Sobrino & Bishop Romero

Madrid – On the evening of November 16th, 1989 six Jesuits and two women, Elba and Celina who was only 15 years old, were cruelly and savagely murdered in the Universidad Centroamericana de San Salvador (UCA) by military from the Salvadorian Army. The octuple murder shook the world. The eight dead added to the other 80,000 that the war had already cost in Salvador, a country where the culture of death had installed itself a decade ago.

Spanish-Salvadorian theologian Jon Sobrino could have been the seventh Jesuit murdered, but he wasn’t at home that evening. He was giving a course of theology in Hua Hin (Thailand), 200 km off Bangkok, answering a petition by Leonardo Boff. An Irish priest woke him up to tell him the tragic news. “The entire community, all my community has been murdered”, was his comment. He immediately wondered why he was spared and found no answer. In Thailand, where the number of Christians is very small, someone asked him with a mixture of surprise and disbelief: “Are there Catholics who murder priests in El Salvador?”

A few days after the tragic events Sobrino wrote Companions of Jesus. The martyrdom-murder of the Salvadorian Jesuits, where the question of why they were killed was answered thus: “For they were the critic conscience of a society of sin and for they were creative conscience of a future different society.” Since then life hasn’t been the same for Jon Sobrino. “I felt –he declares- a deep cut in my life and an emptiness that nothing could fill.” The wound also showed in his writings, which would carry the inerasable mark of martyrdom and the seal of the crucified. Jon Sobrino became the survivor of martyrdom and witness of martyrs, and his theology turned into the literary gender of testimony.

On March 12, 1977 murderous bullets had ended the life of his companion Rutilio Grande, who was committed to the struggle for justice in Aguilares, and two peasants, an old man and a child. Jon Sobrino, who was accompanying the dead, opened the door to greet Monseñor Romero, who had just been named archbishop of San Salvador, and who was to preside over Rutilio’s funeral. Sobrino accompanied him to the church where hundreds of peasants had gathered to accompany the bodies. It was during the funeral that Romero, who until then had been a conservative bishop and critical of the Theology of Liberation, converted to the God of the oppressed, to the Church of the poor and the cause of liberation. Three years later, on March 24th, 1980, while he was saying mass in the chapel of a small nun’s hospital, monseñor Romero was murdered. Jon Sobrino was the first priest who knew about the killing. A couple of days prior to that, Romero had a premonition and said: “If they kill me, I will resurrect in the Salvadorian people”. And so it happened: his funeral, on March 30th, became one of the largest popular demonstrations –if not the largest one- in the entire history of El Salvador. His book Monseñor Oscar A. Romero. Un obispo con su pueblo, (Monseñor Oscar Romero. A Bishop with His People”) written on the tenth anniversary of the murder of the archbishop ended with these words by I. Ellacuría: “With monseñor Romero, God passed by El Salvador”.

Jon Sobrino is today witness of martyrs in the strictest sense of the word. He keeps the memory of the horror alive in order to avoid its repetition, he practices the anamnestic reason in times of amnesic and forgetful reason, he keeps the subversive remembrance of the dead for love of justice, according to one the most revolutionary ethical principles that Jesus of Nazareth preached in the Sermon of the Mount and that Gandhi called a real social program: “Blessed be the persecuted for seeking righteousness for theirs is the Kingdom of Heaven.” With his testimony, uncomfortable for the victimizers, many of them still alive, Sobrino is claiming justice and rehabilitation for the victims and questioning a legal system that lacks all humanity.

The witnesses of memorable events, massacres, catastrophes, collective disgraces, of special moments in the history of the peoples sometimes have a special consideration. They are protected because they represent the voice of the victims and their testimony must be protected so it doesn’t get lost. The ecclesiastic institution, however, has an attitude towards martyrs and witnesses which is not very generous. The first are not acknowledged as such. They are often accused of having deviated from their evangelizing mission, of going into politics when their business is the salvation of the soul. They are implicitly being made responsible for their own deaths. This is the case of monseñor Romero, known as a saint and a martyr by the Salvadorian people and by Christians from all over the world, and yet, questioned in his evangelic consistency.

Jon Sobrino, who hasn’t been allowed to mourn his martyr companions, has suffered the same lack of generosity and acknowledgement. Since 1975 he has been investigated and harassed mercilessly. The investigations coincide with the murders mentioned above: first, after the murder of Rutilio Grande; then after Romero’s, then after that of the Jesuits, and now, once more. Instead of asking him to recall the memory of so many thousands of Salvadorians he has seen dying, silence is imposed on him. He has never been summoned to give his testimony about the martyrs. He has never been asked how he felt after the murder of each one of his brothers, on the contrary, his books have been read to discover mistakes, heresies. The censors don’t care about his orthopraxis, which is truly evangelical, but his orthodoxy. And this has been judged not with the standards of mercy and dialogue, of equanimity and comprehension, but with exaggeration and discredit. And still the guardians of orthodoxy are proud of not having punished him yet.

In the meantime Sobrino remains silent. Perhaps silence is the best answer, recalling Atahualpa Yupanqui’s song: “I don’t need my voice. I can sing in silence”
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Juan José Tamayo
Drector of the Chair of Theology and Science of Religions in the Universidad Carlos III of Madrid and author of Nuevo Diccionario de Teología (Trotta, Madrid, 2005) (New Dictionary of Theology)