In the Margins: A Memory in Flesh and Blood

It was about 1:00 am, on the morning of November 16, 1989, when the 35 soldiers arrived at the university. A small group broke off from the main body—heading towards the Jesuit residence as the rest of the troops went about the work of faking a rebel skirmish. They forced the door of the residence, only to discover the cook—Elba Ramos—and her 15 year old daughter—Celina—in the room beside the kitchen where they entered.  Leaving one soldier to hold the two at gunpoint, the main body of men went further into the house.
They found Fr. Ellacuria coming down the hall; he was wearing pajamas and wondering who was making all the noise. He was their primary target—the rector of the Jesuit community, a sociologist and major proponent of the Jesuit work in Central America to promote what their documents called “a faith that does justice.” They pushed him out into the garden, and with him his companions—Amando López, Ingacio Martín Baró, Segundo Montes, and Juan Ramón Moreno. They forced them all to lie face down on the grass. 
Then they shot them—over and over again—giving special care to shoot their heads, a small sign of the hatred and fear which they had for the ideas of these men. Ideas derived not from ideology, but from faith; born of the Sermon on the Mount and the Magnificat; shaped by their encounter with the Lord in the gospels and in the Spiritual Exercises of St. Ignatius. These ideas, that proclaimed the radical gospel of Jesus, where the poor and the sorrowing are blessed, and where the God of the Incarnation “has thrown down the rulers from their thrones and lifted up the lowly, has filled the hungry with good things, and sent the rich away empty”—these ideas led to their death. 
Having killed their primary target, the soldiers went on to kill the witnesses—the 71 year old Fr. Joaquin Lopez, frail and feeble from prostate cancer, was shot in the hall; and the two women—neither of whom bore any guilt, but both of whom loved the Jesuits for whom they worked—were gunned down in their room. All in all, eight people died in a matter of minutes; and when the murders were announced by radio in the army barracks the next morning, a cheer went up. A cheer not from monsters, but from ordinary soldiers—most of whom were Catholic by baptism and by practice, and who saw themselves as good citizens and protectors of the order of the nation.
In an age such as ours—hardened by generations of war and terror, by the thoughtless death-dealing of drones and the mass graves of Ukraine—it is easy to forget the horror evoked by the murder of these eight souls, murders which seem so long ago, a generation of death already passed. In the wake of Afghanistan and Iraq, Rwanda and Ukraine, when new atrocities seem to take up all the room our hearts have for sorrow and outrage, we can forget our proxy war in El Salvador and the glimpse it offered of the power of fear and the rarity of courage and truth. In these times of financial hardship, when the poor are cast aside and wounded souls dismissed as drags on the economy, we can forget that our brothers and sisters have died for the poor, because they knew that in those poor was the very life of Christ. “Forget the past,” the world seems to say, and in forgetting, we too are lost in the same cycle of fear and blood, of betrayed trust and comrades dead among the roses. Like death itself, this amnesia darkens our vision and robs us of all our hope.
But our past, for all its pain, has granted us a grace that pierces the darkness and opens our memory and our dreams; for when the blood ran over the roses of that garden, the women and men of our community—people of faith in San Francisco and Seattle, in Washington and Chicago—bound their spirits and their bodies together with the people of El Salvador in a in a covenant of blood and hope. The Sister Parish relationship at St. Ignatius remains an abiding sign of that covenant, and changes the history of war and violence. On both sides, we have been true to that covenant, through the winter of war and the springtime of new life: learning from each other about justice and struggle, offering refuge on one side and receiving welcome on the other, supporting each other and receiving the support that only a vision of resurrection can bring. In this covenant—this union of blood and Spirit—we find the antidote to our forgetfulness: for we are called to remember by our own brothers and sisters, people we have known, who have held us in their hearts and whose example of healing and renewal stirs us to action.
This coming week, as we recall the blood shed in that garden in El Salvador, may we recognize that violence can be overcome by solidarity, and the power of death conquered by love. For all those who suffer share in the blood in which we have been baptized as one body, one community—the blood of Ellacuria and Montes, of Elba and of Jesus—and the Spirit of life, who raised Jesus from the dead, raises us, as well, opening our hearts, and calling us from the table of blood and body to the gathering of our companions, of our community, of our suffering and redeemed world.