current Buta seminarians and other worshippers at the tombs of the Martyrs of Fraternity after the Sunday Mass for 20th anniversary of the martyrdom, 2017.

Photo by Jodi Mikalachki.

the martyrs,” she relates, “I always think about the meaning of the Cross, that we’re

all called to venerate the Cross. . . . There is nowhere we can flee the Holy Cross. On Earth or in Hell, the Cross will always be there and we must worship it, whatever the cost.”76 For all these Burundians—parents, instructors and neighbors of the

Buta martyrs—Christian martyrdom is intimately bound up with the traditional

virtue of ibanga, or fidelity to one’s social commitments, whatever the cost. Faithful

to the end, the Buta seminarians paid the ultimate price of worshipping the Cross.

A red cross surmounts each of their tombs, inscribed with their names.

A CHRISTIAN TESTIMONY FROM BURUNDI TO THE WORLD As important as the Buta students’ moral and cultural training was in preparing

them to testify to fraternity, those closest to the martyrs insist on a divine element that allowed them to be faithful to the end. It is in this divine assistance that

they discern the global importance of the martyrs’ testimony. Vincent Nsabima-

na, father of martyr Jean-Thierry Arakaza, insists that in the students’ witness to

fraternal love, “there was a strength that goes beyond men. I don’t know how they

found the strength to die together. It goes beyond the will of man, it goes beyond.

76 Liduine Bukuru (Buta neighbor, farmer) in discussion with the author, December 2019.

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It was not their strength alone. There was a supernatural force that acted in them.”77 Gaspard Nzeyimana, father of martyr Pacifique Kanezere, agrees. “Do you think

it’s normal, without the work of the Holy Spirit? You hear gunshots and you go and try to escape. But the children helped one another.”78 For Nzeyimana, this

divine assistance affirms the students’ status as Christian martyrs: “Whether the

Pope accords it or not, they’re martyrs. . . . Kanezere is my ambassador to the Lord;

he represents me. He also represents the family and the nation—the whole world.

There are forty sons who are ambassadors.”79 Nzeyimana’s belief that the Buta mar-

tyrs’ witness belongs to the whole world is echoed by his fellow bereaved father, Vincent Nsabimana: “I don’t think it’s just for the context of Burundi. It’s a very

unique case. You should look in other countries to see if there is a case like it. I don’t think you’ll find it.”80 Reflecting on God’s choice of Buta, a tiny community in a little-known nation in the heart of Africa, Nzeyimana invokes a hymn about Bethlehem as a small town that wasn’t very noble but which the Lord chose to honor rather than Jerusalem. He reports that his late wife, Jacqueline Karenzo, mother

of martyr Pacifique Kanezere, used to tell him that “maybe Buta was a small place where the Lord wanted the world and especially the country to see and think about

what Imana ishaka [God wants].”81 Nzeyimana’s shift to Kirundi is telling. In the Buta martyrdom, it suggests, Imana, the God of Burundi from precolonial times

to the present, reveals God’s will to the world and gives the world something to think about.

Burundian theologians amplify the parents’ sense that Burundi is taking its place in

Christian history through the martyrs of Buta. Venant Bacinoni, retired Bishop of

Bururi, notes the growing inclusiveness of the church’s liturgical calendar: “In the missal of the liturgical calendar, martyrs have a very big place. . . . They come from

all countries, all cultures. . . . Before, it was centered on Europe, after, the Americas.

77 Vincent Nsabimana (retired high school principal, father of martyr Jean-Thierry Arakaza) in discussion with the author, November 2018.

78 Nzeyimana, discussion.

79 Nzeyimana, discussion.

80 Nsabimana, discussion.

81 Nzeyimana, discussion.

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Now, they’ve added Asia, Africa—the Martyrs of Uganda.”82 The witness of the Martyrs of Uganda—also African youth who maintained fraternal solidarity to

the end—is a recurrent point of comparison for Burundians reflecting on the Buta

martyrdom. The current Bishop of Bururi, Monsignor Salvatore Niciteretse, notes that the Martyrs of Uganda “died refusing to deny their faith and were resurrected

in such a way that thousands and thousands of people live out the values to which

they testified.”83 In recognition of the power of the Uganda Martyrs’ testimony in

evangelizing eastern Africa, the fourth Sunday after Pentecost is dedicated to their

remembrance in the Church of Burundi. The major seminary in Bururi Diocese is

also dedicated to the Martyrs of Uganda. Buta supervisor Henri Nizigama observes

that “here in Africa, we know the Martyrs of Uganda.”84 Noting that in the past, Burundians might go on pilgrimage to Uganda, survivor Pasteur Manirambona

is encouraged that more Burundians are making pilgrimages now to discover the Buta martyrdom.85 Pierre Nyandwi, father of martyr Désiré Nduwimana, asserts that, like the Buta martyrs, the Martyrs of Uganda also testified to unity: “Among them, there were Protestants, Catholics, even two Muslims.”86

Anthropologist and theologian Léonidas Nitereka reflects on the inclusiveness of

the Church’s commemoration of martyrs: “In the tradition of the Church, we commemorate saints, martyrs—even those who are geographically or chronologically

distant from us—it all enters into the tradition of the Church.” In commemorating

the Buta martyrdom, he adds, “we want to make present the value that is contained in this event, because the fact of accepting death in the name of faith, agreeing to

die for fraternity, that speaks. It’s a value that speaks, that will remain perpetual, that will speak to man at any moment in history and in any place on the globe.”87

Survivor Pasteur Manirambona, whose brother Patrick Nininahazwe is one of the martyrs, is now a priest serving in Italy, where he is doing graduate work in 82 Venant Bacinoni (retired Bishop of Bururi, theologian) in discussion with the author, October 2018.

83 Niciteretse, discussion.

84 Nizigama, discussion.

85 Manirambona, discussion.

86 Nyandwi, discussion.

87 Nitereka, discussion.

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philosophy. “As a Burundian,” he says, “to have a place where we testify that there

were martyrs shows that our evangelization has born fruit, not just for us, but for the whole church.” He speaks of the “fraternal approach” of Italians who invite him

to share about Buta, “as though this event went beyond Burundi.” He confesses

that “I’d been afraid they might not really understand. But I saw a real openness in the way they listened, a willingness to receive our story.”88 The value of fraternal love for which the Buta martyrs died thus speaks to the wider Church and the

world, fostering a growing fraternity among Christians and others open to listening. In this, it exemplifies “a union increasingly directed toward others” that Francis defines in Fratelli Tutti as “a social friendship that excludes no one and a fraternity that is open to all.”89

FRAGILE, HANDICAPPED, YOUNG The fraternal witness of the Buta martyrs is all the more eloquent in that, as boys

during a civil war, they were particularly vulnerable to genocidal violence and its manipulations. Political scientist Adam Jones has demonstrated “that it is non-

combatant males who tend overwhelmingly to be the victims of gender-selective

killing” and that “modern warfare, with its relentless press-ganging and criminality, extends ever further down the age ladder in the hunt for child soldiers and streets

thugs—overwhelmingly boys.”90 One of the possible aims in attacking Buta was to recruit Hutus in the senior classes to serve as officers in the rebellion, hence the attackers’ focus on the senior dormitory and their repeated attempts to persuade Hutu students to identify themselves.91 Seniors were also targeted because they would soon graduate and report for compulsory military service in the regular army.92 The attackers’ eagerness to eliminate these students is consistent with Jones’s 88 Manirambona, discussion.

89 Francis, Fratelli Tutti, 94.

90 Adam Jones, Gender Inclusive: Essays on violence, men and feminist international relations (London: Routledge, 2009), 179, 173.

91 Nyabenda, discussion.

92 Innocent Ndayiragije recalls hearing attackers shout, “To the senior dormitory, they’ll go for military service soon and attack us!” as they ran up the stairs to the dormitory; cf. Ndayiragije, discussion.

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analysis of the emphasis on “battle age” males in genocide: “the enemy who is today passive, feminized, prone to abuse may tomorrow be the active, masculine

abuser of oneself.”93 Indeed, when the CNDD-FDD claimed responsibility for the Buta attack, they accused the seminary of being a training center for Tutsi militants, claiming the latter had opened fire on FDD troops as they passed through

the area. These unfounded allegations received considerable credence in European news organs.94

Survivors of the Buta attack testify to an acute awareness of their vulnerability. On dormitory duty during the attack, supervisor Henri Nizigama says that “we were

set there like baby birds. There were no weapons. There were no soldiers. There were just these children who died in unity.”95 Teacher Jacqueline Ntakirutimana, whose family clothed and sheltered martyr Oscar Nzisabira before he died of his injuries

after fleeing the attack on the junior dormitory, recalls that “he was a little child, really, in Eighth Grade. He was wearing a little top and underwear.” As the civil war

continued to rage after the attack, the surviving students experienced a complex vulnerability that was at once physical, social, political and spiritual. Newly dis-

charged from hospital and on crutches, student Nepo Bironkwa joined in founding a survivors’ association after the Mass commemorating the first anniversary of the

martyrdom. The association was later refounded as the peace and development

organization Association Lumière du Monde—Buta (Light of the World Associa-

tion—Buta), or ALM-Buta. Bironkwa, now a journalist, served as president and chair of the board of ALM-Buta from 2012 to 2018. He recalls how vulnerable the survivors were to exploitation in the years following the massacre:

93 Jones, Gender Inclusive, 297. For Jones’s work on Burundian genocide in particular, see “The Great Lakes Genocides: Hidden Histories, Hidden Precedents,” in Hidden Genocides: Power, Knowledge, Memory, ed. Alexander Laban Hinton et al. (New Brunswick, New Jersey: Rutgers UP, 2013), where he characterizes the 1972 Burundian genocide as “a classic (perhaps the classic) eliticide—aimed at stripping the target group of its educated elements.” Jones classifies the 1972 genocide as “a classic gendercide against males,” noting that in many areas of the country, and especially the south (where Buta is located), no educated Hutu males were believed to have survived; cf. Jones, “Great Lakes,” 133. Daley compares the 1972 targeted killings of Hutu students with the pervasive vulnerability of all students as emerging elites in the 1993-2005 civil war; cf. Daley, Gender & Genocide, 110-11.

94 Bukuru, Children of God, 111-14.

95 Nizigama, discussion.

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We were still fragile, handicapped, young. When we organized a memorial Mass at the [Bujumbura] cathedral, we’d come out to find young people wav-

ing political posters . . . People would show up and take the opportunity to

spread their own message to the audience—even family members of survivors. . . . At our first commemorations, uninvited guests took the floor to say that [the

seminarians] had been massacred by Hutu extremists. . . . Now we’re adults, we’re autonomous. We can tell people their message has no place here, even a priest. But before, when we were fragile and vulnerable, it was easy to take over

our commemorations. We knew then and we know now that commemoration is very political, very sensitive.96

Physically vulnerable in their long recuperation from injuries that have left some

with handicapped limbs, damaged organs or bullets embedded in bones, the survi-

vors also had the social vulnerability of children in a society that privileges age and familial authority. They learned early that the massacre of their classmates would

be exploited for political purposes, becoming wary of offers to support their commemorations financially.97 Spiritually, they were also vulnerable to manipulation

by priests who sought to frame the Buta story in partisan terms. On some occasions, survivors were prevented from sharing their testimony after commemorative Masses in the Buta martyrs’ sanctuary, an enforced silence that Bironkwa compares to reliving the event itself.98

The survivors had their own objectives in memorializing the deaths of their fellow

students. Principal among these, says Bironkwa, was the need “to stay together for solidarity, mutual support, and especially for commemoration, to gather together

around this event at Buta.”99 Their main vehicle was the Catholic Mass, offered in memory of the Martyrs of Fraternity on the thirtieth of each month. In their first two years, they would gather after Masses to share memories and reconstruct 96 Jean Nepomucène Bironkwa (survivor, past president and chair of the board, ALM—Buta) in discussion with the author, March 2018.

97 Bironkwa, discussion. Bironkwa recalls politicians offering them a bus to travel to Buta for commemorative Masses. He emphasizes that this is why it is so important for ALM-Buta to finance its own activities.

