The government on Saturday strongly rebuked Catholic Bishops who wrote a letter this week accusing government of human rights abuses.
Trading under the banner, The Zimbabwe Catholic Bishops Conference, the men of cloth become the latest actors to join the regime change agenda.
The Bishops based their accusations on the foiled July 31 street protests which were foiled by the government.
In a strongly worded statement, Information, Publicity and Broadcasting Services Minister Monica Mutsvangwa said the pastoral letter was misguided.
“As the Government of Zimbabwe we vehemently object to and strongly condemn the Pastoral letter of Archbishop Ndlovu and his coterie of Catholics Bishop prelates. Its evil message reeks with all the vices that have perennially hobbled the progress of Africa. It trumpets petty tribal feuds and narrow regionalist agendas so that it can sow seeds of internecine strife as a prelude to national disintegration,” she said.
Mutsvangwa likened Archbishop Ndlovu to Archbishop Arthanase Seromba of Rwanda who was regarded as a chief spiritual ideologist during the Rwanda genocide.
“The infamous Rwandese Catholic Archbishop would eventually be tried and sentenced to life imprisonment by the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda. Such was the horrendous and abominable conduct of the Rwanda Catholic Church that Pope Francis, the global head of the world-wide Catholic Church had to be obliged into a formal papal visit to Kigali and offer a contrite apology for the heinous crimes of the Rwanda Catholic Clergy.
“With nefarious cynicism to history, Archbishop Robert Christopher Ndlovu is inching to lead the Zimbabwe Catholic congregation into the darkest dungeons of Rwanda-type genocide. The letter seeks the revival and continuation of the perennial vices of division. It has a selective and warp-sided reading of history.”
She urged the Catholic congregation in Zimbabwe to ignore the pastoral letter, highlighting that it sought to turn the people against the government.
“Bishop Christopher Ndlovu is leading a coterie of Zimbabwe Catholic Bishops along the wrong path of bygone petty tribalism, narrow regionalism and the debunked and defeated racial antagonism.The letter is full of generalized accusations. By way of contrast, the meticulous Catholic Peace and Justice Commission of the anti-colonial, anti-racist epoch collated, compiled and published dossiers of specific crimes committed by the colonial settler minority regime.
“The Archbishop and his flock of misled Catholic Bishops have none of that diligence. Instead they wallow in generalized and baseless accusations. Absolutely no shred of reported evidence of the so-called victims,” she said.
New Ziana