A Reflection on El Salvador—

A theological place that ‘constitutes the…prophetic and  
apocalyptic presence of the Christian God.’  

The following was written by Bob LaSalle-Klein and Kevin Burke, S.J., two theologians long connected to the people of El Salvador and CRISPAZ. It was sent as a fund-raising letter to our snail-mail list of supporters in August—and triggered an unusually large response. Therefore, when our communications taskforce met in El Salvador in October as part of our annual Board meeting, it was decided to make this reflection available to a larger audience thru our Web site and our listserv.  

We hope this reflection will deepen your commitment to the people of El Salvador—and prompt an online gift to support the work of CRISPAZ. 

Thank you in advance for your attention—and your generosity! – The CRISPAZ Board

Dear Friends of CRISPAZ, 

We write to you in our role as U.S. theologians whose lives have been definitively changed and whose work has been fundamentally defined by our ongoing relationships with the people of El Salvador. We also write as friends and board members of CRISPAZ. Our desire to reach out to you and ask your support of CRISPAZ springs from our deep love and respect for this organization, a real sense of pride and gratitude for its incredible commitment to the establishment of peace with justice in El Salvador for over 20 years, and a clear awareness that the work that has begun is ongoing.  

Indeed, our support for the people of El Salvador through CRISPAZ is more urgent than ever in these days when El Salvador, long off the front pages of our newspaper, has been relegated once again by “the powers that be” to the underside of history. As Ignacio Ellacuría has taught us, we know that this theological place “constitutes the maximum and scandalous, prophetic and apocalyptic presence of the Christian God.”  

As Christians and theologians, we are convinced that this place – the El Salvador of an oppressed and poor people who have not given up the struggle, who labor to build a new future – puts us in vital contact with the living God. With this in mind, allow us to share a bit of our own stories to give you a sense of who it is that is asking your help, and more importantly, to say a bit more about El Salvador at this present moment. 

We introduce ourselves as two theologians. We should add that we are theological friends who have worked together closely for over 10 years. We recently co-edited a book, The Love That Produces Hope: Essays on the Thought of Ignacio Ellacuría, S.J., in which a group of scholars from around the world contributed reflections on various aspects of the philosophical, theological and political genius of Fr. Ellacuría, the Jesuit rector/president of Universidad Centro Americana ‘Jose Simeon Cañas’ who was the principle target of the brutal massacre of six Jesuit priests and two Salvadoran women shortly after midnight on Nov. 16, 1989. Both of us have written numerous other pieces, including our doctoral dissertations and first books, on Ellacuría and the UCA. But our own involvement with El Salvador has even deeper personal roots. 

Building a Sanctuary: Bob and Lynn Lassalle-Klein. Lynn and I met, married and started our family during almost nine years at the Oakland Catholic Worker. It was a vital part of the Sanctuary Movement and a place where love and friendship had a way of changing one’s plans. Today Marina Zavala cooks for the Jesuit School of Theology at Berkeley, but she loves to tell the story of how she and her four babies turned to Lynn and I for help when things fell apart as she was about to cross the border. Similarly, Jon Sobrino, S.J., gently pushed my dissertation and career in a different direction when he asked me to tell the story of his murdered Jesuit brothers and their companions in 1993. In different ways, these events echo for us the words of Gerard Manley Hopkins, “God speaks in 10,000 places, lovely in limbs and eyes not his.” Our plans were changed through our many friendships with the people of El Salvador. We like to imagine that this pattern of love and friendship has enriched the soil of our family life, and will nurture the seeds of compassion and hope God has planted in the hearts of our children. 

Discovering My People: Kevin Burke, S.J.  Thirty years ago, on the night of March 11, 1977, I began the 30-day Spiritual Exercises of St. Ignatius Loyola with 25 Jesuit novitiate classmates in Denver, Colo. Several days later our retreat director announced at mass that, on March 12, in another part of the world, another Jesuit had just “completed” these Exercises. Rutilio Grande, a parish priest in rural El Salvador, was assassinated while on his way to celebrate mass in the town of El Paisnal. Although I pondered the significance of this new Jesuit martyr, I little imagined that El Salvador would change me. Yet it did. During my early years in the Society of Jesus, I followed the dramatic events that lead to the assassination of Archbishop Romero and four U.S. women missionaries in 1980. I received direct reports from friends and Jesuit classmates who studied and worked in El Salvador during the 1980s. Then, in 1989, while working as a campus minister and faculty member at Regis University in Denver, we received the terrible news of the UCA massacre.  

Several months after the UCA massacre, on May 6, 1990, Regis bestowed an honorary doctorate on Jon Sobrino, the Salvadoran Jesuit theologian who was out of the country when the massacre occurred. In a personal conversation over dinner that night, Father Sobrino said something that I have come to regard as prophetic. He observed that being a priest in the United States was far more difficult and challenging than being a priest in El Salvador where so many priests had been murdered! I snorted in disbelief.  

With a laugh and a gentle wave of the hand, he continued: “Of course, you will say that being a priest in El Salvador is so dangerous and painful, and that is true. But is it not also true that you must wake up every day and ask yourself, ‘What is the meaning of my priesthood? What is the meaning of my Christian identity, my baptism?’ It would never occur to me to ask these things, because in El Salvador they are so obvious.” I stared at him intently. I couldn’t find words for my next question, but he read it on my face. “I am a priest for my people,” he said simply. Seven words. A simple affirmation that changed my entire way of thinking about vocation, that prodded me to ask: Who are my people? Through whom does God call me to be a Jesuit priest? For whom will I be a theologian? 

El Salvador Today: Out of the Headlines but Deep in the Struggle. Nearly 18 years have passed since the UCA massacre of 1989. Much has changed in El Salvador and in the world. But sadly, much has not changed. El Salvador today remains a country deeply divided between the rich and poor, a country shattered by violence and crushed by the impunity with which the powerful manipulate the system. It remains a place of the “hidden gospel” of Jesus where, as Jon Sobrino likes to say, the “crucified people” show us how “to live as risen beings.”  

We write to you today to ask your support for CRISPAZ because we have seen with our own eyes how much CRISPAZ remains a part of the “resurrection in the Salvadoran people” of which Archbishop Romero prophetically spoke. We remain committed to the people of El Salvador because in these, “the least of our brothers and sisters,” we continue to meet him who is “the way, the truth and the life.” We write to encourage you to continue to be generous to El Salvador through CRISPAZ. Thank you. 

Your friends, 

Bob Lassalle-Klein & Kevin Burke, S.J.