98 Bironkwa, discussion.

99 Bironkwa, discussion.

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the day of the attack. “What happened in the dormitory,” Bironkwa says, “no one has the full story on that. Someone right next to you heard something you didn’t

hear.”100 He also testifies to how the survivors’ continuing solidarity helped them address their inner trauma: “For those who stayed together to talk, to say things out loud—that allowed us to get past the fear, the hatred, the anger that we had

inside us. The fact of staying together—both ethnicities together—allowed us to

go beyond ethnic hatred.”101 Innocent Ndayiragije, who survived multiple injuries in the attack and is now executive director of ALM-Buta, confirms that gathering

for commemorations allowed the survivors to transcend the ethnic manipulations

of the war. But it wasn’t easy. “Buta was not a community of angels,” he observes.

There were boys from political families on different sides. One or two didn’t want to form an association at all. Some asked, “If the attackers had told Hutus and Tutsis to separate before they started shooting, what would we have done?” In the

end, they agreed not to say “if.” They would focus on what had happened, not what might have happened.102

A CULTURE OF PEACE: LIVING THE INTORE DANCE The extraordinarily mature decisions of these young survivors, most of them still

in high school or beginning university, were the fruits of the seminary’s efforts to

create a culture of peace during the early years of the civil war. Innocent Ndayiragije, who was the incoming student president at the time of the attack, says the

Buta students received an education “designed to produce rational men who could transcend the differences there were during crises, people who could say, ‘If Papa

did this, do I have to do it, too?’ We shouldn’t be selfish and always crying, ‘My

ethnic group has suffered.’ I don’t need to be my father.”103 Vincent Nsabimana, father of martyr Jean-Thierry Arakaza, was principal of another boarding school in the region during the civil war. He affirms that the students’ witness to unity

was grounded in home and school training: “It’s the fruit of upbrining by parents 100 Bironkwa, discussion.

101 Bironkwa, discussion.

102 Ndayiragije, discussion.

103 Ndayiragije, discussion.

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and the seminary’s leadership, of training, of moral and religious education. It’s the

result of a certain overall education.”104 Buta teacher Augustin Nzohabonayo, who went on to direct another state boarding school during the civil war, emphasizes

the exceptional cohesiveness of the Buta school community in preparing the students to make their witness:

In many regions, there was a complete breach between the two groups in the

population. Students made a sort of ghetto out of the school; they didn’t go out for fear of being killed. Here [at Buta], there was social cohesion in the whole community—the school and the locality. Some students used to go out

to drink—unauthorized outings. That meant that the students weren’t afraid of the local community. . . . One of the deep causes that allowed the students to

die for one another was that there was cohesion between teachers. Elsewhere, if students died, it was because of the teachers. That’s why students in turn would kill teachers. . . . At Buta, there were no cliques among teachers.105

Student survivors interviewed in 2008 also emphasized the effectiveness of school

leadership in preventing ethnic conflict at the seminary, citing the example of inter-ethnic collaboration among teachers and other staff members.106

Students had nevertheless come to the seminary with strong and divergent ideas

about Burundi’s past conflicts, especially the 1972 genocide, though it had occurred before they were born.107 After the October 1993 assassination of President Ndada-

ye, Buta’s Rector, Zacharie Bukuru, instituted evening meetings at the seminary so that students could express their anger, fear and mistrust regarding events that soon

escalated into civil war. Partly to release tensions from these stormy encounters, the seminary’s leadership also brought students together in sporting and cultural

activities. One of the most important of these was traditional Burundian dance.

104 Nsabimana, discussion.

105 Nzohabonayo, discussion. Survivor Nicolas Nyabenda notes that one sign of this good understanding among teachers was that no one resigned from the staff during the war; cf. Nyabenda, discussion.

106 Alexis Nimubona, “La part des écoles sous convention catholique dans la formation des cadres: Cas du Petit Séminaire de Buta (1965-2008)” (Undergraduate thesis, University of Burundi, 2009), 102-3.

107 Bukuru, Children of God, 34-5.

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Bukuru, who instituted the dance program, recalls that “Traditional dancing called

us beyond ourselves into generosity, joy, relaxation, sharing, dialogue, and purity. . . .

The dances brought us together in a single culture, uniting us in something beyond

our differences in ethnicity, age, or social status.”108 In the polemical context of the

civil war, where speech was easily misinterpreted, dance allowed students to express their cultural unity nonverbally. Survivor Edouard Nkeshimana, who taught the

umuyebe dance of his native Mirwa region to fellow students, explains how that dance’s powerful foot-stomping grounded them in a shared ancestral connection

to the earth, celebrating their vitality: “We really like to dance with our feet. . . . It’s

as though we’re packing down the earth. That shows that the earth is our mother. . . . It’s also good exercise. It expresses a celebration of life, showing that we’re in

good health, good shape.”109 Nkeshimana, who helped carry Innocent Ndayiragije

to safety after he was wounded during the attack, lost his sense of taste and smell for five years following the ordeal. When speaking of the attack, he says he can still smell the smoke from the grenade and the spilled blood of his classmates. “Inside

us, there lives a message that cannot be translated,” he relates. “What we lived through goes far beyond what we can say.”110

Among the dances offering nonverbal release and expressions of solidarity at the

seminary, the intore or warriors’ dance retains an important place in commemora-

tions of the martyrs. Originally a spectacular military parade performed for kings

and noblemen, the intore dance has been adapted liturgically to the Catholic Mass, where it is offered to the glory of God by young male dancers in traditional war-

riors’ costume. Brandishing fringed batons representing a bow or spear in one hand

and a shield in the other, the dancers mime advances and retreats, executing leaps and pirouettes with undulations of the upper body to demonstrate their skillful

evasion of enemy missiles. The ensemble moves as one person, exemplifying unity, 108 Bukuru, Children of God, 43. Sylvie Hatungimana makes similar observations in her study of Burundian dance and identity, describing its use in schools as a means of fostering dialogue, reducing tensions between students and calling them to something greater than themselves; cf.

Sylvie Hatungimana, “Les Danses Rundi en Terre Étrangère: Une étude menée auprès des Barundi de Belgique (Dissertation, Université de Louvain-la-neuve, 2005), 82.

109 Edouard Nkeshimana (student survivor, priest assigned to Buta Pastoral Center) in discussion with the author, May 2018.

110 Nkeshimana, discussion.

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flexibility and grace as well as strength, daring and endurance.111 The intore dance thus demonstrates supple alternatives to aggression in its response to imagined

violence, even as it choreographs battle. The technical term for its performance of

is kwiyereka, meaning to show oneself or demonstrate one’s devotion, courage, and grace.112 In its function of demonstrating cultural values, kwiyereka is related to the

etymological sense of the Greek term martyros, which is derived from verbs mean-

ing to affirm or prove. Survivor Nicolas Nyabenda defines Christian martyrdom “as a way of bringing out Christ, this hidden God, to show him to the world.”113 As intore dancers demonstrate their virile devotion to the king, so martyrs also show the

hidden Christ to the world. The literal meaning of intore is “chosen,” indicating the high honor of being called to protect, and possibly die for, the king.114 A sense of chosenness also characterizes martyrs. As philosopher Marie Goretti Nizigiyimana explains, in martyrdom, one both chooses and is chosen by God to bear witness

to a truth that one cannot relinquish, a truth that embraces one’s whole being.115

Martyrdom and the intore dance are thus both associated with being chosen for public demonstration of high values and ideals.

Philosopher Ferdinand Nindorera articulates a connection between Christian

martyrdom and the social and aesthetic practices that build human community: “Martyrs found civilization and human community. Their commemoration restores social cohesion, revives history, and even reinforces the arts . . . at the level of sacred

111 The intore costume also includes a crown of raffia, a leopard skin around the waist, criss-crossed bands of beads over a bare torso, beaded bracelets, a white necklace, and rattling anklets. For variations on this accoutrement and its interpretation, cf. Jean-Baptiste Ntahokaja, Plaidoyer pour l’Afrique (Bujumbura, Université du Burundi, 1993), 63, and Hatungimana, “Les Danses Rundi,” 72.

112 Hatungimana, “Les Danses Rundi,” 53, 71-2; Ntahokaja, Plaidoyer, 63-4.

113 Nyabenda, Letter.

114 Hatungimana, “Les Danses Rundi,” 71-2; Ntahokaja, Plaidoyer, 63-4. Both scholars note that, traditionally, intore dancers performed at the royal court or were attached to noble households or chiefdoms. Acquiring skill in this dance was a central part of the training for the sons of such courts or households. Aesthetic and moral connotations of the term intore include beauty, goodness and grace. Socially, it points to an elite, generally associated with Tutsis. The earth-connected umuyebe dance taught by Buta seminarian and survivor Edouard Nkeshimana is generally associated with Hutus.

115 Marie Goretti Nizigiyimana (professor of philosophy, former secretary general of the National Office of Catholic Education in Burundi) in discussion with the author, September 2018.

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music, dance, rhetoric, architecture.”116 These spiritual-aesthetic connections also inform survivor accounts of dancing during commemorations of the Buta mar-

tyrdom. Innocent Ndayiragije, who was a member of the intore dance group as a seminarian, describes his experience of joining in the post-communion dance at the twentieth anniversary of the Buta martyrdom in 2017:

It was a thanksgiving. I was shot in the knee and the lower back but I can walk

and play sports and use the members of the body that God gave me. One of the dances that really shaped me was the intore dance. An intore is a warrior for the king; he’s dynamic, someone who is healthy in body and spirit, who

can defend the king. If you’re an intore, it means you’re wise and good, truly

sociable, someone who can bring people together. If you’ve once danced that dance—ah!—we danced it when we were twenty years old, and twenty years later, we had to dance it again for the glory of God.117

In Ndayiragije’s account, an intore exemplifies bodily and spiritual health, qualities whose purpose is to defend the king. Focused on service, the intore also acts as a

leader, bringing people together through wisdom, goodness and true sociability.

Scarred by trauma to his knee and lower back during the attack, Ndayiragije also

testifies to having been shaped by the intore dance as a seminarian. Twenty years

later, his intore training triumphs over the traces of aggression against his body.

He gives thanks that he can express physical and spiritual health in the dynamic

sociability of the post-communion dance, his exclamation of “ah!” standing in for the glory that cannot be articulated in words.

Father Léopold Mvukiye, who survived the 1972 genocide as a minor seminarian, was a priest and science teacher at Buta Minor Seminary at the time of the 1997 attack. Reputed to have confessed the martyrs the night before they died, he left

the dais of honor during the twentieth anniversary Mass to join the young intore dancers:

I did it spontaneously, to let out my exuberance, my joy. Dance is really the 116 Ferdinand Nindorera (philosopher and priest) in discussion with the author, September 2018.

117 Ndayiragije, discussion.

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African soul. It’s spellbinding, captivating; it pulls you in. I had to be in the midst of my children that day. Rhythm is African. We make sure that everyone

enters the dance. Even those who don’t want to, we push them. It dispels our

calamities, frustrations, repressions. Otherwise, we’d go mad, given the events we’ve had to endure.118

Like Ndayiragije, Mvukiye articulates his experience of dancing during the memorial in terms of the social values of solidarity and inclusivity. He, too, affirms how

dance preserves mental and spiritual health, dispelling the calamities, frustrations and repressions that might otherwise drive Burundians mad. Meditating on the necessary transformation of Burundian society as the civil war neared its conclu-

sion, Zacharie Bukuru also invoked the aesthetics of commemoration as a way of healing the nation: “What symbols can draw together young Burundians who have survived our ethnic conflicts? What liturgy must we invent so that these symbols

might be regularly celebrated and buried in our hidden memory, so that no-one might again forget what makes us live together as a people?”119

Fifteen years after the attack, the survivors decided to refound their association as

an organization open to anyone who shares their mission of peaceful solidarity. “It

was to say that if it remained a survivors’ association, it wouldn’t last long,” explains president and chair of the board Eric Nkengurutse. “So we created Light of the World Buta after this light that blazed at Buta. Now there are women who have

joined, families. Soon it will be up to our children to keep it going.”120 Light of

the World Buta has participated with other organizations in supporting the work of Burundi’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission and other transitional justice

projects and is also collaborating with the Diocese of Bururi to prepare the silver jubilee of the Martyrs of Fraternity in 2022. One of their missions is to organize 118 Léopold Mvukiye (priest and science teacher at Buta Minor Seminary now and at the time of the attack) in discussion with the author, May 2018. Sylvie Hatungimana also characterizes dance as the soul of the Burundian people: “The practice of dance is a very important act in Burundi and for the Murundi growing up in the country. It is not just the mirror of a country and a people; it is also its soul;” cf. Hatungimana, “Les Danses Rundi,” 86 (my translation).

