Twenty years later, their light still shines

On November 16, 1989 – twenty years ago, this week – soldiers, led by men trained at the School of the Americas in Ft Benning, Georgia, USA – burst in on six sleeping Jesuit priests in their dormitory at the University of Central America in San Salvador – and their housekeeper and her daughter – dragged the priests out to the garden and shot them there.

I have been to that garden, now planted with roses by the husband and father of Elba and Celina, who died along with the Jesuits. Roses bloom there in December, a sign of the hope and memory that lives on.

Those soldiers filled the night with symbols. Ignatio Ellacuria and his companions were killed because they spoke and wrote and taught in defense of the poor. Elba and Celina were killed because they were there – no living witnesses. The priests with the most dangerous minds were shot in the head and left in the garden. I have seen pictures – their bodies still clad in their nightclothes, the matter that was once their brains beside them on the ground. Some of them were dragged back inside, and in one room, a book was knocked off the shelf and became soaked with the blood of one of the martyred priests. The book was The Crucified God, by Jürgen Moltmann.

That book is on display at the Romero Center at the UCA, a memorial that was created in the space where the Jesuits once lived, along with bullets found at El Mozote, where an entire village was massacred in 1991, also by people trained at the SOA in Georgia. Bullets found at the site were made in the United States, provided to those soldiers with our tax money.

On the night of November 16, 1989, the soldiers who came for the Jesuits did some other damage, as well. There in the museum at the UCA are some of the other things they shot: Bibles, dictionaries, typewriters, telephones, letters and papers. They shot a portrait of Oscar Romero through the heart, as he had been shot in reality nine years before: the pastor, shot through the heart, as the scholars were shot through the brain.

Seeing those machine-gunned books and papers, that portrait in tatters, I was mystified. “Why on earth would someone shoot a book?” I wrote in my journal that night.
And then I got it.

You shoot something if it is a threat. You shoot things that have power. Those soldiers left us a map, directions for how to continue that work of building the kindom of God, building the world God dreams of, where there is justice for all people, where every person has what they need to live and grow and thrive, where we value each other for the children of God that we are:

There is power in the Scriptures.
There is power in our memories.
There is power in our stories.
There is power in our writing, our teaching, our words.

Chava Redonnet
November 12, 2009

Additional Link: http://www.cja.org/cases/Jesuits_Docs/jesuits_victims.shtml

Previous Inspirations by Chava Redonnet:

Inspirations-October-2009

Inspirations-November-2009
Inspirations-November11-2009

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