IN SAN SALVADOR, ON THE 16TH OF NOVEMBER 1989, AS IS known around the world, six Jesuit priests, together with their cook and her daughter, were dragged from their beds and murdered. The event was hardly unforeseen or even unchosen by the priests.
For at least four years, they had dwelt under the livid threat that at length broke through their doors and called in a debt of blood. At one point several years ago, an ultimatum was issued against them: 30 days to leave the country or be killed. They chose to remain and take their chances. The word of the Spirit, one concludes, was: Remain.
Instead of leaving, the Jesuits sent a modest appeal to their brothers around the world. Please be apprised of our predicament. Please come if possible to El Salvador. International attention is our only hope. A slight interference, the presence of outsiders, might, just might, delay discharge of guns already cocked and aimed.
It was at this point that another New York Jesuit and I resolved to go. In the course of our visit, we met all those who were subsequently murdered. It occurred to me at the time that it might also be useful to publish a small account of the journey, of the friendships we formed, of the dangers and complications of life in that tormented country. I did so. But nothing we could do availed, as we were to learn to our horror and grief.
The reality of the situation of the Jesuits required neither drama nor dramaturge. Day after day, year after year, as the guns resounded to and fro like mad metronomes, the mortal danger wherein the priests stood -- what form the end might take -- could hardly have been made more vivid to them. Certainly not by their unclairvoyant visitors from el Norte.
The priests had no need of a drama, a play within their play. Why should someone seize the cincture of one among them, bind himself over, and so declare their plight? The Spirit, one might conclude, had spoken to them; a circuit of doom and glory bound them, each to each. One in life and work and consequence: Remain.
AGABUS DECLARED THROUGH THE symbolic binding certain boundaries of knowledge of the future and its form (Acts 21:10-11). The prospective binding of Paul could only signify the drastic curtailing, if not the end, of his extraordinary mission. The response of the community to this dire likelihood is a spontaneous outcry; it is beyond bearing that Paul be taken prisoner. Yet again, friends are appalled. They beg him to stay free, while he is yet able, from bonds whose very prospect is a throttling of hope.
And he will not. He will counter their dread by introducing a larger, more awful threat and embracing that. "Why these tears, why try to weaken my resolution? I am ready not only to be bound, but to die in Jerusalem for the name of the Lord Jesus" (Acts 21:13).
What friend willingly consents in mind to the suffering of a friend, no matter the nobility of the cause? The office of friendship, we think, is to act counter to intemperate heroism. And in discharging that office with all one's might, as the heart drums insistently, the friend acts all the more nobly. Friendship cries in protest, weakens, warns, declares null and void the hot will of the one who runs to death. "Let this cross be far from you."
The outburst of Peter in the face of Jesus' announcement of his death -- so heartfelt and altruistic, so right (and so wrong), so in accord with the heart's deep welling, so weakening and delaying what must be -- is coldly received, perceived only as an assault on invincible will. And it is rejected in tones brusque, final, scandalous: "Stand aside, Satan."
Thus the friend, protesting, impeding, standing athwart, is locked in combat with the beloved one. "Simon, son of John, do you love me?" Friendship, and then vocation. How shall a sedulous friend resolve the dilemma? How do we stand with the other, and still pay respect to the friend's vocation?
The solution is hardly a relief; it is a multiplying of sorrow. It implies agreement with the determination of a friend, that he go where he must go, where he is quite literally and beforehand "bound." And then the new agreement is sealed in blood. It is the blood of an all but unimaginable pact.
The friend imagines, then leaps the void that lies between friendship and vocation. It is quite simple and final. He joins his friend in death. "In very truth I tell you ... when you are old you will stretch out your arms and a stranger will bind you fast and bring you where you have no wish to go" (John 21:18).
They all came to this in the early gathering. One, their friend, preceded them; the others were tardy, but eventually grew hardy in purpose. It was a gathering of death and rising from death.