119 Bukuru, Children of God, 158.

120 Eric Nkengurutse (student survivor, president and chair of the board of ALM-Buta) in discussion with the author, February 2021.

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support for the martyrs’ parents, some of whom live in extreme poverty, and all of whom are aging. More than twenty years after their great ordeal, a group of once fragile, handicapped youth has come of age.

VULNERABLE PEACE The vulnerability that characterized the survivors at the time of the attack, however, might still be said to qualify the national projects of peace and reconcilia-

tion in which they participate. Peace in Burundi seems perennially to be fragile,

handicapped, young. This fragility is perhaps not a handicap, however, but rather, a resource. Meditating on the confluence of violence, mourning and politics in the

context of the United States following the 2001 attack on the World Trade Center, Judith Butler calls for “reimagining the possibility of community on the basis of vulnerability and loss.”121 The body gathered around the story of Buta is indeed

such a community. While it commemorates vulnerability and loss, it also speaks of fraternal love, a value rendered all the more impressive because exemplified by

undefended youth. “Suffering can yield an experience of humility, of vulnerability, of impressionability and dependence, and these can become resources,” writes Butler, “if we do not ‘resolve’ them too quickly.”122 The ongoing commemoration of the martyrs of Buta fosters a recurrent experience of the qualities Butler names. In

its social and aesthetic rites of inclusion and solidarity, commemoration can hold a space for shared responses to violence—responses that are supple, dynamic and

graceful, like the movements of the intore dancers—responses that do not resolve into cries for war in the name of self-protection or vindication.

Burundian responses to the Buta story highlight its educative role in Burundian

society, emphasizing the paradox that fragile, handicapped schoolboys have be-

come the teachers of the nation. Retired Bishop Venant Bacinoni acknowledges that “These young people gave us a lesson in fraternity that goes beyond words to

speak against all those who want to separate people.”123 Philosopher Marie Goretti 121 Butler, Precarious Life, 20.

122 Butler, Precarious Life, 149-50.

123 Venant Bacinoni (retired Bishop of Bururi, theologian), in discussion with the author, May 2018.

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Nizigiyimana emphasizes that it is a lesson for all Burundians, revealing the shared nature of suffering during periods of national conflict: “These children who died

speak to us. When they testified for fraternity, they were all called to testify togeth-

er. If there is a problem in the country, it cannot strike one ethnicity alone; there are

always victims on all sides.”124 For survivor and physician Melchior Ngowenubusa, the Buta martyrs speak into the future of the nation, calling on Burundians to

develop ways to live together and learn from the past.125 Through their example, the possibility of national reconciliation becomes real. “The testimony of the chil-

dren of Buta,” says philosopher Jean Bosco Habarugira, “shows that the mission of reconciling the people of Burundi is possible.”126 For teacher Augustin Nzohabonayo, in Buta at least, that mission has already been accomplished. “The situation

that we live in today is one of great cohesion following the example given by the students,” he relates, “an example emanating from internal cohesion in the school community as a whole, but also from the external community. Today, there’s no going back on it.”127

As Nzohabonayo testifies, the Buta martyrs’ witness to fraternal love is bearing

fruit in Burundi. Bishop Salvatore Niciteretse observes that “it is these seminarians who are helping us to live fraternity.” Pointing to the growing pilgrimage

movement from diocesan parishes, which unites Hutus and Tutsis in long journeys on foot to the Martyrs’ Sanctuary, he says, “This is how blood poured out brings

people together. While they were alive, [the seminarians] could praise the Lord, but because they died for a cause, they cause the Lord to be praised even more.

Before, they were only forty offering praise, but today, they are thousands. They’re purifying the site.”128 Buta secretary Barnabé Bizindavyi, who was in the dormitory during the attack, believes that the martyrs’ witness is calling Burundians back to social values they had abandoned: “The testimony of these martyrs is first to the

Barundi, who have been in interminable wars, in a fratricidal war. It’s a testimony 124 Nizigiyimana, discussion.

125 Ngowenubusa, discussion.

126 Jean Bosco Habarugira (priest and professor of philosophy) in discussion with the author, September 2018.

127 Nzohabonayo, discussion.

128 Niciteretse, discussion.

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of reconciliation, of a return to the message bequeathed by their ancestors to live in peace, in fraternity, in love.”129 Survivor Pasteur Manirambona recalls that when

they were young, the seminarians dreamed of being doctors, teachers, magistrates.

“All these dreams have been realized as a single dream,” he now says, “the dream of uniting our country. We have received this gift.”130

It is a gift of which Burundians are proud. “It’s a great honor for the Catholic

Church that these children were able to die together,” affirms Bishop Salvatore Niciteretse, “a great honor for the defenders of love and fraternity. . . . Though it

lost its sons, the Church is proud.”131 Neighbor Languide Baragahorana, who registered her son at Buta only months after the seminarians were massacred, speaks of “rendering homage to the bravura they had to be able not to separate,” asserting

that after the attack, parents were not afraid but rather “proud to send our children

to the seminary because we saw that they were teaching fraternity, teaching love in that place.”132 Near the end of a discussion in which she expressed great love for

her son, martyr Alexis Ndikumana, and a strong sense of personal loss, Teresa Banyankubusa could nevertheless affirm that “It’s a blessing to be among the forty that

God chose. I’ve given birth to eight children, but God chose one. I rejoice greatly.

Alexis has left a good testimony.”133 Neighbor Léonidas Ntibinonoye affirms that

“each one of these martyrs is an eternal image. A light shone in Buta and the darkness could not extinguish it.”134

The light of Buta is fraternal love. As a value, fraternity has a human particularity

to it, for it is made manifest in the love between particular people whose human qualities give it an exemplary character. The youthfulness of the Buta martyrs is

notable in the ways Burundians speak of them: “These young people gave us a lesson in fraternity . . . These children who died speak to us . . . The testimony given by the children 129 Barnabé Bizindavyi (secretary of Buta Minor Seminary, student supervisor at the time of the attack) in discussion with the author, December 2019.

130 Manirambona, discussion.

131 Niciteretse, discussion.

132 Languide Baragahorana (Buta neighbor, mother of Buta graduate, ALM-Buta member, retired nurse) in discussion with the author, May 2020.

133 Banyankubusa, discussion.

134 Ntibinonoye, discussion.

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of Buta . . . If these children hadn’t stayed together . . . Though it lost its sons, the Church

is proud . . . I’ve given birth to eight children, but God chose one . . . .” The value of

the Buta testimony speaks with a particular eloquence because of the youthful vulnerability of its exemplars. Fragile, handicapped, young—they withstood vio-

lent attempts to separate them on the day of the attack and attempts to polarize their testimony in the years that followed. The ongoing story of their fraternal

love demonstrates that peace itself is something equally vulnerable, perhaps equally

precarious and unresolved. “Peace is never given completely,” says anthropologist Léonidas Nitereka. “It is a reality that is always still to be built. That is why it is

always still fragile. . . . Peace is thus always an initiative still to be pursued; it always still requires efforts to renew it. It has this fragility.”135 Perhaps the ultimate lesson

of the martyrs of Buta lies in their precarious fragility. Out of impressionable vul-

nerability, youthful dependence, and a speaking humility before God, one another and their assailants, they became resources to guide Burundi and other nations in the pursuit of a precarious peace that is always still to be built, pursued, renewed.

CONCLUSION The testimony of the Martyrs of Fraternity of Buta resonates strongly with Fran-

cis’s teaching on the universal scope of fraternal love in Fratelli Tutti. Indeed, their witness to fraternal love speaks to his desire for “a new vision of fraternity and so-

cial friendship that will not remain at the level of words.”136 If Francis is right that “the first victim of every war is ‘the human family’s innate vocation to fraternity,’”137

then testimonies to fraternal love during war—especially civil war—are particu-

larly valuable in restoring the human family. “Life exists where there is bonding, communion, fraternity;” Francis declares, “and life is stronger than death when it is

built on true relationships and bonds of fidelity.”138 The Buta martyrs’ love for one another proved stronger than death because it was built on fraternal relationships 135 Nitereka, discussion. I include both senses of “always” and “still” in translating the French adverb toujours with which Nitereka repeatedly qualifies the ongoing process of peacebuilding and the fragile nature of peace itself.

136 Francis, Fratelli Tutti, 6.

137 Francis, Fratelli Tutti, 26.

138 Francis, Fratelli Tutti, 87.

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fostered by the seminary community and because it was rooted in a culture of sacrificial commitment to others, particularly those “born together” in umuvukano. As

Abapfuriye Umuvukano, or those who died for fraternity, the Martyrs of Fraternity of Buta speak together against the fratricidal violence of Burundi’s civil war and

the human self-destructiveness of all wars. In their youthful vulnerability, they also

testify to the divine foundation of fraternal love. Even as the human fathers of the martyrs insist on the element of divine assistance in their sons’ witness to fraternity in the face of death, so Francis argues that “without an openness to the Father of

all, there will be no solid stable reasons for an appeal to fraternity,” quoting Caritas

in Veritate to affirm that “reason, by itself, is capable of grasping the equality be-

tween men and of giving stability to their civic coexistence, but it cannot establish fraternity.”139 The Buta martyrs offer a fully realized Christian witness to fraternal love, one in which Burundians recognize the quality of ibanga, which holds noth-

ing back in its absolute commitment to others. The process of building fraternity, in Burundi and elsewhere, requires a similar commitment, as Francis recognizes in

calling for a “perseverance” that may entail “moments of silence and suffering,” yet “can patiently embrace the broader experience of individuals and peoples.”140

The virtues of perseverance and patience, essential components of ibanga, are also

fundamental to Francis’s vision of peace: “There is no end to the building of a country’s social peace; rather, it is ‘an open-ended endeavour, a never-ending task

that demands the commitment of everyone and challenges us to work tirelessly to build the unity of the nation.’”141 Francis’s repeated qualification of this task

as having “no end,” “open-ended” and “never-ending” recalls Léonidas Nitereka’s characterization of peace as “a reality always still to be built . . . an initiative still

to be pursued [that] always still requires efforts to renew it.” It is toward this pre-

carious, open-ended, and ever to be pursued initiative of peace that the Martyrs of Fraternity of Buta lead us. It will not be the robust, consolidated peace commonly articulated in metaphors of building and sustainability, however attractive that

vision may be. For if peace is to be sustained at all, the Buta testimony suggests, 139 Francis, Fratelli Tutti, 272.

140 Francis, Fratelli Tutti, 50.

141 Francis, Fratelli Tutti, 232.

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it will be in the form of something much more vulnerable, something supple and sociable and closely connected to suffering, like the martyrs themselves. In their

precarious vulnerability, and the consequent grandeur of their example, the martyrs of Buta lead us toward a peace that is always still fragile, handicapped, young—and through those very qualities, real and human and possible.

BIBLIOGRAPHY Bukuru, Zacharie. We Are All Children of God: The Story of the Forty Young Martyrs of Buta—Burundi. Translated by Jodi Mikalachki. Nairobi: Paulines Africa, 2015.

Butler, Judith. Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence. London: Verso, 2004.

Chrétien, Jean-Pierre and Jean-François Dupaquier. Burundi 1972: Au bord des génocides. Paris: Karthala, 2007.

Daley, Patricia O. Gender & Genocide in Burundi: The Search For Spaces of Peace in the Great Lakes Region. Oxford: James Currey, 2008.

Depelchin, Jacques. Silences in African History: Between the syndromes of discovery and abolition. Dar es Salaam: Nkuki na Nyota, 2005.

