Rwanda Offers No Sanctuary From Chaos : Central Africa: Missionaries reporting bloodletting are stunned that holy places aren’t safe.

Killing frenzies and large-scale massacres are spreading from the Rwandan capital of Kigali to many parts of the anarchic hinterland, Roman Catholic missionaries here said Tuesday.

Amid new fighting and the shelling of refugees in Kigali, missionaries devoted to what is nominally Africa’s most Catholic country told of heartbreak and heroism in a tortured land.

A Spanish nun recounted how hospital patients paid their executioners for swift death. And a 76-year-old Italian lay missionary told her son by radio that food is almost gone but “I am not leaving without the children”--42 orphans marooned in the lawless countryside.

Reports filtering into the headquarters of missionary organizations by telephone and radio Tuesday from Burundi and other neighboring countries depicted apocalyptic savagery.

“I spoke with a senior church official in Burundi this morning who told of horrible new massacres in Rwandan parishes near the border. The killing continues. We will never know how many died, but I believe it must be 100,000 already,” said the Rev. Pedro Sala, assistant general of the Society of Missionaries of Africa, the largest order of foreign priests.

One French member of the order was killed in the violence that has gripped the nation of 7 million since earlier this month.

Sala, who was in Kigali when the killing started April 6 after the deaths of the presidents of Rwanda and Burundi, said massacres have spread in recent days to areas east and west of the capital where most people are members of the Tutsi minority.

Tuesday’s reports told of “horrible massacres” of civilians in the parishes of Cyahinda and Kibeho near the Burundian border, Sala said. Soldiers and civilians of the Hutu majority committed the atrocities in Kigali, missionaries say.

In Kigali, fighting continues between the mostly Hutu army and mostly Tutsi insurgents while surviving civilians huddle for their lives in usually ramshackle dwellings without electricity, water or food.

Reuters news agency reported from Kigali on Tuesday that nine Rwandans were killed and 170 more were wounded when 30 shells slammed into a crowd of around 4,000 hungry refugees at the national soccer stadium, a landmark of the desolated capital.

“This is a battle for power, for economic advantage and for survival that is being fought in the context of a race war,” said Sala, who served six years as pastor of a Kigali parish.

The Rev. Franiszek Filipiec, a Polish priest with the Marian Fathers, who have a large mission in a rebel-controlled area of northern Rwanda, said there were reports of massacres of dozens of people in different settlements in the region.

Violence between Hutus and the Tutsi is a tragic constant of national life in Rwanda, Africa’s most densely populated country. Still, the current round of killing has stunned missionaries in part because the rampage of machete-wielding mobs and army troops has violated the unwritten rules of ethnic conflict.

“Always before, frightened people sheltered safely at churches and in the compounds and residences of the religious. This time there is no asylum. We don’t understand why they will not respect the holy places. Women and children have been wantonly slaughtered, sick children murdered in their hospital beds. It surpasses understanding,” Filipiec said.

Missionaries say about 20 priests have been murdered, almost all of them Rwandan and almost all Tutsi.

Even as dawn broke on the morning after the plane crash that killed Rwandan President Juvenal Habyarimana and Burundian President Cyprian Ntayamira, troops of the elite Presidential Guard raided a retreat house in Kigali run by the Society of Jesus, the Jesuits. Three Belgian Jesuits were locked up in one room. In another, the soldiers killed 11 nuns, three Rwandan Jesuits and five other African priests.

Nuns and priests appear to have been “the principal target” as the violence began, the Rev. Peter-Hans Kolvenbach, head of the Jesuit order, said in a letter to senior leaders of the order.

Of the stories now emerging from the Rwandan slaughter, none is more tragic than that of Spanish Sister Pilar of the Missionaries of Jesus, Mary and Joseph. The 63-year-old missionary told reporters in Madrid that when the killers came to a hospital the nuns ran in the town of Kibuye, about 50 miles from Kigali, the patients realized they had no chance.

“The patients, who died by the hundreds, paid the assassins to kill them quickly and not with machetes,” she said. “We saw children of 6 killing with machetes. Many of them were Catholics, and we knew them.”

Sister Pilar said the nuns hid Tutsi patients, a nurse and four orphans and convinced Hutu killers that all the Tutsi were dead by showing them heaps of bodies.

There were around 1,100 nuns and 500 priests in Rwanda when Pope John Paul II visited in September, 1990.

Around 70 Catholic missionary orders, mainly European, work in Rwanda, but six pulled up stakes last year and Filipiec expects that 20 more may follow them. About two-thirds of foreign missionaries who make up the majority of the country’s priests have left the country, with the remainder either unable to leave or refusing to go.

One missionary who is staying is Amelia Barbieri, an obstetrician who answered a magazine call for lay missionaries 10 years ago. At 76, she runs an orphanage near Muhura in an area controlled by Tutsi rebels.

There are tens of thousands of refugees outside and 42 orphans inside with Barbieri and a handful of Rwandan assistants, her son Piercarlo said by phone from the family home in northern Italy.

“On Monday, Mama was afraid they would be attacked. Today she told us on the radio that they were safe but there was very little food left. She could have left, but she’s insisted from the first day that she would not go without the children. She says if she goes it’s their death sentence,” the missionary’s son said.