as a genocide. In 1995, during his third visit to Kenya before an audience of 300,000, John Paul II pleaded for an end to the violence in Rwanda and Burundi, urging forgiveness and reconciliation as a solution to the genocide. He told Rwandan and Burundian refugees that he "was close to them and shared their immense pain". He said: "What is happening in your countries is a terrible tragedy that must end. During the African Synod, we, the pastors of the church, felt the duty to express our consternation and to launch an appeal for forgiveness and reconciliation. This is the only way to dissipate the threats of ethnocentrism that are hovering over Africa these days and that have so brutally touched Rwanda and Burundi." Views on sexuality While taking a traditional position on human sexuality, maintaining the Catholic Church's moral opposition to homosexual acts, John Paul II asserted that people with homosexual inclinations possess the same inherent dignity and rights as others. In his book Memory and Identity, he referred to the "strong pressures" by the European Parliament to recognise homosexual unions as an alternative type of family, with the right to adopt children. In the book, as quoted by Reuters, he wrote: "It is legitimate and necessary to ask oneself if this is not perhaps part of a new ideology of evil, more subtle and hidden, perhaps, intent upon exploiting human rights themselves against man and against the family." In 1986, the Pope approved the release of a document from the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith regarding Letter to the Bishops of the Catholic Church on the Pastoral Care of Homosexual Persons. While not neglecting to comment on homosexuality and moral order, the letter issued multiple affirmations of the dignity of homosexual persons. A 1997 study determined that of all the pope's public statements, only 3% addressed the issue of sexual morality. Reform of canon law John Paul II completed a full-scale reform of the Catholic Church's legal system, Latin and Eastern, and a reform of the Roman Curia. On 18 October 1990, when promulgating the Code of Canons of the Eastern Churches, John Paul II stated In 1998, John Paul II issued the motu proprio Ad tuendam fidem, which amended two canons (750 and 1371) of the 1983 Code of Canon Law and two canons (598 and 1436) of the 1990 Code of Canons of