Francis. Fratelli Tutti. Accessed October 18, 2020. Vatican.va. https://www.vatican. va/content/francesco/en/encyclicals/documents/papa-francesco_20201003_ enciclica-fratelli-tutti.html.

Hatungimana, Sylvie. “Les Danses Rundi en Terre Étrangère: Une étude menée auprès des Barundi de Belgique.” Dissertation, University of Louvain-laneuve, 2005.

Jones, Adam. Gender Inclusive: Essays on violence, men and feminist international relations. London: Routledge, 2009.

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_____. “The Great Lakes Genocides: Hidden Histories, Hidden Precedents.”

In Hidden Genocides: Power, Knowledge, Memory, edited by Alexander Laban Hinton et al., 129-48. New Brunswick, New Jersey: Rutgers UP, 2013.

Lemarchand, René. Burundi: Ethnocide as discourse and practice. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994.

_____ . Rwanda and Burundi. New York: Praeger, 1970.

Lemarchand, René and David Martin. Selective Genocide in Burundi. London: Minority Rights Group, Report No. 20, July 1974.

Longman, Timothy. Proxy Targets: Civilians in the War in Burundi. London: Human Rights Watch, 1998.

Malkki, Liisa. Purity and Exile: Violence, Memory and National Cosmology Among

Hutu Refugees in Tanzania. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995. https://doi.org/10.7208/chicago/9780226190969.001.0001.

Mukuri, Melchior. Dictionnaire Chronologique du Burundi, Vol. 2: 1966-1993, L’Ere des Coups D’Etat. Bujumbura: Université du Burundi, 2013.

Nahayo, Anatole. “De la Répression du Génocide: Des crimes contre l’humanité et des crimes de guerre commis au Burundi de 1993 à 2005.” MA thesis, University of Burundi, 2005.

Nimubona, Alexis. “La Part des Écoles Sous Convention Catholique dans la Formation des Cadres: Cas du Petit Séminaire de Buta (1965 - 2008).”

Undergraduate thesis, University of Burundi, 2009.

Ntabona, Adrien. Letter to the author. November 22, 2018. _____. L’Ubuntu (Humanité réussie). Ses roses et ses épines au Burundi. Bujumbura: CRID, 2020.

Ntahokaja, Jean-Baptiste. Plaidoyer pour l’Afrique. Bujumbura: Université du Burundi, 1993.

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Nyabenda, Nicolas. Letter to the author. November 11, 2018.

Obura, Anna. Staying power: Struggling to Reconstruct Education in Burundi

since 1993. Paris: International Institute for Educational Planning, 2008.

Siryuyumunsi, Thaddée. “L’école : gestion des tensions dans les établissements

secondaires.” In Burundi, la fracture identitaire: Logiques de violence et certitudes “ethniques”, edited by Jean-Pierre Chrétien and Melchior Mukuri, 171-8. Paris: Karthala, 2002.

United Nations Economic and Social Council (UNESC) Commission on Human Rights, Sub-Commission on Prevention of Discrimination and Protection

of Minorities. Revised and Updated Report on the Question of the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide (Whitaker Report), Thirty-eighth session, Item 4 of the provisional agenda, (E/CN.4/Sub.2/1985/6). July 2, 1985.

United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO).

Manuel sur les Valeurs Culturelles du Burundi. Bujumbura: August 2017.

United Nations Security Council (UNSC), International Commission of Inquiry for Burundi. Final Report (S/1996/682). August 22, 1996.

Uvin, Peter. Life After Violence: A People’s Story of Burundi. London: Zed Books, 2009. https://doi.org/10.5040/9781350221130.

Watt, Nigel. Burundi: Biography of a Small African Country. London: Hurst, 2008.

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G U S TA V O M O R E L L O , S J

Catholicism in Context: Religious Practice in Latin America1

Gustavo Morello, SJ, is a Jesuit priest and Associate Professor of Sociology at Boston College. He holds a PhD (Universidad de Buenos Aires), a Master’s in social sciences (Universidad Nacional de Córdoba), and StL and PhL degrees (UdSal). He taught at Universidad Católica de Córdoba and has been a visiting scholar at the University of Michigan and lecturer at the University of Oxford. Morello studies the Latin American religious landscape exploring how modernity affects Latin Americans’ religious experience. His latest books are Religion in Latin America: An Enchanted Modernity (Oxford University Press, 2021) and The Catholic Church and Argentina’s Dirty War (Oxford University Press, 2015).

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N

orma, 1who lives in the city of Córdoba, in Argentina, is a 59-year-old

Catholic woman. She did not finish primary school and has worked for most of her life cleaning houses. With her husband who passed away a

couple of years before our meeting, they were able to buy a piece of land in the east part of the city. They built a house in the rear end of the property, and later one

of her two daughters built an apartment for her own family in the front. In total, there are eight people on the homestead. Norma has another daughter who lives nearby, so on Wednesday, her day off, Norma takes care of some of her grandchildren and sometimes her two great-grandchildren.

She identified as Catholic. She does not miss the Christmas Mass in the nearby church, and often goes on

pilgrimages to the sanctuary of Our Lady of Lourdes, near the city of Alta Gracia, about 20 miles away from Córdoba. When she does not have money or time, she

goes to pray to a grotto that is on a public square, some two miles away from her house. She has a replica of a

Lourdes grotto at home, and also has an image of St. Expedite,2 that a friend gave to her some time ago (see Figure 1).

She showed the researcher a Pentecostal book of prayers from a nearby church (Figure 2), pointed to a wall clock with a Jewish hamsa (Figure 3), and to her altar.

Her altar consists mostly of a little grotto of Our Lady of Lourdes decorated with

rosaries (Figure 4). She also placed there a picture of two of her grandchildren, 1 2

This article extends research initially presented in Gustavo Morello, SJ, “Lived Religion in Latin America,” in Perplexed Religions, eds. Miriam Diez Bosch, Alberto Melloni, and Josep Lluís Micó Sanz (Barcelona, Blanquerna Observatory, 2009), 149-158.

St. Expedite, more commonly known as San Expedito, was an Armenian-born Roman centurion and martyr. He is known as the patron saint of “urgent causes” and is especially beloved in Argentina. For more information on devotion to San Expedito, see the Catholics & Cultures entry, “Feast of San Expedito” at https://www.catholicsandcultures.org/feasts-holy-days/san-expedito-argentina.

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Figure 1: Norma identifies a mix of religious and nonreligious objects as meaningful in her life.

An image of St. Expedite shares the top shelf with an audio system.

48 | Catholicism in Context: Religious Practice in Latin America

Norma also shares: Figure 2: A Pentecostal book of prayers; Figure 3: A clock with a Jewish hamsa; and Figure 4: An altar with a grotto of Our Lady of Lourdes.

dressed up with the uniform for Argentina’s public school (the white smock). Two remote controls were on the same table, where she has also a model airplane on the

top shelf. On another shelf in her living room the audio system shares space with St. Expedite (Figure 1).

INTRODUCTION Norma is a Catholic woman who practices her religiosity in an unorthodox way—

if we look at her practices from a Catholic theological perspective. In this article, I would like to explore what Norma’s religiosity tells us about a Latin American

way of practicing religion, rather than assessing the orthodoxy of her practices.

Accordingly, I will use a sociological lens to explore the religious situation in Latin America.

Among the different ways of studying the religious, sociology focuses on the influence of religions in societies and how changes in social life affect the religiosi-

ty of people. An important transformation in Latin American societies has been

the cultural trend that we usually call “modernity.” In Norma’s story, for example, the remote control, her sound system, and, most importantly, the picture of her grandchildren attending a public school, together represent one of the flagships of

Argentina’s church/state separation: a public, free and secular educational system.

By modernity, in the social sciences, we usually mean: 1) the separation of social

functions and specialization of the “spheres of value,” that is, the definition of a

specific area for the economy, another for politics, science, religion, and the like, each one with its own rationalities, rules and authorities; 2) the diverse dynamics JOURNAL OF GLOBAL CATHOLICISM

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of capitalism (industrialization, globalization); and 3) the expansion of the ideas of human rights, either civil, political, social or sexual.

These three aspects of modernity reach different contexts in different ways, with different emphases, and through different agents. In many cases, modernity emerg-

es as a hegemonic cultural force imposed by force, either military or economic,

which belittles the recipient cultures as “backward” or “pre-modern.” In any case, many features of modernity (differentiation of the religious and political systems, the growing awareness on human rights, globalization) are present in Latin

America. On the continent, we tend to speak of “hybrid,” “baroque,” “incomplete,” “forced” modernity, etc., as a way of emphasizing the fact of modernization and the

differences between Latin America and Europe or the United States.3 However, for many Latin American thinkers the substantive is still modernity; “hybrid” or “baroque” are adjectives.

How does modernity affect the religiosity of Latin Americans? A central problem

regarding Latin American modernity and its particularities is that the conceptu-

al tools we use were designed to understand the transformations that modernity provoked in European religiosity. Some researchers, for example, think that the

subjects practice a religion clearly distinguishable from other religions. The catego-

ries to measure membership are the ones established by the religious institutions: surveys assume that you are either a Catholic or an Anglican, but not both. Or they consider that the good believer is the one who believes and practices the institutional mandates. The idea of ​​an exclusive membership, measured as participation

in the weekly service, and the intellectual assent to a dogmatic belief, is based on a

religiosity typical of the North Atlantic region—a conception of religiosity which was applied uncritically and normatively to the rest of the world. These concepts

do not allow us to apprehend the daily religiosity of Latin Americans. As it is the case with Norma, she identifies as Catholic, but goes to a Pentecostal church, and observes some Jewish traditions at home.

3

Darcy Ribeiro, El Dilema de América Latina: Estructuras del poder y fuerzas insurgents (México D. F.: Siglo Veintiuno, 1971); Bolívar Echeverria, La Modernidad de lo Barroco (México D.F.: Ediciones Era, 2000); Néstor Garcia Canclini, Culturas Híbridas: Estrategias para Entrar y Salir de la Modernidad (Buenos Aires: Paidos, 2001).

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STUDYING LIVED RELIGIOSITY IN LATIN AMERICA Studies of the religion of Latin Americans have largely explored national cases, investigating what institutions did in certain historical circumstances, and measuring

the religiosity of the population through surveys.4 While some anthropologists have explored religious practices among particular groups, we do not know how ordinary, urban Latin Americans practice religion.

This question of “how?” is typical of qualitative studies, but there are not many comparative, regional studies that answer it. To fill this gap, a group of eleven re-

searchers from four universities (Boston College, Pontifical Catholic University of Peru, Catholic University of Córdoba, and Catholic University of Uruguay) funded

by the John Templeton Foundation conducted between 2015 and 2018 a study of

religion among Latin Americans in their daily lives. The study placed emphasis on how religion is practiced rather than what is believed.

In this research, we paid attention to the aspects of beliefs and practices that believers consider important in their lives. For example, we did not focus on what

Norma does not do (go to church every Sunday), but in what she actually does.

We attempted to make visible the aspects of Latin American religiosity that have not always been evident when we apply the traditional scientific tools established

by the “Theory of Secularization.” The religiosity lived by the subjects is untidy, multifaceted, eclectic, and expressed in diverse practices where believers involve

their own bodies and emotions. Many times, these practices originate in a religious

tradition but are adapted, modified, recreated and mixed by people in religiously meaningful ways.5 4

5

Latinbarometro, accessed December 1, 2014, en: http://www.latinobarometro.org/latNewsShow. jsp; John Lynch, New Worlds. A Religious History of Latin America (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2012); Gustavo Morello and Hugo Rabbia,“Cambios Religiosos y Dinámicas Demográficas: Más allá de la Teoría de la Secularización. El caso del catolicismo en la ciudad de Córdoba, Argentina,” Revista de Estudios Sociales 69 (2019): 14-27, https://doi.org/10.7440/res69.2019.02; Catalina Romero, ed. Diversidad religiosa en el Perú. Miradas múltiples (Lima: El Centro de Estudios y Publicaciones, 2016); Pew Research Center, “Religion in Latin America: Widespread Change in a Historically Catholic Region” (Washington, DC: Pew Research Center, 2014).

