by Paul Eliefrom Georgetown University
Remember This: Jesuits and Companions, Martyred in El Salvador
Ignacio Ellacuría. Ignacio Martín-Baró. Juan-Ramón Moreno. Amando López. Segundo Montes. Joaquin López y López. Elba Ramos. Celina Ramos.
In this season of silver anniversaries – fall of Wall in Berlin; quake in San Francisco; Tom Wolfe’s “Stalking the Billion-Footed Beast” in Harper’s – maybe the most significant, and definitely the most doleful, is the twenty-fifth anniversary of the moment in history that turned those college professors and their colleagues into martyrs.
They are the Jesuit martyrs of San Salvador. Robert Ellsberg, in his great and permanent Lives of the Saints, tells the story:
On the morning of November 16, 1989, news photographers in El Salvador recorded a scene of abomination: the bodies of six Jesuit priests strewn across the garden lawn of the University of Central America. Those seeking a meaning for their deaths could look to the Latin American church’s option for the poor or to the Jesuits’ commitment to social justice. Indeed, they could look to the Sermon on the Mount. But the immediate context was the fratricidal war in El Salvador.
Rebels had challenged the military and the ruling elite, drawing on the Catholic liberation theology which called for believers, as Ellacuría put it, to “take the crucified down from the cross.” The Jesuits at once denounced unjust conditions in the country and sought a settlement to the war. The military moved on the Jesuits as rebel sympathizers:
… a unit of the Atlacatl Battalion, an elite “antiterrorist” force notorious for its record of human-rights abuses, stole onto the campus of the university … After locating Father Ignacio Ellacuría, rector of the university, along with five other Jesuits asleep in their community residence, the troops forced the priests outside, had them lie on the lawn, and then scattered their brains with machine-gun fire.
Elba Ramos was the community’s housekeeper. Celina Ramos, age sixteen, was her daughter.
What is the significance of their deaths, twenty-five years on? The word significance carries the answer. Those deaths are a sign: a sign of authentic Catholic witness, and a sign of the prospective consequences. Theoconservatives are fond of citing poll data which report that the religious communities that “demand the most” of their adherents are the ones that thrive – and are fond of playing this supposed truth against supposedly undemanding Catholic progressives. Well, the Jesuits of El Salvador wound up in a situation in which their progressive Catholicism that obviously demanded the most of them.
For their deaths to be a sign, they must be remembered, and those Jesuits have been remembered at Georgetown all through this past week: with a public forum, the presentation of a wooden cross devoted to the martyrs at the center of campus, a dramatic reading of No Mas: The Story of the Salvadoran Martyrs, and a memorial Mass celebrated by the rector of Georgetown’s Jesuit community
A new poll suggests that Catholicism is a diminished thing among Latin Americans, but no pundit is making the obvious point that one reason Catholicism is diminished in Latin America is that the people who were in charge there a quarter century ago turned their weapons on devout Catholics and killed them.
“I believe grace to be efficacious in the looooooooong run,” Flannery O'Connor told a correspondent. In the short term – look at the photograph – the military in El Salvador got its way; but the lives and the deaths of the Jesuit martyrs of San Salvador suggest that in the long run it is otherwise.