"So, as Paul would not be dissuaded, we gave in and said, 'The Lord's will be done'" (Acts 21:14). Now we have something more than friendship, as the world would understand it. We have a community standing on the shore, not in farewell but in an accompanying spirit. The wind in his sails bears them along in a gale; all are bent on the same errand, the journey toward Jerusalem. Friend and friends, they are bound over. They stretch forth their hands and feet in one direction. More, they bend their necks to Paul's will, "To die in Jerusalem for the name of the Lord Jesus. "
The members are well advised not to doubt the worst, to embrace the darkness of their own foreboding. And this for Paul's sake, that he not go alone on his dolorous way. And for their own also. The journey is theirs, and the binding over; and eventually, in likely prospect, the martyrdom as well.
THE MARTYRS TEST THE CHURCH. The church knows itself, which is to say it has mapped its journey toward Jerusalem and calculated the consequence of the journey. But this only insofar as it knows, embraces, honors, exonerates the martyrs.
This attitude and activity in regard to our own can only be called crucial. It implies at the same time that the church rejects the ideology which the state invariably, for its own perverse delight and to cover its crimes, attaches to the believers whom it marks for martyrdom. This is an insulting tag attached to a noble corpse: ideologue, or troublesome priest, or disturber of public order.
Thus the sequence: The state executes the martyrs, then denigrates their deaths behind a meticulous (or foolish) scrim of duplicity and doubt.
It was thus in the case of Jesus. He must not only die, but Roman law must be vindicated in his death (and he dishonored, his memory smirched) by charges of subversion, threats of destruction of the temple, endangerment of law and order.
In his death we have something more shameful even. We have the classic instance of religion abandoning the martyr, joining the vile secular chorus of dishonor. Worse and worse, it supplies out of its own foxy canons a philistine logic to conceal its implication in the crime: "One of them, Caiaphas, who was high priest that year, said, 'You have no grasp at all of the situation; you do not realize this: It is more to your interest that one man should die for the people than that the whole nation should be destroyed'" (John 11:49-50).
Martyrdom is included in the church's catechesis, for the church knows why martyrs die, and says so. More, in certain circumstances, the church makes it clear that such death is the only honorable witness and outcome.
Then, their deaths accomplished, the church's task continues. It raises them to the altar for holy emulation. For they are, after Christ and Mary, the church's chief glory. The church knows it and at least sometimes says it boldly, sternly defending the martyrs.
The defense is risky. Often guns again are lowered, the terror continues, and others are placed at danger. The mere declaration of how and why the martyrs perished heightens the immemorial struggle between the church and the worldly powers -- a struggle that the martyrs personify to the highest and noblest degree.
In San Salvador as elsewhere, noble tongues are silenced, but the truth must continue to be told. The truth of their death, the cruelty and injustice of it, the precious connection between their death and the integrity of the gospel. This is judgment, the heavy tolling, not of a passing bell, but a presentiment of the last day itself. The bell tolls for the defeat here and now of the violent victors, for the triumph of the victims.
THE MARTYRS, ALL SAID, HAVE stood surrogate for Christ and the church. Their crime is their firm withstanding on behalf of an irresistible word of love. In this they have spoken for the whole body of Christ.
Then, death accomplished, their community takes up the task, not solely to justify the innocent death, nor to seek justice. That's an impossible task in most cases, since the unjust and violent sit also in the courts. The task is otherwise: to confront the powers with judgment and a call to repentance. Even murderers, and the powers that impel them, must be salvaged -- even those who are furthest from the saving truth, from the mercy and compassion they have sought to extinguish.
This is the consonance between church and martyr: the martyr standing witness for the church, the church vindicating and honoring the martyr.
An ordination photo of Father Ellacuria, murdered Jesuit of El Salvador, shows him vested, prostrate on the sanctuary floor while the litany of saints is chanted over the new priests. A photo dated Thursday, Nov. 16, 1989, shows Father Ellacuria murdered, prostrate outside the Jesuit house. He is in exactly the position of his ordination rite.
The church from time to time (and wondrously in our own time) earns the name church of martyrs. It does not mean, obviously, that all the faithful perish. It signifies the living consonance between the witness of those who die and those who survive. Both speak up, both pay dearly, some in blood, some in the bearing of infamy and danger.
THIS CONTINUING BURDEN OF truth telling is, it would seem (and here one speaks with trepidation), mainly a matter laid upon the local church. The situation could hardly be called ideal. When the highest authorities of the church refuse to vindicate our martyrs, and thus refuse to confront the powers clearly and unequivocally, only the local community of faith can supply for the moral deficit.