See Nancy Ammerman, Sacred Stories, Spiritual Tribes: Finding Religion in Everyday Life (New York: Oxford University Press, 2014); Meredith McGuire, Lived Religion: Faith and Practice in Everyday Life (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008).

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We wanted the study to be, in addition to qualitative, comparative. That’s why we selected three South American cities (Lima, Peru; Córdoba, Argentina; and Montevideo, Uruguay) and in each of them we interviewed about 80 people from

different socioeconomic status (two groups: upper/middle and low) and different

religious orientations (Catholic, Evangelical, other traditions, and non-affiliated).

In total, we conducted 254 interviews. We looked for interviewees of different

genders, ages and life situations (single, cohabitation, with and without children).

The selection of respondents was intentional, and means that our findings do not represent the society studied. It does not tell us how many people among the general population do this or that (which is typical of quantitative studies), but it does

show us what people do in that society when they practice religion. Norma, for example, in a regular religious survey, would have fallen in the category of “not practicing” Catholic, since she does not go to church every Sunday but only at Christmas. There is no room in that measurement for her home shrine, her pilgrimages

to Our Lady of Lourdes’ different grottos, or her conversations about religion with her friends, that have led her to visit a Pentecostal church and to obtain an image of St. Expedite.

We conducted two interviews with each of the interviewees. The first meeting gave

us a general view of the daily routines and the presence or not of religious practices,

their itinerary of faith, the decisions made in life, relationships with other people, what happens at work, free time, and about their social or political activities. In the second meeting, interviewees were asked to attend with an object (or photograph

of it) that is meaningful in their lives. In employing this approach, we hoped to deepen conversation about meanings and emotions, through the history of those

places and objects. In Norma’s case, she produced photos, pointing the researcher

to the objects she wanted to capture with her camera. The objects respondents

brought to the interviews were also quite varied. Some brought expected things,

like images and Bibles, but others brought umbilical cords, plants and computers.

This allows us to speculate that the idea of ​​distinguishing between “sacred” and “profane” spaces, objects and people does not have such strict limits among Latin Americans in their everyday life.

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The attitude of the people in the interviews caught our attention from the begin-

ning of the process. The people contacted were willing to talk. The interviews were

conducted in university classrooms, offices and religious buildings, bars, markets, houses, cars and plazas. During the meetings, people talked freely about their beliefs. The meetings became a space of reflection and unusual introspection on ev-

eryday life. Many respondents mentioned that they do not usually talk about their religious concerns with their families or friends (Norma, in this sense, is an excep-

tion). Neither do they talk with religious ministers. They wanted to talk about their religiosity, and the interview was a way to legitimize their practices and beliefs in

front of another person. The process of telling their story served to reflect on their lives, seeking to give coherence to different experiences; to unite narratively what

seemed broken or disconnected. Several times the subjects “adjusted” their religious

orientation throughout the interview so much that a methodological decision we

made was to keep the self-identification declared at the beginning of the interview.

We interpret this desire to speak, and the difficulty in doing so, as a result of the lack of space to freely communicate about religion. Informants do not find, even

within the churches, a place where they can express what happens to them in their own terms. People spoke about their doubts, something problematic for methodologies that emphasize what people “believe” or other intellectual aspects of religios-

ity (whether their ideas are right or wrong, in accordance with theological dogmas).

There is a tension here with many surveys that poll people about concrete beliefs, like the literal interpretation of the Scriptures, the second coming of Jesus, or the

idea of transubstantiation during the celebration of a Mass. Concrete people are on

a religious journey, but they have not necessarily reached a destination of dogmatic clarity. Being a believer implies a “work in progress.”

THE IMPACT OF MODERNITY: PLURALIZATION AND AUTONOMY Almost all the interviewees, in the three cities, have had contact with a religious “other,” whether they are Catholic, Pentecostal, unaffiliated, or belonging to an-

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other confession. The experience of social pluralization has transformed the community and, in many cases, the family life of many respondents. In some cases, the

contact with the “other” has triggered interest in knowing about other beliefs, to

be better informed, and to visit other sacred places and even participate in other celebrations. This was the case of Norma, who visited a Pentecostal church with her

friend. However, for other interviewees the way to handle diversity has been to “not talk” about religion. Mostly, when religious plurality happens within the intimate world of family and close friends.

We also saw the experience of plurality in the subject’s own life trajectory. Many

interviewees have gone through various stages, from non-affiliation to active prac-

tice, from confession to disaffiliation, from Catholicism to Pentecostalism, from Mormonism to Catholicism, from Buddhism to new spiritualities, from New Age practices to Judaism.6 Others mentioned the experience of plurality within their

own tradition, narrating migrations in terms of religious conversion: “Before I practiced a way of being Catholic that hurt me. Now I practice different way that is good for me.”

Among the religious pluralization of society and the pluralization of their own

experience, respondents in the three cities find throughout life an important variety of “sources of meaning” to interpret what happens to them in everyday life. This

is a very important transformation since until the end of the 1950s the offer came almost exclusively from Catholicism.

Another common point observed in the three cities has to do with the religious autonomy of respondents. The subject is her own religious authority. Each one

decides, according to their own circumstances and life experiences, what practices and what explanations give meaning to their daily life. It is not the arbitrariness of

doing what first comes to mind; the subjects articulate explanations, give reasons, express in different ways the meaning of their religious actions and convictions.

Norma explains her devotion to Our Lady of Lourdes, her affection to Christmas Mass. Norma’s friends were also a source of religious information: one invited her 6

Veronique Lecaros, “Estudios de Recorridos Religiosos: Los desafiliados en contexto,” Estudos do Religiao 31, no. 3 (2017): 111-130.

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to the Pentecostal gathering; another one talked to her about the devotion to St. Expedite. The perception of the interviewees is that, since contemporary life is complex, it is not easy for an outsider to give an answer to a specific situation.

This difficulty does not mean that the subjects are not related to religious traditions

and organizations. That is why we prefer to speak of “autonomy” and not of “independence.” Whether they be religious institutions or “spiritual tribes,” communities

have a role in generating, circulating, approving and rejecting symbols, practices and beliefs.7 However, once established, it is the subjects who decide what to do

with them. People take, change, and produce religious symbols and meanings. The

criterion of selection, adoption and adaptation is whether this practice helps them to connect with the divinity in their concrete circumstances or not.

THE RELIGIOSITY RECEIVED Just as the sources of meaning were diversified, so the means of accessing those

sources have changed. The family circle remains paramount in the transmission, both in continuing with, and breaking from, the religious tradition. The grandparents are also important. And while in the case of the parents the interviewees mention both mothers and fathers, the figure of the grandmother is almost exclusive

with respect to the grandfather. With women fully incorporated into the workforce, the role of grandmothers in the care of children has become more relevant among some Latin American communities.

The religious community continues to have a role in the transmission of the belief.

It is usually the first place where subjects believe and practice religion. As in the

case of Norma, for many respondents the communal aspect was the connection with friends with whom they share a religious quest. For others, religious commu-

nities are a place of interaction with peers that in many cases leave a lifelong mark.

These communities they voluntarily joined are privileged spaces that are “closer” to them, more “humanized” than the institution. Some of the objects brought for interviews were photos of those groups or other types of mementos of a positive 7

Following terminology in Ammerman, Sacred Stories.

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experience with the religious community.

For other interviewees, bad experiences in religious groups have been a cause of

rupture. We saw this situation among Catholics, Pentecostals, and also among atheists, whose affiliation to a political or social group acts as a “community of belonging.”

Finally, another source of religious inspiration is the media, both traditional and

the digital forms. Norma, for example, and many interviewees in Córdoba and

Montevideo, mentioned religious soap operas, Pentecostal Brazilian productions (like “Moses” or “Jesus”) that are broadcast on primetime commercial TV. Other

respondents rely on the web and social networks looking for information, inputs for their personal growth, applications to pray or read the Bible, and video calls to

receive spiritual advice. We have found numerous “digital memberships,” enabling subjects to participate in the celebrations transmitted through the web and, every

so often, join in person after a four-hours trip.8 And we did our research before

COVID-19, the shutdown of in-person religious services, and the growing practice of religion online.

RELIGIOSITY AS PRACTICED The range of practices considered religious by the interviewees is remarkable. Many

have to do with traditional religious observances, like praying the rosary among

Catholics, daily reading of the devotional among the evangelicals, or recitation of the daimoku of the Buddhists. However, these practices might take place in nonreligious settings like a street, during trip to the workplace, in the shower, or at

the office; blurring the classic distinction between public and private, secular and religious.

Several interviewees mentioned participation in community celebrations (gener-

ally with a monthly frequency, not so much weekly) and social justice activities 8

Rolando Pérez, “Apropiaciones mediáticas de la religiosidad vivida,” in La Religion como Experiencia Cotidiana, eds. Hugo Rabbia, Gustavo Morello, Néstor Da Costa, and Catalina Romero (Córdoba: EDUCC, 2019), 119-129.

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in groups (not necessarily confessional ones) as a religious practice. While some interviewees include “alternative therapies” (family constellations, reiki, etc.) as

religious practices, others mentioned psychological therapy or physical exercise as

part of their spiritual routines. The contact with nature is mentioned in several interviews, and by that respondents mentioned a walk in the mountains, along the seashore, watering the plants or looking at the stars with a telescope from a balcony

in the city downtown. Queka, a lower socioeconomic status Catholic woman from Córdoba, Argentina is disappointed with the Pope because she understands that Francis unfairly criticized animal protectionists. The love and dedication for her pets (she has eleven dogs and four cats) connects her with God more than the papal figure. “I mean, aren’t animals also my neighbor?”

One widespread religious practice, among people of different social classes, religions, sex and age, is listening to, or making, music—mainly, “profane” music that is

interpreted religiously, either because the “secular” lyrics are “re-listened” religiously, or because music is used as a tool to build a space of privacy and silence. It creates

a kind of liminal state to the encounter with transcendence in the case of believers, or a spiritual sphere in itself for non-believers. The experience of music becomes

more intense and profound when the subjects interviewed perform the music (they sing or play an instrument) rather than just listen to it.

THE RELIGIOSITY BELIEVED If North Atlantic societies operate within an “immanent framework”—as if God did not exist—this cannot be said of the people we interviewed in southern Latin America. Our participants state that their daily life occurs in a “transcendent framework.”9 There is no an empirical world and another supra-empirical one. There is only one world. A single human story. Everything can be a sign of the divine, and

the connection with that reality can occur in any space and time. The contact with

supra-human powers (divinity, significant beings, dead people) occurs all the time 9

Charles Taylor, A Secular Age (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2007); Peter Berger, The Many Altars of Modernity: Toward a Paradigm for Religion in a Pluralist Age (Boston/Berlin: De Gruyter, 2014).

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and in any place. These sorts of experiences are present in all socioeconomic status,

confessions, sexes and ages, and is a common point in the three cities. Paradoxically, for most of the interviewees, life after death is not an important issue. It is not a key issue in its convictions or in its daily practices. In general, they believe in eternal life, but they are not interested in the matter; it’s not on their agenda.

This apparent inconsistency (overwhelming presence of the divine in daily life and lack of interest in the afterlife) would indicate that eternal life is not a problem

because divinity is present in all aspects of life. This world is inhabited by the divine and can be a sign of divinity. Many interviewees mentioned that they communicate

with God “all the time,” not at specific times or places. The idea that the divinity is not necessarily present in the practice prescribed by religions also appeared in the interviews. We saw this in the “significant objects” that people showed us. Some

were religious, but many were not. Respondents brought Bibles, images of saints, crucifixes, sacred books, pictures, rosaries, and “sympathies” (objects made of cloth used by Umbanda10 followers), but also computers and backpacks, umbilical cords

and pipes, phonographs and telescopes, annotators and photos, teddy bears and

fridge magnets. A young Catholic woman from Lima connects with God by wear-

ing a bracelet of quartz stones made by a sorcerer from Piura, a Peruvian northern city. Norma, as we see in the pictures, mixed her shrines with a model airplane, a sound system, and placed the hamsa on a wall clock.

