Into the heart of Rwanda.

On Tuesday, 8 October 1996, I stepped off a Kenya Airways jet on to the soil of Rwanda. Two years earlier, little did I dream that so soon I would be walking on that poor tragic earth from which the blood of probably a million victims of civil carnage is crying out to God.

But Rwanda is famous also for God crying out to Rwandans. At the town of Kibeho in that country, starting in 1981, Our Lady was reported as beginning a series of apparitions and messages to teenage girls in a Catholic teacher-training school. With my eight fellow pilgrims from Canada, I was able to visit that holy place, and afterwards, the local bishop, Jean-Baptiste Gahamanyi, in the town of Butare. He gave us a generous interview in French, and described the work of his commission of investigation, involving theologians and psychiatrists. There is not yet an official decision confirming the genuineness of these alleged visions and messages, but neither is there a rejection -- at least of the principal ones -- and pilgrims are allowed to come and pray at the site. It is marked by a column bearing a statue of the Blessed Virgin, exactly where she appeared in the school yard, to the fascination of all the students round about, who heard the visionary answering aloud to the inaudible voice from heaven. The schoolroom hard by is now a church. The reason is the subsequent damage in the civil war to the actual church building not far away. The Blessed Sacrament was exposed in this new church, and we all entered to pray and sing.

While bouncing in our minibus over the rough Rwandan backroads, we were able to visit also the childhood home (little more than a hut) of one of our host family. There in the overgrown front yard were three wooden crosses, marking the graves of three members of her family who had not escaped the mortal hatred. There were many more ruined and empty homes close by, of former sharecroppers swallowed up by the violence. It was a sad, grim scene.

Our base in Rwanda was the home of Christophe and Eugenie, a friendly couple with an extended family, in a hilly district of Kigali, the capital. In fact, Rwanda, "Land of a thousand hills," is hilly all over. But you climb with special care when you descend the steep steps to this bungalow, tucked into a hillside terrace. The biggest moment we celebrated in that home was surely the baptism -- at Sunday Mass -- of seven infants and young children, all dressed in sparkling white clothing, and surrounded by their various families and relations. We sang hymns in English and French and especially Kinyarwandi, the local language. Rwandans break spontaneously into simple, repetitious songs at liturgy; there seems to be no silent Mass. They joined us in some of our hymn tunes -- Jesus my Lord my God, Humbly we adore Thee, Immaculate Mary -- all with Kinyarwandi words. But I regretted that they seem to be no longer taught the Latin Gregorian chants of the Ordinary of the Mass. This prayerful music remains the only hope for reverent, authentic, united Catholic singing at cross-cultural liturgies.

We earlier visited a Belgian White Fathers' mission base in the bush at Rwaza near Ruhengeri. This church was the third Catholic Mission (1903) in all of Rwanda. It has nine substations. The main church, which holds 3,000 persons, is filled 3 times every Sunday. The seats are very narrow benches. An average 400 confessions are heard per week. All work ceases daily after 5 p.m. "We still live a natural life here," remarked the pastor. This is Christophe's parental family parish, and so the priest authorized me to perform the baptisms of those seven children. He himself does 250 baptisms each month or two.

Our host friends in Kigali told us of many more alleged messages, prophecies, and visions, coming to a considerable number of persons and places in Rwanda from Jesus, Our Lady, and other heavenly personalities. We tried to enter into the ongoing process of discernment of their genuineness or lack of it. When a genuine vision does occur, there may follow in the same area a recognized phenomenon of "imitation."

Some of the more striking visions reported in Rwanda included scenes of horrifying bloodshed, well before the civil war broke out between two major tribes. Were these a warning to repent before it would be too late? Rwandans must have wept later in retrospect. We are reminded that Jesus predicted the destruction of Jerusalem. It happened about 37 years after his death, and he himself wept at the thought.(Luke 19:41-44).

Jesus did not limit to the Jews his predictions of chastisement. Two chapters later in Luke, he foretells "wars and seditions . . . great earthquakes. . .pestilences, and famines, and terrors from heaven . . . and great signs . . . they will persecute you . . . signs in the sun, moon, and stars . . . distress of nations by . . . the roaring of the sea and of the waves; men withering away for fear . . . of what shall come upon the whole world . . . watch therefore and pray . . . to escape all these things . . . and to stand before the Son of man" (Lk 21:9-36).

Such words of Jesus in the Gospel are an inspired and permanent portion of revelation. They are a benchmark for all other alleged prophetic messages. We should maintain our ongoing discernment, as St. Paul urges us: "Despise not prophecies. But prove ("test") all things; hold fast that which is good" (1 Thes 5:20-21).