"Murder of Salvadoran priests galvanized Jesuits in the US"
Sunday, November 16th, 2014, is the 25th anniversary of the murders of Jesuits Ignacio Ellacuría, Ignacio Martín Baró, Segundo Montes, Joaquín López y López, Amando López and Juan Ramón Moreno and Elba Ramos, their houseeper, and Celina, her daughter, in El Salvador.
Father James Martin, SJ, has been posting commentary and links on Facebook in commemoration of the deaths of his Jesuit brothers and the two women, and it was by that means I saw the following:
[url]http://ncronline.org/news/global/murder-salvadoran-priests-galvanized-jesuits-us[/url]
The assassinations were truly shocking, and no Jesuit anywhere in the world could be expected to react with anything other than outrage. But the murders at the university were especially challenging for the several thousand members of the Society of Jesus who also happened to be citizens of the United States of America. Jesuits in the U.S., like all Jesuits, had to absorb the fact that their brothers had been brutally executed. But Jesuits in the U.S. also had to face the additional fact that these executions had been carried out by a military force that enjoyed the full political and financial support of their own government.
This complex dynamic, involving multiple identities and cross-cutting loyalties, was at the heart of U.S. Jesuits' varied responses to the murder of their brothers in El Salvador. Jesuit spirituality emphasizes "discernment," a prayerful willingness to seek the will of God in all circumstances and to conform personal preferences to it. For Jesuits, however, discernment is never the end goal; action is. Jesuits, both individually and collectively, greatly prize action grounded in discernment. It is frankly difficult to imagine anything more likely to spur American Jesuits to action than the complicity of their own government in the violent death of their fellow Jesuits.
Members of the Society of Jesus, however, do not act in an institutional vacuum. Yes, U.S. Jesuits were united in a desire to do something, to turn spiritual discernment and communal solidarity into effective action. But the forms their actions took were almost exclusively defined by the "educational apostolate" with which Jesuits are so closely identified in the United States.
When the leadership of a Jesuit university was decimated in San Salvador that night, experienced (and physically courageous) Jesuit administrators and faculty members in the U.S. immediately volunteered to replace them. When the University of Central America was then faced with a potentially crippling debt repayment, experienced (and financially savvy) Jesuits in the U.S. arranged creative ways to restructure the debt without sacrificing the university's institutional autonomy.
Do read the rest. It is a timely message.
= new reply since forum marked as read