THE GOOD BELIEVER In the three cities, the interviewees of different religious confessions tend to consider a model believer the person who does good for others in everyday life. Neither

the intellectual element (in what is believed) nor church attendance (the member-

ship) is an important characteristic of the “good believer”; they are two of the main

metrics used to understand religiousness in Europe and the United States. Instead, the main barometer of a person’s authenticity or commitment is their actions at home and work.

10 Umbanda is a religious tradition that started in Brazil in the late nineteenth century, mixing Afro traditions and Spiritist practices.

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That family life is a religious space did not surprise us; although some details are

new, such as the aforementioned experience of religious diversity within the family.

What is particularly interesting is the presence of religion in the workplace. The economy is the secularized area par excellence, where religion has been expelled

by an autonomous rationality; religion has nothing to say about market dynamics.

At least, in theory. Because in the case of the interviewees in Córdoba, Lima and Montevideo, from different religious confessions, being a good believer is mainly

associated with being responsible at work and respectful and in solidarity with co-workers. Work is a “public space,” but religion does not stay in private.

THE CONTRASTS We also found differences between the populations studied, which question the use of thinking about Latin America as a sort of homogenous region. While for inter-

viewees in Lima the role of the religious community is strong, this role decreases in Córdoba and Montevideo, especially in the upper classes. In these two cities, the practice is more individualized. Even when the interviewees attend celebrations, in

their narratives they explain that they do it looking more for a moment of personal prayer than for an opportunity of common celebration.

The people interviewed in Lima talk a good amount about “sin,” a notion that is

seldom used by interviewees in other places. While in Montevideo and Córdoba respondents mentioned psychological therapy as a spiritual practice, that was not

the case in Lima. Peruvian interviewees did talk about membership to Fraternidades and Cofradias (religious associations), even among non-Catholic respondents. (“I am a Mason and of St. Jude.”)

Atheism is most prominent in Montevideo, where there is a centennial tradition of secularism driven by the state.11 But despite more than a hundred years of secular

public policies, which undoubtedly have marked Uruguayan identity, the research-

ers had trouble finding atheists (not to be confused with “non-affiliated”) in the 11 Néstor DaCosta, “El Fenómeno de la Laicidad como Elemento Identitario: El Caso Uruguayo” Civitas 11, no. 1 (2011): 207-220.

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lower socioeconomic status. Uruguayan atheism is enlightened. Something similar happened in Córdoba, where the atheists interviewed were high-class university educated, very critical of other “non-affiliated” practitioners because these later ones were interested in new spiritualities and alternative therapies. In Lima, we

found “post-evangelical” atheists—that is, people who got tired in their religious search. They are atheists because of “religious saturation,” a point that brings them

closer to many “non-affiliated” in the United States and perhaps to some former European Catholics.

The combination of different traditions in one’s life is more frequent among Catholics, the non-affiliated and Umbandistas than among Pentecostals, Buddhists and Mormons. These latter groups tend to be stricter with their beliefs, but no more

“docile” to their own religious authorities. In both Córdoba and Lima, researchers were surprised by the autonomy of Pentecostal believers with respect to their religious leaders.12

The lives of Peruvian migrants in Córdoba and Montevideo show the different roles assigned to religion in the Latin American public space. In Uruguay, it has

been difficult for them to organize as a migrant community, because secularism

prevents them from recreating the procession of the Señor del Milagro on the streets of Montevideo; a religious practice that cemented the Peruvian community in Córdoba.13

CONCLUSION AND FUTURE The transformations brought about by modernity at the social and personal level

have affected religious traditions and organizations as well as the ways in which 12 Hugo Rabbia, “Otredad, Diversidad Religiosa y Prejuicios en las Interacciones Cotidianas de Evangélicos/as de Córdoba, Argentina,” Sociologias 22, no. 53 (2020): 36-63; Verónica Roldán and Rolando Pérez, “El Protestantismo Vivido: Un Estudio Comparativo desde América Latina y el Sur de Europa,” Sociologias 22 no. 53 (2020): 20-35.

13 Valentina Pereira Arena, “Migraciones y la Continuidad o Ruptura de las Vivencias Religiosas,” in La Religieon como Experiencia Cotidiana: Creencias, Prácticas y Narrativas Espirituales en Sudamérica, eds. Hugo Rabbia, Gustavo Morello, N. Da Costa, and C. Romero (Argentina: Pontificia Universidad Católica del Perú, 2019), 143-57.

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people live their religiosity. Of the many features of modernity that interact with religion in Latin America, we have highlighted two aspects: the pluralization of Latin American societies and the growing awareness of the subject’s autonomy.

The question we asked ourselves at the beginning, how Latin Americans live their

religion, has conditioned responses to the places and confessions of the people.

We saw that they are not the same Pentecostals as Mormons, or Catholics as nonbelievers. But the Catholics of a city sometimes have more similarities with their Pentecostal compatriots than with co-religionists from other geographies.

Religious sources have been pluralized, Latin Americans experience a diversity in their lives that they did not know before, but they also do not know how to handle

it. The family environment and religious groups continue to be important places for the transmission of the faith, but social networks and mass media have been added as venues for transmitting, modifying and recreating religious traditions.

The practices are diverse and occur everywhere. There are no spaces or specific

times; religion is not circumscribed to a specific area or space. There are no sacred objects per se, but that sacredness is ad hoc; it is created in the use that is made of

the crucifix, the bracelet or the computer. This permeability between the sacred and the profane makes us think that, for many respondents, there is no transcendent and immanent world, one here and one beyond. There is only one reality that may

or may not be a meeting place with supra-human powers. Because eternity is de-

fined in this life, the good believer is the one who does good in this concrete life, at home and at work.

This way of living religion among respondents, poses future questions to sociology

and religious institutions. For example, that subjects handle religious pluralization by silencing the religious issue, is it a form of acceptance or rejection? Or the fact

that the subject is her own religious authority in tension with the institution, does

it have any impact on political life, on the relationship between a citizen and authority? Finally, the idea of ​​the “good believer” as one who does good for others is something that has been transmitted, in Latin America, mostly after Liberation

Theology and within local churches. What will happen to this “golden rule” if the JOURNAL OF GLOBAL CATHOLICISM

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“I” is the only authority? These are questions that we cannot always answer, but

that invite us to continue investigating the multiple ways in which cultures and religiosities interact.

REFERENCES Ammerman, Nancy. Sacred Stories, Spiritual Tribes: Finding Religion in Everyday Life. New York: Oxford University Press, 2014.

Berger, Peter. The Many Altars of Modernity: Toward a Paradigm for Religion in a Pluralist Age. Boston/Berlin: De Gruyter, 2014.

DaCosta, Néstor. “El Fenómeno de la Laicidad como Elemento Identitario: El Caso Uruguayo.” Civitas 11, no. 1 (2011): 207-220.

Echeverria, Bolívar. La Modernidad de lo Barroco. México D.F.: Ediciones Era, 2000.

Garcia Canclini, Néstor. Culturas Híbridas: Estrategias para Entrar y Salir de la Modernidad. Buenos Aires: Paidos, 2001.

Latinbarometro. Accessed December 1, 2014. En: http://www.latinobarometro. org/latNewsShow.jsp.

Lecaros, Veronique. “Estudios de Recorridos Religiosos: Los Desafiliados en Contexto.” Estudos do Religiao 31, no. 3 (2017): 111-130. https://doi. org/10.15603/2176-1078/er.v31n3p71-90

Lynch, John. New Worlds: A Religious History of Latin America. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2012.

McGuire, Meredith. Lived Religion: Faith and Practice in Everyday Life. New York, Oxford University Press, 2008.

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Morello, Gustavo. “Lived Religion in Latin America.” In Perplexed Religions, edited by Miriam Diez Bosch, Alberto Melloni, and Josep Lluís Micó Sanz, 149-158. Barcelona, Blanquerna Observatory, 2009.

Morello, Gustavo and Hugo Rabbia. “Cambios Religiosos y Dinámicas Demográficas: Más allá de la Teoría de la Secularización. El Caso del Catolicismo en la Ciudad de Córdoba, Argentina.” Revista de Estudios Sociales 69 (2019): 14-27. http://doi.org/10.7440/res69.2019.02.

Pereira Arena, Valentina. “Migraciones y la Continuidad o Ruptura de las Viven-

cias Religiosas.” In La Religieon como Experiencia Cotidiana: Creencias, Prácticas

y Narrativas Espirituales en Sudamérica, edited by H. Rabbia, G. Morello, N. Da Costa, and C. Romero, 143-57. Argentina: Pontificia Universidad Católica del Perú, Fondo Editorial, 2019.

Pérez, Rolando. “Apropiaciones Mediáticas de la Religiosidad Vivida.” In La

Religieon como Experiencia Cotidiana: Creencias, Prácticas y Narrativas Espirituales en Sudamérica, edited by H. Rabbia, G. Morello, N. Da Costa, and C.

Romero, 119-29. Argentina: Pontificia Universidad Católica del Perú, Fondo Editorial, 2019.

Pew Research Center. “Religion in Latin America: Widespread Change in a Historically Catholic Region.” Washington, DC: Pew Research Center, 2014.

Rabbia, Hugo. “Otredad, Diversidad Religiosa y Prejuicios en las Interacciones Cotidianas de Evangélicos/as de Córdoba, Argentina.” Sociologias 22, no. 53 (2020): 36-63. https://doi.org/10.1590/15174522-98898

Ribeiro, Darcy. El Dilema de América Latina: Estructuras del Poder y Fuerzas Insurgents. México D.F.: Siglo Veintiuno, 1971.

Roldán, Verónica and Rolando Pérez. “El Protestantismo Vivido: Un Estudio Comparativo desde América Latina y el Sur de Europa.” Sociologias 22, no. 53 (2020): 20-35. https://doi.org/10.1590/15174522-99908.

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Romero, Catalina, ed. Diversidad Religiosa en el Perú. Miradas Múltiples. Lima: El Centro de Estudios y Publicaciones, 2016.

Taylor, Charles. A Secular Age. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2007.

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64

ANTONIO D. SISON

Manila’s Black Nazarene and the Reign of Bathala1

Antonio D. Sison is Vatican Council II Chair of Theology and Chair of the Department of Historical and Doctrinal Studies at Catholic Theological Union in Chicago, with a research focus on the inter-discipline of religion, visual/audiovisual culture, and the postcolonial.

His authored books include World Cinema, Theology, and the Human (Routledge, 2012) and Screening Schillebeeckx: Theology and Third Cinema in Dialogue (Palgrave Macmillan, 2006). Among his recent published/peer-reviewed journal articles are “Surrexit… She Has Arisen: ‘The Rites of May’ and the Folk Catholic Imaginary” for Situation (Yonsei University, Korea, 2019), and “Afflictive Apparitions: The Folk Catholic Imaginary in Philippine Cinema” for Material Religion (Taylor and Francis, 2015). Book chapters include contributions to The Routledge Companion to Religion and Film (Routledge, 2009), and Representing Religion in World Cinema (Palgrave Macmillan, 2003). His latest book is The Art of Indigenous Inculturation: Grace on the Edge of Genius (Orbis, 2021), a cutting edge, interdisciplinary study of art/ritual in Asian, African, and Latin American postcolonial contexts.

His CTU faculty page can be accessed here: https://ctu.edu/faculty/antonio-sison/.

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T

he1 scene unfolds in Quiapo Church, undisputed center of Folk Catholic Figure 1: Santa Santita piety in Manila, and home to Poong Hesus Itim na Nazareno, Lord Jesus

Black Nazarene, a dark-skinned, half-kneeling statue of Jesus Christ who

bears the weight of the Roman cross on his right shoulder. It is the 9th of Jan-

uary, a massive religious procession is in progress commemorating the feast day of the 17th-century image. Through a high, wide-angle view, we see the carroza

(carriage)—known popularly as andas from the Spanish; andar meaning “to move

forward”—bearing the life-sized Black Nazarene being ushered out of the Church vestibule, and inching its way through a sea of humanity; they are bare-footed devotees who are drawn each year to the Black Nazarene by some mystical, centripetal

force. To come close, to embrace, to kiss, to touch, to wipe with a cloth … that is the

hope, that is the mission. As the haunting orchestral score, reinforced by deep bari-

tone voices repeatedly chanting Sanctus Dei, or “Holy God,” rises to a crescendo, the multitude undulates as a single organism, creating oceanic waves of quasi-syn-

chronized “chaos” that ferries the Black Nazarene to the church environs, out into

the arteries of old Manila, where it will make its annual sojourn for a protracted period of twenty or so hours, before returning to the main altar of the church.

