Читать книгу Blessed Peacemakers - Robin Jarrell - Страница 74

5 July 1928—12 March 1977

Proclaiming Subversion

It didn’t take long at all. Just a few bursts from a couple of machine guns, and Jesuit father Rutilio Grande was silenced. The spray of bullets that took his life also killed an old man and a teenage boy who just happened to be passengers in the car Grande was driving when the murderers caught up with him. But in every war, there’s so-called collateral damage.

Grande was murdered because the El Salvadoran military thought him a threat to the small country’s elite class who controlled the government and most of the national wealth. Grande, a native El Salvadoran who studied in Rome, taught at the Catholic seminary in San Salvador, and served the parish of Aguilares, sought to empower hitherto voiceless peasants by giving them some control over their spiritual and material destinies. For generations, they had been stifled by a hierarchical Church on the one hand and an oppressive economic and political system on the other. Grande encouraged their liberation through the establishment of Christian base communities, self-reliant groups of peasants who regularly met to discuss the gospels and the ways in which Jesus’ message shed light upon their situation. The base communities, serving as they did to raise consciousness among the peasantry, were condemned by the authorities as dangerously seditious, and it became increasingly risky for priests like Grande to remain in El Salvador.

The beginning of the end for Grande came in early 1977. In January a meddlesomely “subversive” priest had been snatched by government authorities and thrown out of the country. Two weeks later, Grande delivered a sermon at his Aguilares church that blasted the climate of fear and oppression created by the ruling junta. “I am fully aware,” he said, “that very soon the Bible and the Gospels will not be allowed to cross the border. All that will reach us will be the covers, since all the pages are subversive—against sin, it is said. So that if Jesus crosses the border, they will not allow him to enter. They would accuse him, the man-God . . . of being an agitator. . . . Brothers, they would undoubtedly crucify him again.” This sermon was Grande’s death warrant, as he must have known it would be. A month later he was dead.

But Grande’s murder bore fruit. It energized his friend Óscar Romero, who had just been appointed archbishop of San Salvador, into active opposition to the government and solidarity with the peasantry. Romero himself would be murdered three years later. In all, seventeen priests would die at the hands of the El Salvadoran junta. But their efforts to preach the subversive good news of spiritual and material liberation helped build a society in which wealth was a little more evenly distributed and a Church better able to see Christ in the faces of the people. So the bullets that cut him down didn’t silence Grande after all.