Martyrs of El Salvador

On a quiet Saturday evening Fr Rutilio Grande, SJ, was travelling by car along with two close companions, Manuel Solorzano and Nelson Rutilio Lemus, to say Mass in a small village outside Aguilares in El Salvador. Half-way through a sugar plantation a government death squad opened fire and killed them all on the spot.

This incident, in an ongoing murder spree by the Salvadorean government, was a precedent, an escalation on the previous killings, where only small local leaders were earmarked for elimination. A sort of taboo was broken. Never before had a priest been murdered. This precedent reached its culmination two years later, on March 24, 1980, when Archbishop Oscar Romero was mowed down by bullets as he was preaching in church.

The background to these terrible events was the economic and political situation in El Salvador and in many other Latin American countries. An unholy alliance between the few great landowners, the military establishment and the mostly dictatorial political leaders had evolved. These left out the vast majority of the population from economic and political participation with the result that poverty, illiteracy and illness was the lot of the common people.

Mgr Luis Chavez Gonzales, was Archbishop of San Salvador from 1938 to 1977, and was one of the leading figures in the Latin American episcopate for his stand in favour of the poor. He was a staunch supporter of the Theology of Liberation and the Option for the Poor. That meant that the good news of the Gospel had to be matched with progress and development even in the social and material aspects of life. The method to bring this around was to organise and multiply small local communities known as communità di base.

Educating the poor in these communities meant making them aware that the good news of the Gospel needed learning and taking action in favour of solidarity with others. In many cases this led to concrete stands against the ruling establishment with consequent repressions and murders.

Fr Grande was one of the leading lights in this area, a great collaborator of Archbishop Gonzales and one earmarked to become rector of the seminary there. He had just returned from one of the usual conferences to deepen the involvement set forth by the Latin American Bishops' Conference in Medellin, Colombia.

When Archbishop Gonzales retired, the establishment lobby succeeded in having Bishop Oscar Romero of Sta Maria nominated as his successor. They based their choice on his criticism of Liberation Theology. He was a friend of Fr Grande but was not afraid of expressing his reservations. No doubt the ecclesiastical authorities hoped to find in him a balancing factor in the Church-State impasse that had evolved.

That was not to last long. On the day Romero was informed of the political murder of his friend he held a press conference to express his grief at the loss of a personal friend. Later on he led the funeral Mass in Aguillares, Fr Grande's parish. But nobody expected the later developments. On Sunday, March 20, no Mass was to be held in parishes so that the faithful could attend the funeral Mass in San Salvador Cathedral.

The homily delivered on this occasion left no doubt where the new Archbishop stood in this struggle against organised injustice. Later his homilies were transmitted ever and ever again on radio until he himself was shot down two years later. The rest is history

It started all with the gunning of this Jesuit and his faithful friends.