1

This article is an excerpt from my book The Art of Indigenous Inculturation: Grace on the Edge of Genius (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 2021), which offers the discursive space for me to explore further questions on colonial religious history, inculturation (as against syncretism), and the aesthetics of liberation. The book also includes case studies from Mexican and Pan-African postcolonial religious cultures.

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© 2004 Unitel Pictures

66 | Manila’s Black Nazarene and the Reign of Bathala

Figure 2: Minor Basilica of the Black Nazarene or Quiapo Church, 2014.

Photograph courtesy of the author.

Persistently, the astounding Black Nazarene documentary sequence of Santa San-

tita (dir. Laurice Guillen), a 2004 religious drama feature from the Philippines, has

detonated in my consciousness, its visceral power undiminished over time. While this has led me on two occasions to engage in critical analyses of Santa Santita and

the Quiapo religious universe for previous publications, this current work does not represent a reprise of those projects2 but a further step in what has become for me

a meaningful academic and personal journey. The mystifying figure of Quiapo’s Black Nazarene and the phenomenal religious fervor it attracts continues to draw

my postcolonial imagination closer to the flame; it ignites my desire for a more critical and creative re-visiting of the sentence of Spanish colonial history on the Philippines in view of the contemporary collective retrieval of the country’s culturalreligious soul and story.

2

See my previous critical essays on the film Santa Santita: Antonio D. Sison, “Postcolonial Religious Syncretism: Focus on the Philippines, Peru and Mexico” in The Routledge Companion to Religion and Film, ed. John Lyden (London and New York: Rouledge, 2009), 178-193; and “Afflictive Apparitions: The Folk Catholic Imaginary in Philippine Cinema,” Material Religion 11, no. 4 (December 2015): 422-442.

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MORE THAN SKIN DEEP The Minor Basilica of the Black Nazarene, canonically named the Parish of St. John the Baptist, and to Manila residents, simply Quiapo Church, is centrally located in a busy section of old Manila, a strategic locale for a taste of the city’s colonial past, and the nerve center for folk Catholic piety.

The church building itself is of relatively modest size for a site of major religious significance, and, from an aesthetic viewpoint, unostentatious. The façade reflects

baroque flourishes that bespeak its past affinity with the virreynato de Nueva Es-

paña but the interiors are basically modern, giving the impression that the architectural scheme was guided by utilitarian considerations over aesthetic value. In

fact, this current iteration represents the architectural fallout of serial destruction, rebuilding, and relocation—a tortured history of fires, earthquakes, and war—since its genesis as a Franciscan mission outpost in 1586. Poetically, the church’s original

site was in Bagumbayan, present-day Luneta, where national hero José Rizal was executed.

The statue of the Black Nazarene arrived from Mexico in 1606 via the Manila-

Acapulco galleon and came under the stewardship of an unnamed Augustinian Recollect. In 1767, Archbishop of Manila Basilio Tomás Sancho Hernando authorized its transfer to Quiapo Church where it had since remained. Aesthetically, the

statue resembles typical Mexican santos of the period, and rooting further down the colonial lineage, the Catholic iconography of Spain. The similarities between the

Quiapo Black Nazarene and the traditional cross-bearing Cristos I encountered at the Iglesia de San Francisco and the Basilica de Santa Maria Guadalupe in Mexico

City during the Good Friday observance of Via Crucis come to mind, so do the Cristos brought to procession by confraternities in Spain, most especially those in the Andalucía region where vestigial Catholic piety can still be found.

The Quiapo Black Nazarene is of Mexican mesquite hardwood, giving it a decidedly darker hue than the few versions I have chanced upon. It bears a resemblance to other cross-bearing Cristos Negros of Latin America, notably, Panama’s

Cristo Negro de Portobelo and Guatemala’s Cristo Rey de Candelaria. It is also worth VOLUME 6 ISSUE 1 | FALL 2021

68 | Manila’s Black Nazarene and the Reign of Bathala

mentioning that there are a number of popular crucified versions of Cristos Negros such as those enshrined in Chiapas, Campeche, and Esquipulas, and also in the Spanish cities of Salamanca and Cáceres.

The special devotion to a dark-skinned Nazarene among followers who are pre-

dominantly kayumanggi or brown-skinned suggests a special rapport along racial

lines, but this does not appear to be conclusive. Another dark-skinned statue from the Manila-Acapulco galleon, the 17th-century Nuestra Señora de la Paz y del Buen

Viaje (Our Lady of Peace and Good Voyage) enshrined in the city of Antipolo, also has a following, but nowhere near the vicinity of the devotion to the Quiapo Black Nazarene.

The olive-skinned Santo Niño de Cebu, the statue of the child Jesus brought by the Magallanes expedition in 1565, does have a certain degree of prominence in

Catholic piety, but so does the pale-skinned Nuestra Señora del Santísimo Rosario de Manaoag (Our Lady of the Most Holy Rosary of Manaoag), another 17th-century icon, whose delicate Eurasian features are etched in ivory.

I propose that the unparalleled devotion to the Quiapo Black Nazarene is more than skin deep. It roots further down into the hidden regions of the Filipino psyche

where the vanquished religious beliefs of a primal religion have beaten all odds, living-on organically in the rhythm of life of devotees. To test this assertion, a trip

to Quiapo is necessary for a closer look at the unique devotional practices simultaneously occurring in the church and its immediate environs.

THE QUIAPO RELIGIOUS UNIVERSE: A DOUBLE BELONGING I am inside Quiapo Church one day in March. It is off-season for feasts and processions, the most significant of which falling on the first week of January leading

to the feast day of the Black Nazarene on the 9th, and Semana Santa, particularly

on Good Friday. For this first visit after years of being away as a US immigrant, I had intentionally chosen a placid period for a more attentive re-orientation and

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sense of space; nonetheless, devotional fervor is in the air this morning. The Eu- Figure 3: The Black Nazarene. Quiapo

charistic celebration has just ended, one of ten scheduled on a Saturday beginning Church, 2014.

Photograph courtesy

at 5 a.m. The devotees gathered today raise their hands in anticipation of a rite of the author. of holy water sprinkling assigned to a lay minister, and then spontaneously break out into applause, praising God in a manner not very different from “charismatic” worship. A few devotees are penitentially walking on their knees down the center

aisle to the altar—a long-held Quiapo tradition—and feeling through rosary beads on their fingers along the way. The Black Nazarene statue itself is enshrined at the

center altar, a few feet above the tabernacle. It is, in fact, a composite, with the orig-

inal 17th-century head attached to a replica-body carved by a Filipino santero or VOLUME 6 ISSUE 1 | FALL 2021

70 | Manila’s Black Nazarene and the Reign of Bathala

“saint-maker” by the name of Gener Maglaqui.3 The Black Nazarene venerated in

processions is also a composite version but in reverse, with a Maglaqui replica-head attached to the original Mexican body. The use of composite images was the strat-

egy adopted by the Archdiocese of Manila to ensure the security and preservation

of the original statue amid recurrent touching, wiping, and transporting. In my

visit, I caught sight of two other life-size replicas, one located by the right side of the nave entrance, the other, under a tarpaulin tent outside the church. A few

devotees had gathered around each of the replicas, touching and hanging on to the statues prayerfully. Whether in quiet devotion on a regular day, or in a procession of millions during a major feast day, veneration and prayer by means of touch are the constant gestures of piety of the Quiapo Black Nazarene devotee.

There is good reason to argue that the practice has decisively Indigenous roots. The

understanding of experience in terms of pagdama, or “felt experience,” a sensuous perception that is naturally and firstly affective-intuitive, animates the Quiapo devotion. Filipino culture is so infused with pagdama, finding expression in anything

from the imperative pakiramdaman mo, “feel what is happening,” to the perceived manifestation of a departed loved one in pagpaparamdam, “to make one’s presence felt,” that Filipino theologian José M. de Mesa proposes the term “worldfeel” rather than “worldview” to describe the Filipino mindset.4 The importance of pagda-

ma in Filipino culture meaningfully informs our understanding of the materiality and tactility of the Quiapo Black Nazarene phenomenon; immediate contact with

concrete representations of the divine is the way by which the Filipino devotee feels God’s grace coming closer to home. In discussing folk Catholicism, De Mesa identifies “body language” as its main mode of communication:

This form of religiosity, while not devoid of verbal and written language to

express itself, communicates to a great extent corporeally. The physical coming together, “walking” on one’s knees, lighting candles, wiping statues with one’s 3 4

Gener Manlaqui, who himself is a Black Nazarene devotee, was featured in a TV documentary entitled “Mukha: Panata,” aired on the Filipino channel ABS-CBN/ANC, January 18, 2017, www.news.abs-cbn.com.

José M. de Mesa, Why Theology is Never Far from Home (Manila: De La Salle University Press, 2003), 85-86. He is careful to point out that pagdama does not necessarily eschew the rational– cognitive, but harmonizes with it in an “integrated sensing,” 82.

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handkerchief, joining or “watching” a procession, going on a pilgrimage, are all

expressions of faith in folk Catholicism. Prayer is uttered by the body in its var-

ious movements and gestures … Words are powerful means of communication.

But corporeal expressions may communicate more than words.5

The ancient value of pagdama and its material-tactile expression in the Quiapo

Black Nazarene devotion open a virtual window into Filipino primal religion, where the dualistic curtain that separates the sacred from the profane was yet to be drawn back. History and anthropology from a western perspective have often

characterized the precolonial worship life in the islands as a form of “animism;” this is a term we will bypass for its condescending connotations, its tendency to undervalue Indigenous religious practices as irrational, incoherent, and superstitious. By

the dichotomizing “west and the rest” tendencies of Eurocentrism and colonialism, such Indigenous practices do not merit respect and appreciation but are dismissively judged as a problem to be solved; it is “our religion” against “their superstition.”6

In Filipino primal religion, visible objects of nature represent levels of reality that go beyond materiality; they were inhabited by spirit beings not readily seen by the naked eye, but whose presence was felt. These nature spirits controlled the shifts

in natural phenomena—fluctuations in weather, the bounty or shortfall of crop 5

6

De Mesa, Why Theology is Never Far from Home, 82. In Quiapo, the corporeal expressions of devotion often come in the form of personal and collective sacrifice, e.g., the devout practices detailed by De Mesa. Robert J. Schreiter equates sacrifice with communication with God, of which human words often prove impoverished. “Sacrifice tries to speak where human words do not reach far enough.” Schreiter, In Water and in Blood: A Spirituality of Solidarity and Hope (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 1988, 2006), 12.

Daryl Wilkinson offers an on-target description of the problematic connotations that bedevil the term, “…animism is an analytical operation that we do, not a type of religion that Indigenous people hold to. It involves taking a non-concurrence of Western and non-Western practices as a starting point and using that dissonance, a dissonance that we call ‘animism,’ as a way of highlighting the presence of some not-as-yet \understood difference or alterity. Animism therefore is not a shorthand for what Indigenous people are really doing, but more a statement to the effect that we don’t know what they’re doing, but we know we certainly wouldn’t do it.” Wilkinson, “Is There Such a Thing as Animism?” Journal of the American Academy of Religion, 85 (June 2017): 306. For Wilkinson’s fuller treatment that includes a critical analysis of “new animism,” the scholarly efforts to emancipate the original term from its Eurocentric, colonialist, and evolutionist moorings, see the entire article in the same, 289-311. Agbonkhianmeghe Orobator offers an incisive critical analysis of animism from an African postcolonial perspective. Orobator, Religion and Faith in Africa: Confessions of an Animist (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 2018), xviii.

