Ordinary People
Made
Extraordinary

by Fr. Charles Berine, SJ

On Monday night, November 11, 1989, Ignacio Ellacuría, the Jesuit president of the University of Central America (UCA) in San Salvador, returned to campus from Spain just as curfew fell. The curfew had been imposed in response to Salvadoran rebels who had startled government forces by darting in and out of the capital at will. Fifteen minutes before soldiers searched the house that night, I spoke with Ignacio Nacho Martín Baró, SJ, the academic vice president, who apprised me of the situation and asked for assistance in getting an article into U.S. papers under an assumed name, as he wanted to avoid local repercussions.

On Wednesday the 15th, I got through at 6:15 P.M. after repeated efforts from my office phone at Santa Clara University. Nacho told me that several hundred soldiers ringed the campus but that he was working on the analysis, which he would fax to me. Nine hours later, soldiers entered the Jesuit residence and brutally murdered Nacho, five other Jesuits, Elba Ramos, who was the cook, and her daughter Celina.

As I made my way to the Santa Clara coffee room Thursday morning, I was mulling over the conversation with Nacho the previous evening and thinking of my father, dying of cancer in Jersey City. My musings ended abruptly when Fr. John Privett, the Jesuit rector at Santa Clara, told me that he had heard on the radio that something terrible had happened at UCA. I assured John that the Jesuits in El Salvador were fine, having chatted with them the previous night. But John persisted, saying that the radio was quoting Fr. Chema Tojeira, the Jesuit provincial in Central America.

Something was wrong.

I ran to my office and began trying the telephone roulette that usually got me through to the Jesuit residence in El Salvador in two dozen tries. This time, nothing.

I called the Jesuit Conference in Washington, D.C., and I wrote down the names. Ignacio Ellacuría. Segundo Montes. Elba Ramos. Celina Ramos. Amando López. Juan Ramón Moreno. Joaquín López y López. Nachos was the last. My life was changed forever.

I flew to Jersey Saturday night, and my father died on Thanksgiving morning, my parents 52d wedding anniversary, just a week after the assassinations in El Salvador. On the following Thursday, back at Santa Clara, I spoke with the Jesuits superior general, Fr. Peter-Hans Kolvenbach, who was visiting the West Coast. We decided that after finishing the academic year at Santa Clara I would fly to El Salvador in August 1990 and take over Martín-Baró's position as academic vice-president.

Ignacio Ellacuría and I had attended a Jesuit education meeting together in Lima in 1976, where with passion and clarity he sketched out his design for a university that would be a critical conscience for a nation. Three years later he became UCAs president, a post he held for a decade. He was gracious, brilliant, and warm, though he did not suffer fools gladly.

San Salvador Festival For the past nine years, members of the University of Central America (UCA) community and of the San Salvador community at large have gathered on November 15 and 16 to commemorate the six Jesuits and two women killed in 1989. This popular celebration consists of a candlelight procession the evening of the 15th, followed by an all-night vigil of song, dance, food, videos, and mass. The next day there is another mass replete with bishops and other dignitaries. The festivities are preceded by a month of Saturday morning masses, each in memory of a pair of martyrs, and always very lively and popular. These liturgies are preceded by special events: one year it was a conference on base communities, another year it was a discussion of human rights; another year a judge spoke on juvenile delinquency and the pressures on youth today. At times, Fr. Jon Sobrino, SJ, or another theologian gives talks on the role of the Church in society today, martyrdom, and other topics. During this celebration, UCA fills up with thousands of people, mostly campesinos, workers, and children, who remember the eight killed at UCA and also all the martyrs of El Salvadorthe many thousands of poor and anonymous who have been kidnaped, tortured, or killed during the countrys civil war. The yearly commemoration is a celebration of the movimiento popular: if the UCA did not sponsor these celebrations, the people would have them anyway. -- Dean Brackley, SJ, professor of theology at the University of Central America in San Salvador.

In the mid 80s he came for a conference at Georgetown, where I introduced him to U.N. Ambassador Jeane Kirkpatricknot exactly a meeting of mindsbut I helped translate a respectful exchange of views. He winced at her glowing description of Salvadoran military leaders whom she knew, but all he did was suggest that the situation was complicated.

At that same conference he challenged what he considered to be a questionable interpretation of liberation theology by Vargas Llosa, the Peruvian author and presidential candidate. As moderator of the discussion between these giants I began to cringe, worried that I might have to mediate fireworks, but once again, real dialogue ensued.

As I drove him to D.C.s National Airport to head out for his honorary doctorate at Loyola University Chicago, I could see that he had enjoyed encounters with sympathetic listeners and respectful adversaries alike.

My first memory of Segundo Montes, whose majestic presence earned him the nickname Zeus, brings me back to his room at the Jesuit residence at UCA in the 1980s. He showed me the new plaster that covered the damage a bomb had done. Just a day or two earlier he had switched his bed around to the other side of the room. His blue eyes came alive as he described this rude awakening.

On this same visit to El Salvador he and I concelebrated mass at the weekend parish where this gentle giant charmed, cajoled, and encouraged the people of the barrio with great personal warmth. And then he headed back to reality, skillfully treading his way through side streets to avoid military blockades.

Martín Baró and I had both earned PhDs in economics from the University of Chicago and had worked together on several projects during the 1980s. He would get up before dawn, eat breakfast, and head to the office to catch up on the latest in psychology and write scholarly articles and books before his administrative duties cluttered the day.

In the afternoon it was off to class with a pile of books in his attachÄ case and an enormous umbrella. His intense look and demanding academic requirements would dissolve into smiles, however, as he trudged up to his weekend parish in Jayuya to share the sacraments, play his guitar, and give piles of candy to the kids.

After the assassination I used to help Dean Brackley, SJ, a fellow New York province member of the replacement team at UCA, to minister to Nachos flock. Dean was a worthy successor with the same brilliance and simplicity as Nacho. We both heard countless stories of El Padre Nacho and his caring ministry. A later pastor eased the Jesuits out, but the people still remember their martyr.

I also remember jolly Amando López, smoking his pipe and smiling; Juan Ramón Moreno, a quiet, intense man who helped so many people through spiritual direction; and Lolo, Joaquín López y López, the beloved director of Fe y Alegría schools; but I had less contact with them. And I never met the two women who shared their martyrdom.

When I was little, I pictured martyrs as heroic figures in a world far beyond my own. But the martyrs of El Salvador were very ordinary people made extraordinary by the way they responded to dramatic challenges. Much of their day involved writing, praying, studying, watching soccer on TV, and hearty laughter. Because they did not take themselves too seriously, the Lord could work through them effectively on behalf of the poor.

Fr. Charles Beirne, SJ, is the academic vice-president at the Universidad Rafael Landívar, the Jesuit university of Guatemala, and author of a history of the UCA, Jesuit Education and Social Change in El Salvador (Garland Press, 1996).

They were priests, not partisan politicians. They dealt with the polis, the poor, and they explored the Christian and ethical dimensions of the national reality that Ellacuría never tired of mentioning as the compass point of so much that they did. He and his colleagues insisted that they respond to these challenges universitariamente -- as a university, and in university fashion through their teaching, research, and social outreach. And they did it well.

Yes, their martyrdom changed my life in many ways, and it wasn't easy to fill in for them. There were times when I wished that they had had enough sense that fatal night to take refuge in an embassy or in the house of friends, as they had done many times before. But despite these difficulties I feel that I have been privileged during this past decade to help continue their ministry in Central America.