After 20 years, Jesuits' deaths still affect Saint Joseph's

In the outskirts of San Salvador two decades ago, a death squad of some 20 armed men entered the rectory of the University of Central America Jose Simeon Canas (UCA) in the dead of night, brutally murdering eight residents.

Though it happened a world away, it's an event that still has an impact on Saint Joseph's today.

The slaying of six Jesuits-Ignacio Ellacuria, Ignacio Martin Baro, Segundo Montes, Amano Lopez, Joaquin Lopez y Lopez, and Juan Ramon Moreno-along with their housekeeper, Elba Ramos, and her 15-year-old daughter, Celina, was a moment of great importance in both the history of El Salvador and the Jesuit order.

The initial reaction on campus was one of utter surprise and sadness, both at the victims' high profiles and the savage brutality with which the execution-style murders were carried out. For many Jesuits, the event is described as a seminal moment, the memory of which endures vividly to this day.

"The major reaction was one of stunned silence and shock," said Vincent Genovesi, S.J., a theology professor at St. Joe's. "Nothing had happened like that in our lifetime. We've had Jesuit martyrs way back in history, but nothing like this happened to us, so it was just a shock. It was difficult to accept that."

"My recollection would be that we were kind of dumb-founded," said James Moore, S.J., who served as the associate dean of the College of Arts and Sciences in 1989 and has since retired from the university. "We weren't aware that what the Jesuits were doing at the UCA was so unacceptable to the government down there. It took us by surprise, just to imagine that something like that could ever happen."

The shock was especially profound for Robert McChesney, S.J., the director of Campus Ministry at St. Joe's at the time and current associate dean for administration at the Jesuit School of Theology at Santa Clara University. He studied with Martin Baro in Chicago in the late 1970s, and was informed of the tragedy by the cover of a local newspaper.

"I was out to an early dinner the night of Nov. 16," he said. "I was driving home, and I stopped at a convenience store near the university, and I remember looking down at a stack of the Philadelphia Daily News. I remember just waiting in line to pay my bill for milk or whatever, and I remember on the cover of the paper was a picture, that famous picture of the Jesuits lying in a circle like the spokes of a wheel, and the one I could see was my friend. He was lying on his back, but I could see that it was him, and I could see the side of his face, and I could see the side and back of his head where blood was trickling down. I can still see it today."

The reaction from the Jesuit community at St. Joe's was swift, as a mass at the Loyola House chapel for residents was held on the evening of the 16th, just hours after the news had reached them that afternoon.

Several days later, a mass for the entire Philadelphia Jesuit community was held at Old St. Joe's in Society Hill. The homilist at that service, Simon Smith, S.J., had spent time at UCA and was well acquainted with the six Jesuits. It was a gathering that had a profound impact on Moore.

"The Jesuit who gave the homily said, 'They can kill seven Jesuits, but they cannot kill the University of Central America', and that got a huge ovation," Moore said. "That was a moment that was very inspiring. Of course we were paying tribute to those who were murdered, but it was a rallying cry, because those people were not going to beat us."

The response by students was slower and less direct. McChesney recalls church services held in remembrance of the departed, as well as other political activities such as letter-writing campaigns and petitions to elected officials.

Protests included a demonstration in which an ecumenical delegation of faculty and students knelt before the Federal Building several weeks after the incident to protest the American government's support of the Salvadoran regime that perpetrated these acts. McChesney and William Walsh, S.J., the rector at St. Joe's at the time, were among those arrested. McChesney and others also participated in a candlelight procession to the Liberty Bell to protest the U.S. government's stance.

Students acted by putting pressure on elected officials to influence change on U.S. foreign policy. Petitions to Sen. Arlen Specter and other elected officials were distributed.

Specter, who as a Republican staunchly supported the Reagan and Bush Administrations' military interventionist policies, appeared on campus for a panel discussion on the matter in 1990, and eventually changed his stance on the topic.

The ideas espoused by the Jesuits killed, most of whom were born in Spain, contributed to the school of thought known as liberation theology. Ellacuria, a philosopher, Martin Baro, a social anthropologist, and Montes, a social psychologist, were all eminent scholars in their fields and the development of advancement of liberation theology.

The aim of these ideas was to apply the Gospel to the impoverished and oppressed lives of Salvadoran peasants at the time. The nation lived under an oppressive, right-leaning, military dictatorship that was supported by over $7 billion of American aid over the 12-year civil war that engulfed the Central American nation from 1980-1992 and claimed over 75,000 lives. They utilized death squads and a national guard to root out dissidents and opponents.

"What the Jesuits we commemorate this month really did was that they looked at the problems of the country, and not just the civil war, but the reality of oppression on the part of the oppressive military and social structures, and they thought, 'What are the needs of the people in this country that we can fulfill in this university?" said Joseph Koczera, S.J, who specializes in Latin American studies. "Their contribution was to take that division between the people and the apostolate, and put at the service of the poor."

The guerrilla opposition, the Farabundo Marti National Liberation Front (FMLN), was left-leaning politically and supported by the Cuban government from early in the 1980s. While the UCA's ideas, by and large, were leftist in their avocation of land redistribution and reduction of the government's authoritative hold on rights and elections, the Jesuits held no explicit allegiances with either group. Especially in the case of Ellacuria, they were outspoken against both the government-sponsored terror and the methods of the insurgency, although the criticism fell much more harshly on the former.

