Rwandan genocide shaped his vision of priesthood, Japanese cardinal-designate says

(OSV News) -- Archbishop Tarcisio Isao Kikuchi of Tokyo, a recently announced cardinal-designate, first met Pope Francis on the first Friday of this year's Synod on Synodality in Rome.

"I went to greet him and then I took the photo with him and he was looking at my ID card and reading my name," Cardinal-designate Kikuchi explained to OSV News. "I thought, 'He doesn't know me.' But then on Sunday (the list of cardinal-designates for the Dec. 7 consistory) was suddenly announced, so I was really surprised first and foremost!"

Cardinal-designate Kikuchi, the president of Caritas Internationalis and secretary general of the Federation of Asian Bishops' Conferences, said he was humbled and "really afraid to be nominated." He said the 21 cardinals-designate will face great demands. Also, "some of the cardinals who are very much talented and those who know the administration or many languages or (have) the deep knowledge of the theology, these things I don't have," he said.

The 66-year-old Divine Word missionary finished undergraduate studies in philosophy and theology and a licentiate in sacred theology at the Pontifical Faculty of Theology at Nanzan University in Nagoya, Japan, and spent a year at the Divine World's theologate in Chicago learning English. There he learned about missionary life in Ghana and was "really tempted to go to Ghana while I was there in Chicago."

After returning home to finish school, he requested an assignment to Ghana upon ordination. In 1986, he got his wish and went to live for eight years in the bush with no electricity, sometimes no running water and was in charge of 20 mission stations, building schools and putting up clinics. The cardinal-designate said he had help from just a few missionaries but no other outside priests because the government placed a five-year ban on their visas in its dispute with the church over who should run schools.

He said, "Ghana really made ... my priestly character as a missionary who (is) always challenged with difficulties."

The other significant part of his priestly vocation was finding his true call in Rwanda. Within a year of returning from Ghana, he went as a Caritas Japan volunteer to work with the flood of refugees left by the Rwandan genocide in 1994.

Shortly after arriving he said he witnessed the killing of 36 refugees in an attack at a camp of 9,000 "génocidaires," or those who carried out the genocide of 1 million Tutsis and Hutus who were Tutsi sympathizers, according to the United Nations. The camp was closed down out of safety concerns, but when he returned months later, he asked one of the génocidaires leaders what he needed.

Thinking he would need supplies, which were scarce, Cardinal-designate Kikuchi said the man replied, "'Father when you go back to Japan tell them we are still here. We have been forgotten by the people.' That was a really shocking statement because I thought he would ask for food or medicine or some material stuff. ... That ... actually (became) the foundation of my life as a priest ... we should not create anybody feeling that they have been forgotten."

He said this became his motto as head of Caritas Japan, then Caritas Asia and now, since 2023, as president of Caritas Internationalis, one of the church's international humanitarian agencies.

Archbishop Kikuchi, who likes to play jazz piano or his own compositions on his few days off, said Catholic Japanese are less than half a percent of Japan's population. In his archdiocese there is an aging population of 90,000 local Catholics and 100,000 younger foreign Catholics.

In the Federation of Asian Bishops' Conferences and also the synod, he said, "now they are not taking care only about their own people, but all of them (need) to have the section to deal with this migration" and that the synod looks to migrants not just as the hope for the faith to grow but also "to bring the encounter with others."