The situation implies a kind of vexed and sorrowful logic. A given community has nourished the faith of the martyr with word and sacrament. A kind of holy ampelopsis has joined the holy one to the body of Christ. It seems only fitting (though regrettable as well) that after death, both the good repute of the martyr and the continuing witness against the powers should lie in the hands of those (invariably the poor) who survive and mourn. Let the great be silent, or mouth platitudes, or introduce absurd political innuendo. It is the humble who know, who speak; their tears are eloquent.
In the great world, and the great worldly church, other concerns are in the air. The blood and torment are distant. They are carried on the airwaves and tubes, a phenomenon known fatuously as "international news." There the images of the dead are seized, impeded, manipulated, shuffled about.
Add to this the political and economic interests of ecclesiastical headquarters. Suppose for a moment (one need not suppose!) that those who died perished for speaking on behalf of inarticulate, powerless Christians and others. Their deaths occurred in a minor, indeed inconsiderable, land, worlds distant from the highly "developed" church and its special concern and interest in the "developed" superstates.
The situation does not invite moral clarity. A conclusion is reached in exalted circles (and this in fact is the rub) that the murdered Christians defended no recondite or required dogma. They did not die for the integrity of, say, the doctrine of the Eucharist, the virginity of Mary, the bodily resurrection of Christ. A mutter is heard from influential lips. The victims died in a politically volatile situation; it is reported that they took sides, that they were defenders of one ideology or another.
It could be conceded perhaps that they died for the sake of the powerless and poor. But this hardly suffices to grant them the entitlement of martyrs. So it is thought and said. Or is not said, but the silence wears a frown of thunder.
LET US BE AS CLEAR AS MIGHT BE. Innumerable sisters and brothers have died in our lifetime for the sake of the powerless and poor. Let us think in consequence of this of a scriptural teaching baptized again and again in a sea of blood. A teaching, let it be added, generally neglected in high ecclesiastical circles -- the teaching of the body of Christ.
Paul writes of the mutuality and integrity of all members of the body, the consonance of the lowliest with the most honored. "So that there might be no division in the body, but that all its parts might feel concern for one another. If one part suffers, all suffer together; if one flourishes, all rejoice together" (1 Corinthians 12:25-26).
Bishops and others, we beg you, take notice of this passion for the integrity of the body, this rejection of the rejection of the lowly. Behold the scripture on behalf of which a host of martyrs in your lifetime and mine have staked their lives.
In the face of the ambivalent speech (and the even more ambivalent silence) of authorities, the harmless pieties, the intertwining of profane and church interests, are we not justified in insisting that those appointed to speak for the universal church speak clearly, passionately, in defense of our martyrs? That they clarify issues of faithful political witness, that their words resound with the same truth that at a crack of gunfire turned mortal bodies to pentecostal flame?
This is unpleasant and, to the mind of many, unfortunate; and, all said, true. Faith is a political matter, inevitably. So is martyrdom, in most cases. The task is to separate out, in mind and heart, the political content of a given death (one's dying for the poor, who themselves are joined to political parties of revolution, thus means taking sides). This political implication must be separated from another lurking issue -- that of ideology: high and low; ecclesiastical or secular; the itch and appetite of special interests, pursuits, hankerings; and, above all, the appetite for power, control, secrecy, non-accountability.
Thus the death of the martyrs urges a scrutiny of conscience on the part of all. This includes a self-scrutiny of authority, of its ideology and behavior -- especially an ideology that inhibits speaking the truth concerning the murder of our sons and daughters, the honor and dishonor of their deaths.
Let us, for Christ's sake, hear loud and clear, let the assassins hear, and let the faceless politicos and oligarchs hear why our martyrs stood where they did ("the standpoint is the viewpoint"), why in consequence they, known and anonymous, were eliminated. Let us hear praise of the martyrs. Let us hear an unambiguous call to the faithful, that the holy dead be emulated by the living.
Daniel Berrigan, S.J., was a Sojourners contributing editor when this article appeared. The account of Berrigan's journey to Central America was titled Steadfastness of the Saints: A Journal of Peace and War in Central and North America (Orbis, 1985).
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