The other day I was chatting with my mom on Facebook and she asked me what the best part of my trip has been so far. I struggled to think of a good answer, and eventually said that the day we worked on the church, heard the testimonies, and visited Jorge´s grave was probably the most meaningful day. There have of course been wonderful moments and I have experienced lots, but nothing really stuck out to me as being ¨the best¨.
Today that changed. I got to meet Jon Sobrino!!! Jon Sobrino is a Jesuit priest (originally from Spain) who has worked at the University of Central America (UCA) here in San Salvador for a long time. He is one of the leaders of Liberation Theology and has written many many books. I have read some of his books and these books greatly influenced my own theology. Furthermore, he is an amazing man of great courage, he is incredibly intelligent, and is overall just a great model of a person of faith who is working for peace and justice.
Julie and I have been talking about wanting to meet this man for quite some time. He often travels out of the country so we weren´t sure if he was in the country or not. We asked a few different people around here and most people seemed to think that he was indeed out of the country. But when we went to the UCA today, Julie was asking a secretary if Jon was in the country and as she was asking, he walked past us, the secretary pointed him out to us, and he went through some doors (we think he went to the bathroom). So, naturally Julie and I freak out as if we had just seen a rock star. After a few minutes he came back out and it was obvious that he was in a hurry (he´s a very busy man). Julie and I very quickly asked him if we would take a picture with us and he agreed. And then he left. Julie and I were just glowing and smiling and star struck for some time. We are hoping to maybe find some way to get to actually meet him and talk with him sometime later in our trip. Just to be in his presence for a short time was amazing!!! I´m still a little bit giddy just thinking about it.
The reason we were at the UCA was to visit a museum there and to learn about the massacre that occurred there in 1989. A student served as our tour guide and did a fantastic job- the amount of information was overwhelming. We started in the museum where they have artifacts from priests, nuns, and other church people who were murdered before and during the civil war. We started with learning about Father Rutilio Grande who was assassinated in 1977 along with an old man and a young boy who were traveling with him in his jeep. We saw the shirt Father Grande was wearing when he was shot, the shoes of the old man, and the backpack of the little boy. Father Grande was just the first of many who were killed because they were priests, because they were nuns, because they had things like Bibles with them, or simply because they were just with a priest or nun. In the museum we saw a picture of Pastor Matias´ priest who had been killed in 1979. All the pictures and personal artifacts of the people who had been assassinated really showed that these people were people just like you and me. These things illustrated humanity in the face of inhumanity.
Our tour guide told us about a few massacres of hundreds of people- women, men, kids, elderly people. The Salvadoran army (backed by the U.S. government and tax payers) massacred these people for no rational reason. They justified what they did by saying that the people they killed were guerrillas or they were supporting the guerrillas, but in reality most of the people in these massacres were just people trying to escape from the army.
Then we started learning about the massacre that occurred at the UCA. In the early morning hours of November 16, 1989, members of the Salvadoran army came to the place where Jon Sobrino and 6 of his fellow Jesuits lived there at the university. (At the time Jon Sobrino was out of the country.) The Jesuits were awoken by the soldiers. The soldiers ordered the priests to go out of their rooms into a garden area where they proceeded to brutally murder the men by shooting them. One of the priests had managed to stay in his room until he thought the soldiers had left, but he opened his door too soon and he was shoot too. A little bit down the hall, the groundskeeper´s wife (Elba) and their daughter (Celina) had been sleeping. They had been awakened by the gun shots and when they opened the door to see what had happened the soldiers saw them. The soldiers had been told to leave no witnesses and so these two women were killed as well. The rooms of the Jesuits and their things were burned, shot, and otherwise destroyed. We saw the clothes the Jesuits had been wearing when they were killed- pajamas. They soldiers left a brutal scene. Blood, organs coming out, skulls bashed in.
Just outside the museum and the place where the Jesuits lived is the rose garden that was planted in memory of the Jesuits, Elba, and Celina. The roses were planted in the place were four of the bodies were left. The gardener would eventually plant more rose bushes because these people were not the only ones assassinated during the war.
The reason the Jesuits and other religious people were murdered was because the government feared that they and their ideas were encouraging the people to rise up against the government and the wealthy. Most of them practiced and preached liberation theology which challenged the status quo of the injustices that benefited the wealthy but greatly harmed the poor. In a symbolic act, the soldiers destroyed the priests´ books, typewriters, and heads because they used these things to teach and preach liberation.
Recently declassified documents indicate that U.S. officials knew about the plan to kill the Jesuits before it happened. This is obviously very disturbing on a number of levels. Today we talked about the Cold War mentality, the way of thinking that led to support such atrocities. However, nothing can justify what happened to the 6 Jesuit priests, Elba, and Celina, and the thousands of other innocent people who were murdered during the war.