"On both sides, they didn't have an interest in peace," said Daniel Joyce, S.J. "They wanted to keep going. The government, especially the military, were benefiting from all this aid money that was coming in, as were the rebels that were communist. There was a lot of profit-making going on in the war, and the Jesuits were trying to work for resolution."

The death squads attempted to play off these divisions to allay suspicions of the attack by leaving a sign near the bodies that read, "The FMLN has executed the spies who turned on them. Victory or death. FMLN."

"The idea was that if they can have their heads explode, it's going to be symbolic of what they could do to their ideas," Genovesi said.

The attacks against the Catholic Church were not the first of their kind to occur in El Salvador. The government's anti-Jesuit policies were first put into action in March of 1980. Archbishop Oscar Romero was assassinated while delivering Mass, while three nuns and a laywoman were raped and murdered under explicit orders from a death squad in December of that year.

The attacks in 1989 re-intensified criticism of the Salvadoran government and the U.S.'s involvement in its affairs. Several of the attackers that carried out these heinous murders were trained at the USA's School of the Americas (SOA), now the Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation. The weapons used were either given to the soldiers by the American government or bought with American money, and there may even have been an American operative present with the group that night, although the secrecy of the operation has permanently blurred the details of the evening.

Two military officers were convicted in 1991, but were pardoned in 1993 as part of amnesty acts passed by the national assembly as part of the peach process ending the civil turmoil.

On Nov. 13, 2008, a lawsuit was filed by the Spanish Association for Human Rights and the San Francisco-based Center for Justice and Accountability in Spanish court asking for an investigation to be carried out in the case, which the court opened in January. Among the defendants are 14 former military officers, former president Alfredo Cristiani, former defense minister Humberto Larios, and former head of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Rene Emilio Ponce.

St. Joe's was directly involved in the first investigation of the murders 20 years ago. Nicholas Rashford, S.J., serving as the university president, joined a delegation of five Jesuits-the presidents of Fordham University, Boston College, Loyola (Md.), and the head of the Association of Jesuit Colleges and Universities (AJCU)-along with Congressman Joe Moakley (D-Massachusetts), who launched an inquiry into the events.

They met with a number of high profile government officials in El Salvador, including member of the Supreme Court, high-ranking military personnel, Cristiani, and important players in the U.S. delegation to El Salvador, including ambassador William Graham Walker and members of the CIA. They also were able to visit the living quarters the Jesuits spent their final night in, as well as the courtyard in which the gruesome execution-style murders were carried out.

Rashford said the original goal of the group was to preserve the freedom of the Jesuits to continue their mission after the government had shut down another university.

"One of the things that happened right afterward was that the government and the military managed to shut down the University of El Salvador, which was a private university," Rashford said. "We were always afraid that they were going to shut down the Jesuits, too. When they killed the Jesuits and the lay people, I think that our first concern was that they were trying to shut down the UCA. That's why it was important for us to get down there and see what was happening."

Among the changes accomplished by the envoy, through Moakley, was a successful appeal to have some of the money allocated by the U.S. government for military purposes diverted to the UCA.

While 20 years has passed since the attacks, the loss of six brothers still weighs heavily on the consciousness of many who were a part of the order at that time, and those that have since been taking orders.

"I think it has changed us in the end," Moore said. "We do not let the event just pass in history: the lives and the experience, we will not let go of it. It's something that's still inspires us. It was a certain sense of pride of what the Jesuits were doing in Central America, and not even a massacre like that was going to stop us."

"It's affected the society in the sense that martyrdom is very real," said Koczera. "It reminds all Jesuits that in the world that we're still doing something dangerous, that we still have to be aware of the full implications of the call. In some cases, preaching the Gospel and living out the implications of that call can bring about martyrdom and provoke opposition. One way to put it is that we are called to be a site of contradiction. These were people that lived that out in a uniquely profound way. They were that site of contradiction to the point where they were seen as such a threat that they designed their deaths."

Joyce, in particular, has a special relationship to the martyrs. He graduated from St. Joe's in 1988, and spent 1989 volunteering as a teacher with Jesuits in nearby Belize. Joyce was one who eventually answered the "rallying cry" Moore spoke of, joining the Jesuits in 1991.

"I actually, for a moment, thought about joining the Jesuits in Central America when these men got killed," he said. "I thought maybe I should commit my life there, but then I realized that that didn't make sense for a bunch of reasons. But it had a huge effect on me. I can't say it was the way I joined the Jesuits; that's not true. But it certainly influenced my view of the Jesuits."

With their current positions in the university, both Joyce and Koczera are able to use the memory and spirit of this tragedy to inspire others.

"For me it's because they were intellectuals, so it means that from the position of the university, we can still use our gifts, our talents, and to some extent the position we have, to really speak up for people who are suffering," Joyce said. "Their work in the university makes me know the power we have as a university. Every Jesuit university has this little conscious urge that says you can speak up if you want. You're in a privileged place at a university. These guys were in a position to speak out with the knowledge to really give voice to others."

"In some ways, it seems far away in the United States that our lives can be challenged in that way," Koczera said. "But it is a reminder that all Jesuits are part of the same work: the work I am doing here, the work that all Jesuits at the university do; it's part of the same mission that propelled Ellacuria and the other martyrs. It doesn't lead us to the same dramatic sacrifice, hopefully, but it's all part of the same mission."