Learning from the Martyrs for Justice

Thirty years ago, the news poured into my office in Washington, DC: six Jesuit priests, their housekeeper and her sixteen-year-old daughter had been brutally murdered on the campus of the Jesuit Universidad Centroamerica José Simeon Cañas in El Salvador, where they taught, worked and lived.

One phone call after another delivered the shocking details that Salvadoran soldiers had come on to campus on November 16, 1989 and shot Ignacio Ellacuría, SJ, Ignacio Martin-Baro, SJ, Segundo Montes, SJ, Amando Lopez, SJ, Juan Ramon Moreno, SJ, Joaquin Lopez y Lopez, SJ, Elba Ramos, and Celina Ramos at point blank range. 

Our colleagues from the region were contacting many of the national organizations in the United States that were part of a then-vibrant movement for peace and justice in Central America—including the Pledge of Resistance, a nationwide network of 400 local groups that have been organizing nonviolent action to end US war there for the previous five years, and where I had been serving as the national coordinator since 1987—to get the word out and to mobilize a response. 

Immediately, the networks we had built since 1980—initially prompted by the assassination of Archbishop Oscar Romero (who has recently been canonized by the Catholic Church as a saint) and the wave of killings throughout El Savador, including four North American church women in December of that year—swung into action. 

Over the next days and weeks over 1000 nonviolent actions—with many of them featuring civil disobedience—took place from Washington, DC to California, including a powerful action at the San Francisco Federal Building, where 120 Jesuits and others were arrested (under the leadership of Rev. John Dear) and a weekly demonstration at its counterpart in Los Angeles that went on for months.

This national mobilization had a powerful impact.  For example, after a sit-in in his office by religious leaders, a conservative member of Congress from Texas declared he would not vote for one more penny for military aid to El Salvador.  Within a few months, Congress as a whole joined him, cutting off the billions of dollars that had fueled “death squad government” and clearing the way for the United Nations to begin a peace process that resulted in the end to the civil war there.

Public action had translated grief and shock into nonviolent people-power.  Together we sought to honor those in El Salvador who had given their lives for justice, including the Jesuits and their co-workers. 

It was not an accident that they were killed.  They had stood for a more just and equitable Salvadoran society.  As we look back over these three decades, we would do well to understand this commitment and see the ways in which it is calling us to take such a stand in our own time.

One way to take the measure of this commitment is to savor the words found below of Ignacio Ellacuría, S.J., a liberation theologian who was president of the university.  He and others at the university had re-made an institution that long had focused on educating the wealthy of the country. Under their leadership, the University of Central America became a force for social justice. It is said, for example, that every department of the University of Central America had to justify its existence in terms of how it was contributing concretely to ending the suffering of the Salvadoran people.

Ignacio Ellacuría, S.J.'s June 1982 Commencement Address at Santa Clara University

Seven years before his assassination, Rev. Ellacuría was asked to give the Commencement Address at the University of Santa Clara in California, where he received an honorary degree. Here in an excerpt from his presentation, where he lays out the commitment to justice that his university had made -- and invited those assembled in Santa Clara in June 1982 to consider making such a pledge. 

Across these decades, Ignacio Ellacuría, SJ is also asking us, here and now, to make this commitment as well.

It is a great honor for me, and a gesture of solidarity and support for the Universidad Centroamerica José Simeon Cañas, that Santa Clara University has decided to confer upon me this honorary degree.

I am sure you intend primarily, not to single out my intellectual activity, but to commend the academic and social work which our university has conducted for more than 17 years. Our university's work is oriented, obviously, on behalf of our Salvadoran culture, but above all, on behalf of a people who, oppressed by structural injustices, struggle for their self-determination--people often without liberty or human rights.

But American universities also have an important part to play in order to insure that the unavoidable presence of the United States in Central America be sensitive and just, especially those universities--like Santa Clara--which are inspired by the desire to make present among us all the Kingdom of God.

There are two aspects to every university. The first and most evident is that it deals with culture, with knowledge, the use of the intellect. The second, and not so evident, is that it must be concerned with the social reality--precisely because a university is inescapably a social force: it must transform and enlighten the society in which it lives. But how does it do that? How does a university transform the social reality of which it is so much a part?

It may be difficult for you to understand our situation, because you are such a privileged nation but a minority of the human race. We, in contrast, have daily experience of this reality, and unremitting suffering which attest to it.

What then does a university do, immersed in this reality? Transform it? Yes. Do everything possible so that liberty is victorious over oppression, justice over injustice, love over hate? Yes. Without this overall commitment, we would not be a university, and even less so would we be a Catholic university.

But how is this done? The university must carry out this general commitment with the means uniquely at its disposal: we as an intellectual community must analyze causes; use imagination and creativity together to discover the remedies to our problems; communicate to our constituencies a consciousness that inspires the freedom of self-determination; educate professionals with a conscience, who will be the immediate instruments of such a transformation; and constantly hone an educational institution that is both academically excellent and ethically oriented.

But how can a university so shape itself, or come to understand itself and its social obligations? Perhaps, just a word.

A Christian university must take into account the gospel preference for the poor. This does not mean that only the poor will study at the university; it does not mean that the university should abdicate its mission of academic excellence--excellence which is needed in order to solve complex social issues of our time. What it does mean is that the universitv should be present intellectually where it is needed: to provide science for those without science; to provide skills for those without skills; to be a voice for those without voices; to give intellectual support for those who do not possess the academic qualifications to make their rights legitimate.

We have attempted to do this. In a modest way, we have made a contribution through our research and publications, and a few men have left far more lucrative positions to work in the University for the people.

We've been thanked and supported in our efforts. We also have been severely persecuted. From 1976 to 1980, our campus was bombed ten times: we have been blocked and raided by military groups and threatened with the termination of all aid. Dozens of students and teachers have had to flee the country in exile; one of our students was shot to death by police who entered the campus. Our history has been that of our nation.

But we also have been encouraged by the words of Archbishop Romero--himself so soon to be murdered. It was he who said, while we were burying an assassinated priest, that something would be terribly wrong in our Church if no priest lay next to so many of his assassinated brothers and sisters. If the University had not suffered, we would not have performed our duty. In a world where injustice reigns, a university that fights for justice must necessarily be persecuted.

Taken from the June 1982 Commencement Address at the University of Santa Clara by the Rev. Ignacio Ellacuría, S.J., president of the Jesuit university in El Salvador, Universidad Centroamerica José Simeon Cañas. This text appeared in Santa Clara Today (Alumni Newsletter), October 1982, p. 12. I am grateful to Dr. Jeanette Rodriguez, professor of theology at Seattle University, who drew my attention to this document.