What I learned from El Salvador's Jesuit martyrs

[struggle4progress]

Andrew Hamilton November 11, 2009

... That evening Jon Sobrino did join us for the Eucharist, still in shock. Next morning he read the account in the Bangkok Post. A photograph showed one of the dead Jesuits in a room. Jon looked at the photo, and said slowly, 'That's my typewriter: that's my Bible. That is my room' ...

These communities had been forced to leave the mountainous parts of El Salvador as the army conducted its counterinsurgency campaign. This consisted of sweeping through villages and killing indiscriminately, and more systematically murdering catechists. In this way they hoped to deprive the guerrillas of a population where they could hide and to intimidate its leadership.

The families, all poor, fled and gathered in camps across the border. There they centred their lives around reflection on the Gospels, eventually returning to settle on deserted land. They lived precariously, protected to some extent by foreign volunteers who accompanied them ...

The theology done in El Salvador, too, was about listening to the Gospel through the lives and the simple words of the poor, and seeking larger, connected words in which to speak of it. It made sense in the communities that I visited. The learned criticism of it that I had read made no sense, just as the political analysis of the threat posed by the poor of El Salvador made no sense. It all began and ended in the wrong place ...

http://www.eurekastreet.com.au/article.aspx?aeid=17532