Rwandan President Paul Kagame has threatened to spherical up Catholic devoted who go to pilgrimage websites in his nation, accusing them of “worshipping poverty”.
“I discovered that many younger individuals, as many as hundreds… get up within the early morning, stroll for 3 days to go to (a spot) the place a imaginative and prescient appeared, a pilgrim land, a spot related to poverty,” Kagame informed a youth convention on Wednesday 23 August 2023.
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Ought to anybody worship poverty?
“I assumed that once you pray, you might be praying for what can assist enhance your lives, praying to get wealthy and get out of poverty,” he stated. “Nobody should worship poverty.
Don’t ever try this once more… If I ever hear about this once more, that folks travelled to go and worship poverty, I’ll convey vans and spherical them up and imprison them, and solely launch them when the poverty mentality has left them,” stated Kagame, himself a Catholic.
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Yearly, hundreds of individuals, many travelling for a number of days on foot, go to Kibeho, a city in southern Rwanda the place the Virgin Mary is claimed to have appeared to 3 schoolgirls 4 many years in the past.
However a spokeswoman for the federal government on Thursday denied that Kagame was referring to Kibeho in his speech, telling AFP that he was probably talking a few little-known web site in western Rwanda.
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“In his handle on the youth occasion, President Kagame didn’t at any level point out a particular pilgrimage web site, and positively not Kibeho,” Yolande Makolo stated.
Rwanda needs to be bold and exhausting working
“What he was probably referring to is an off-the-cuff pilgrimage-type occasion that takes place within the Rutsiro district, and the purpose was to encourage younger Rwandans to be bold and work exhausting as a substitute of getting caught up in cult-like rituals,” she stated.
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It’s not clear what prompted the outburst by Rwanda’s iron-fisted ruler, and the Catholic Church within the nation has not but made any public remark. Virtually all Rwandans are Christians, with Catholics making up roughly half the inhabitants.
str-txw-amu/kjm© Agence France-Presse
