At the Jesuit house at the University of Central America; the garden where the Jesuits were killed in 1989; the roses were planted in their memory and in the memory of their cook and her daughter who were brutally killed with them.
In downtown San Salvador the tomb of Bishop Oscar Romero on a Sunday in November.

Here a delegation of rural people visit the altar where Bishop Romero was murdered.

En este altar Monsegnor Oscar A. Romero ofrendo su vida a Dios por su pueblo.

EL SALVADOR MEMORIAL NOVEMBER 2007
It was very early in the dark hours of November 16, 1989 after nine years of the brutal war in El Salvador that the six Jesuits and their cook and her daughter were pulled from their beds and shot point blank at the Jesuit residence at the University of Central America in San Salvador. The army officers responsible later told the story of that night in all its grim details. The Jesuits were their target, Jesuits who had pleaded all along with both sides to seek some agreeable cease-fire but the elites and the army viewed even neutrality in the war as yielding to a communist-influenced treason.

El Salvador is a country no bigger than New Jersey with about the same population. Since the war ended in 1992 with a UN brokered peace agreement, the situation for the poor has not changed much. Still the bottom 40% of the population barely sustain themselves while the top 20% live very comfortable lives. Because of the lack of jobs at home, over a quarter of working age El Salvadorans, some 2.2 million men and women live and work outside the country, nearly a million in California alone.

During the war 75,000 men, women and children died in the brutality. About 80% at the hands of the army and the right-wing death squads. Imagine 5 or 6,000 citizens of New Jersey killed every year for twelve years at the hands of government forces, some tortured and you get the idea of the extent of the chaos. The Jesuits were only a tiny part of the bloodshed that embraced so many families.

Briefly let me say this: I spent many years working and preaching in the African American community. The leading image of salvation in that community is the image of the Exodus, the biblical journey of the Israelites from the slavery of Egypt to the freedom of the promised land. This image still sustains AA Christians as they make their pilgrimage of faith into freedom.

But for the people of El Salvador the memory of blood running in the streets is still fresh. For them the leading image of salvation is the bloody sacrifice of Christ on the cross, his torture and his death that leads to life. An AA leader is often compared with Moses who leads the people into freedom. The diocesan priests, the Jesuits, Archbishop of San Salvador, Oscar Romero gunned down even at the altar, and all those innocents who suffered death in the war in El Salvador rather are pictured as suffering with Christ on the cross.

It is with the sufferings of the people of El Salvador and with the sufferings of others like them that we, too, can come to know this Jesus who suffered for us, the Jesus whom his Father raised up to new life.

Jon Sobrino, the Jesuit theologian who today carries on the work of the martyred Jesuits at the UCA, has this to say about the Jesus that led his brothers to death: “Jesus’ cross is an expression of God’s love…and God chose this way of showing himself, because he could not find any clearer way of telling us human beings that he really wills our salvation.” Let this encourage us to embrace our own salvation in our relationships with those who are suffering. And let us labor to build an image of this life of salvation by alleviating in all that we do the sorrow and the frustration that faces so many of our brothers and sisters.