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harvests, and such—and also acted upon the ebb and flow of everyday human existence. The cultural-religious schema was based on the belief in a supreme deity

by the name of Bathala, whose divine intervention held sway in the kapalaran or destiny of human beings. This core belief anchored and animated the religious customs of the community so that one’s plans and decisions in life rose or fell on the

basis of panalangin or prayer that comes from kagandahang loób, the beauty of one’s

authentic inner self (as against sama ng loob, the debasement of one’s inner self ).

A host of lesser nature gods and spirit beings known as diwata inhabited the cre-

ated world alongside human beings, they lived in the celestial bodies, mountains, seas, and rain forests. For this reason, the sun, moon, and stars, as well as certain animals, trees, and rock formations, were believed to be enchanted; they were ap-

proached with reverence and wonderment. This explains why the Spaniards did not find significant built structures for worship in the archipelago as they did in their

previous encounters with Mesoamerican religious culture. Neither did the island culture reflect the neighboring religious cultures of Southeast Asia such as Indone-

sia, Thailand, and Cambodia, with their ornate Buddhist-Hindu temple complexes.

The Filipino primal godhead Bathala and the host of diwata did not require such

human-made structures for their cult; the entire created world was their dwelling place, nature itself was their temple. It comes as no surprise then that the iconoclastic compulsion of the Spanish missionaries led to the wanton desecration and destruction of sacred forests and mangroves.7

The presence of the diwata was also mediated through images carved out of wood or stone known as anito (in the lowland Luzon/Tagalog region)8 who served as portals between the material world and the spirit world. The precolonial Filipinos believed that their departed ancestors had joined the realm of the spirits and could 7

8

John Leddy Phelan notes, “In the Philippines there were no temples to demolish. But sacred groves were cut down by zealous Spanish religious who were determined to break the magic sway such groves exercised over Filipinos.” Phelan, The Hispanization of the Philippines: Spanish Aims and Filipino Responses, 1565-1700 (Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 1959, 2011), 54.

The Cebuano/Visayan term for a carved idol is tao-tao, while anito denotes “sacrifice.” William Henry Scott, Barangay: Sixteenth-Century Philippine Culture and Society (Quezon City: Ateneo de Manila Press, 1994), 83, 86. To avoid confusion in the part of the reader, I have decided to use the Tagalog term anito as a more general appellation to refer to statues and concrete images of lowland Filipino primal religion.

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then be venerated as anitos. The Neolithic Manunggul Jar (711 B.C.), one of the

centerpieces of the Philippine National Museum of Anthropology, offers archaeological evidence of the belief in the afterlife in primal religion. The jar’s lid features

two anito figures on a boat—an oarsman/spirit guide ferrying the kaluluwa or departed soul into the great beyond.

It is not difficult to imagine how the Spanish Christianizing campaign found convenient analogues of the Catholic cult of the Saints in the Indigenous practice of

venerating anitos. The Italian scholar Antonio Pigafetta, who travelled with Fernando Magallanes9 as his official chronicler, documents the near seamless transfig-

uration of an Iberian icon into a primal anito. In his account of the 1521 baptism of Rajah Humabon in Cebu, the statue of the Santo Niño—the child Jesus dressed in the finery of a European prince—so captivated the local chief ’s wife that she shed

copious tears and begged to be baptized; she was christened as “Juana” in honor

of the Castillan queen. Juana wanted the Catholic statue to replace her deities so Pigafetta presented it to her as a gift.

But as it turned out, an astonishing counter-phenomenon took over when the Magallanes expedition came to an end. Filipino writer-historian Nick Joaquin de-

scribes how Juana’s Santo Niño found a niche in the pantheon of diwatas and assimilated with ease into primal religion so that by the time the subsequent expe-

dition led by Miguel Lopez de Legazpi arrived 44 years later, folklore had already

woven around the imported statue, essentially converting the child Jesus into a rain god:

During those 44 years, the Christian image fulfilled a pagan [sic] mission… its fame spread to the neighboring islands from where came pilgrims curious

to see this strange new god of the Cebuanos. To make rain, it was borne in

procession to the sea and dipped in the water. Sacrifices were offered to it; it was anointed in oil. A ritual developed among its worshippers: a wild hopping 9

Portuguese navigator Fernando de Magallanes (Fernão de Magalhães) led the first Spanish expedition to the yet unnamed archipelago in 1521. This was abruptly truncated when he lost his life in a battle against the troops of Lapu-Lapu, the datu or local chief of the island of Mactan. See Luis H. Francia, A History of the Philippines: From Indios Bravos to Filipinos (New York: The Overlook Press, 2014), 51-55.

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Figure 4. Votive candles for sale. Quiapo Church, 2018. Photograph courtesy of the author.

dance to drums which, as the Pit Señor, survives to this day in the folk homage

to the Santo Niño, as the rainmaking ritual of bathing the image survives in the fluvial procession.10

The history of the Santo Niño de Cebu is noteworthy for two reasons: first, it vividly confirms how the value of pagdama and the primacy of the tactile were con-

jointly operative in the cult of primal religion as it has been in the dramatic visceral character of the Quiapo Black Nazarene devotion in present times; second, it sheds

light on the tensile strength inherent in Indigenous Filipino religious culture– resilience in response to the allurement of a foreign religion, and incorruptibility in upholding the primal religion of the forebears.

The ability to sustain an inclusive both/and continues to animate contemporary

Filipino folk Catholicism. As I had noted in another study, the Quiapo Black Nazarene devotion is a prime example of a religious double belonging.11 While the statue and the activities surrounding its cult constitute part of the didactic, poetic, and worship life of a Catholic basilica under the aegis of the Archdiocese of Manila, the 10 Nick Joaquin, Culture and History (Pasig City: Anvil Publishing, 1988, 2004), 104-105.

11 Sison, “Afflictive Apparitions,” 422-442.

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Antonio D. Sison | 75

actual cultic practice as expressed in grassroots piety is descended from Indigenous Figure 5. Anting-Anting or talismans from a

cultural and religious values. We can glean further validation for this by looking vendor’s stall. Quiapo Church, 2018. into the Quiapo Church milieu.

Stepping out of the church, the street vendors positioned at the perimeter of Plaza

Miranda, the open public area fronting the building, come to view. Nazareno rep-

licas, rosaries of all colors and materials, scapulars, votive candles, novena booklets, the usual religious paraphernalia associated with traditional Roman Catholic devotions are the more obvious articles available for purchase.

But taking a closer look, a number of the vendors also sell para-religious articles

that blur the line between officially sanctioned Catholic devotion and a piety of a

different sort. Known in Tagalog as anting-anting, these articles come in the form

of amulets, pendants, miniature humanoid figures, animal bones, and talismans, usually embossed with eclectic wordings (mostly in Latin) and symbols borrowed

from Christianity; these are worn by adherents to ward off evil spirits, spells, or misfortunes.

Although there are undeniable Christian elements in such articles, the anting– anting has its origins in primal religion. In the Filipino creation mythos, it was

believed that after Bathala created the universe, he delegated human affairs to the diwata who were to serve as his mediators. But not all spirits were benevolent like VOLUME 6 ISSUE 1 | FALL 2021

Photograph courtesy of the author.

76 | Manila’s Black Nazarene and the Reign of Bathala

the diwata; malevolent ghouls and monsters such as the horrifying aswang co-

inhabited the world and were set to afflict human beings with all sorts of bodily

and spiritual torments. To protect themselves from such attacks, ancient Filipinos

kept anting-anting close to their persons, maintaining close physical contact with the sacred object, as a concrete means to repel real and perceived danger.

In the period of the Spanish conquest, the continued use of anting-anting was a form of native resistance, a way by which Filipinos asserted their sense of agency

and empowerment in subversion of the Spanish colonial hierarchy that had forc-

ibly relegated them to the lowest rung of the sociopolitical pyramid where they were denied access to power. Rebel leaders of the Philippine revolution, notably

Andres Bonifacio and the Katipuneros or revolutionaries, were known to have worn

anting-anting to protect them from the superior firepower of the Spanish forces.12

Anting-anting made them feel connected to a higher power, emboldening them in the fight for freedom. Like the veneration of anitos that became convenient an-

alogues of the cult of the saints, anting-anting analogously fit hand-in-glove into the traditional Catholic preoccupation with religious articles and relics, ultimate-

ly, liquefying the demarcation between Spanish Catholicism and Filipino primal religion.

Retracing my way to the Quiapo Church entrance, it is hard to miss the presence

of elderly and middle-aged women seated on plastic stools at the edges of the

nave; some praying the rosary, others attentively conversing with individuals. These Quiapo mainstays are known as magdarasal or intercessors, prayer-women who

listen to the everyday concerns that burden devotees, offer prayers on their behalf, and provide practical counseling when needed.

Like any legitimate ministry, these services are free of charge, although “donations” left to the discretion of the devotees are welcome.

It is interesting to note that the work of the magdarasal has some points of over-

lap with the pastoral function of the ordained priesthood, and from a spatial 12 Dennis Santos Villegas, You Shall be as Gods: Anting-Anting and the Filipino Quest for Mystical Power (Quezon City: Vibal Foundation, 2017), 27-28.

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Antonio D. Sison | 77

Magdarasal, or prayer-women.

Quiapo Church, 2014.

Photograph courtesy of the author.

consideration, it is the first line of shepherding available to devotees since the mag-

darasal are more accessibly positioned by the church entrance and not behind the altar like the presiding priest. In effect, the Quiapo prayer-women appear to have become alternative pastors as the ordained priests take on an ever-increasing load of sacramental assignments.

I have argued elsewhere that there is reason to posit a link between the Quiapo magdarasal and the ancient babaylan,13 the priest or shaman of Filipino primal re-

ligion, who, unlike the Catholic priests, were almost exclusively female (marginally, there were also priests who were male transvestites or bayok). The babaylanes served

as the divinely chosen human mediators between the diwata and the worshipping community, who also looked up to them as wisdom figures. The priesthood of the

babaylan had no precursor in colonial Catholicism since the ministerial role of

women within the hierarchical order, that of the professed religious sisters, was subordinate to the authority of the clergy; their ministries did not and could not

overlap. Notably, the venerable Ignacia del Espiritu Santo, an 18th-century Fil-

ipina beata who defied the authority of the Spanish king to form a community 13 Sison, “Afflictive Apparitions,” 429-432.

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78 | Manila’s Black Nazarene and the Reign of Bathala

that would flourish to be the first Indigenous religious order of women, had to work surreptitiously at the margins of an androcentric, patriarchal, and colonial

Catholic hierarchy. Even the likes of her could not have possibly engaged in a

ministry that overlapped in the slightest with the powerful ordained priesthood, let alone positioned herself at the church frontlines. After all, Ignacia bore on her

shoulders the double crosses of being a woman and being an India. Ultimately, the

Spanish friars considered the babaylanes to be prime targets for Christianization.

Those who eventually acquiesced to conversion were stripped of leadership roles and given a demotion; they were made to become the assistants-at-large in the

parish, assigned to perform subsidiary tasks such as flower arrangements at the altar, and administrative help for processions.14 If, as previously discussed, the ingress of colonial Catholicism had not been able to completely obliterate Filipino

primal religion and its expression in folk Catholicism, could the ancient babaylan victis, the banished Indigenous woman-priest, not have risen as well in the form

of crypto-resistance in the person of the self-ordained Quiapo magdarasal and her priestly ministry? Considering our fairly consistent postcolonial thesis that Spanish Catholic culture and Indigenous Filipino religious culture co-exist in a dynamic

and tensive middle field, we can persuasively affirm that the Quiapo magdarasal, in her discretional leadership and uniquely feminine priestly ministry, may well be the babaylan rediviva.

Finding an afterlife in grassroots piety and often undetected, primal religious

expressions in the Quiapo universe are caught up in a dance of mutuality with sanctioned devotional practices. On the level of a public transcript is official Catholicism, which is framed by Church teachings and doctrines as shepherded by

the Philippine Church hierarchy; on the level of a hidden transcript is folk Ca-

tholicism, an Indigenous crypto-resistance that nurtures and keeps alive its own semi-autonomous rituals within the four walls of the Catholic Church.

14 Z. A. Salazar, Ang Babaylan sa Kasaysayan ng Pilipinas (Quezon City: Palimbagan ng Lahi, 1999), 3-4.

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