Margaret Swedish
December 02, 2020
El Salvador had become a very dangerous place to be a missioner. Civil war was imminent. Popular movements were being crushed by government-sponsored violence. Repression from the military and its allied paramilitary death squads had become savage and widespread by 1980. Student activists, human rights workers, labor and campesino organizers and political opposition leaders were all being targeted. Bodies were turning up in ditches along roadsides, in garbage dumps or floating in rivers, often with thumbs tied behind their backs. Catechists, lay missionaries, priests and other pastoral workers were being threatened and killed.
Even St. Óscar Romero, then the archbishop of San Salvador, was not spared. Indeed, his assassination on March 24, 1980, sent a message to all those who had taken up the “preferential option for the poor” articulated by the Latin American bishops’ council in 1979 and promulgated across the Americas. They were not safe.
Despite all of that—or because of it—the four churchwomen chose to stay and to suffer, as St. Romero had once said, “the same fate as the poor.”
Reality in the light of faith
A little over a decade earlier, at a conference in Medellín, Colombia, in 1968, the Latin American bishops gathered to discuss the implications of the Second Vatican Council for the Latin American church. Special attention was given to “Gaudium et Spes,” which called the church to enter into the modern world: “The joys and the hope, the griefs and the anxieties of the men of this age, especially those who are poor or in any way afflicted, these are the joys and hopes, the griefs and anxieties of the followers of Christ” (No. 1).
More:
https://www.americamagazine.org/faith/2020/12/02/four-catholic-churchwomen-murdered-el-salvador-40th-anniversary-239378
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