Haiti: a camp of the displaced massacred in a church

On the night of Sunday 23 to Monday 24 August 2026, a displaced-persons camp installed in a church, on the heights of Kenscoff on the edge of Port-au-Prince, was targeted by armed men. They overran the community, killed inhabitants who had taken refuge there, burned houses and carried off captives.

The toll remains uncertain. Some forty dead are counted according to the first tallies, at least forty-seven according to others, and up to nearly fifty are advanced on the ground, with several dozen wounded and abducted; the United Nations reports twenty-two wounded. The massacre took place near a police station. A mountainous zone commanding the access roads to the capital, Kenscoff has been the repeated target of criminal groups since the start of 2025, and the attack is attributed to a coalition of gangs.

The government has promised to strengthen security and to hold the perpetrators to account, while a UN-backed gang-suppression force is to be brought up to strength. The carnage comes ahead of general elections planned for December 2026, the first in more than a decade.

The law this blood breaks

“Thou shalt not kill.” This Fifth Commandment, teaches the Catechism of the Council of Trent, is made “to protect the life of each one of us in particular” and “absolutely forbid[s] homicide.” It excepts no one: “neither rich, nor poor, nor powerful... There is no one, whatever be the lowliness of his condition, who is not protected by it.”

The same Catechism weighs the enormity of the crime. Homicides, it says, “are the most relentless enemies of the human race and even of nature; for they destroy, as much as is in them, the work of God, in destroying man.” And because man is created to the image of God, he who sheds his blood “does Him a signal injury... in making His image disappear from the midst of the world.” From immediately after the deluge, God had laid down this demand: “I will require the blood of your lives at the hand of every one that shall have shed it.”

The measure

What the night of Kenscoff gives to see is the crime this commandment forbids in its barest form: the blood of the innocent and the defenceless, shed even in a place of refuge. No cause, no lowliness of condition strips these dead of the protection of the divine law; their blood, like Abel’s, cries from the earth to God, who requires an account of it.

The same law lights up the duty of authority. The Catechism recalls that the magistrates, “the legitimate avengers of crime,” who act against criminals “to protect the innocent,” far from breaking this precept, observe it: their office tends only to “put our life in surety, in repressing audacity and injustice.” To guard the weak is therefore not, for those in power, one policy among others, but a charge received from God; where the innocent is not protected, blood mounts up, and an account of it will be required.

What the faithful must retain

We must pray for the dead, for the wounded and for the captives, and remit their executioners to the justice of God, who is not mocked. Tradition asks of us neither vengeance nor despair, but the firm memory that the life of man, made to the image of God, is sacred even in the poorest of the displaced, and that no massacre escapes judgment. It is by this light, and not by that of figures alone, that such a night is measured.

Sources. Catechism of the Council of Trent (1566), on the Fifth Commandment (“Thou shalt not kill”). Holy Scripture: Genesis I, 27 (man created to the image of God); Genesis IX, 5 (the blood required after the deluge); Genesis IV, 10 (the blood of Abel which cries from the earth to God).