Father Rutilio Grande,
Another Salvadoran "Revolutionary"

During March, we celebrate the life and sacrifice of Monsignor Oscar Romero. At FSSCA, we also want to take this opportunity to honor another admirable yet
less-known man, Father Rutilio Grande, martyred thirty years ago.

Our dear friend John Lamperti has provided us with this short piece on Father Grande’s life and significance to the larger historical context of El Salvador.

Revolutionary (2): “bringing about or constituting a great or radical change”


On March 12, 1977 the telephone rang in the office of newly-appointed Archbishop Oscar Romero. The caller was El Salvador’s President, Colonel Arnoldo Molina. He told Romero that Father Rutilio Grande had just been assassinated.

Molina reportedly assured Romero that the government had nothing to do with the murder and that there would be a serious investigation. It is hardly possible that the president believed what he said, for time would show both statements to be false. Instead of solving the crime, the assassination of Father Grande marked a sharp escalation in a virtual war against El Salvador’s progressive Church.

Rutilio Grande was 49 years old. Born in El Paisnal, a small town some 20 miles north of San Salvador, he had returned there in 1971 to lead a team of four Jesuit priests who would serve a region centered in the nearby larger town of Aguilares. During the six remaining years of his life, Father Grande and his colleagues carried out pastoral work there that merits the description “revolutionary.”

Rutilio Grande’s life had not followed a smooth, steady course toward his social/religious vocation. As an adolescent and youth, he suffered physical and psychic ill health. Tilo, as he was called since childhood (later “Father Tilo”), left home at age 14 to attend the Seminary in San Salvador. Subsequently he studied abroad, mainly in Spain, for many years and was not ordained as a priest until age 31. He returned to El Salvador in 1961, where he lived and taught, not always happily, in the Jesuit-run Seminary during the rest of the decade. Due to his long absence from El Salvador, Grande had difficulty feeling entirely at home in his native country – even when, in 1971, he was sent to serve in the region where he had been born more than 40 years earlier.

Aguilares has been described as a “sounding board for the larger national conflicts” of El Salvador. “Thus the history of the country and of Aguilares, and the biography of its parish priest, have become closely linked forever” (Rodolfo Cardenal). The conflicts centered on control of the land and the status, close to serfdom, of the majority of the people, the campesinos. For the big landowners of the region the situation was fine, and a movement for change could only be due to “communist subversion.”

A priest who, like Rutilio Grande, accepted and acted on the “preferential option for the poor” was bound to encounter opposition. Grande and his colleagues were accused of preaching “Marxism” and of organizing the peasants of the region for armed rebellion. They were “agitators” who advocated hatred and class violence. Even some members of the clergy believed and repeated these accusations, for the Church in El Salvador was bitterly divided. Of course the charges were pure fantasy; the work of the Jesuit team was strictly pastoral and focused on encouraging the people to read and interpret the Bible. They were champions of love and reconciliation – but genuine reconciliation had to be based on justice for all, not on passive acceptance by the poor of continued misery.

In a sense, however, their enemies were right; the work of Rutilio Grande and the others was revolutionary. Here are a few examples.

  • An old woman who lived near Aguilares was asked, years after his murder, what she remembered about Father Grande. “The thing I remember most,” she said, “is that one day he asked me what I thought about something. In my seventy years no one had ever asked me that before.”

  • A priest from a neighboring parish tells that they took the same path as in Aguilares, encouraging the people to form “Christian base communities” and organize their own religious practices. “We applied the methods of Pablo Freire to evangelization” he said, to awaken in the campesinos a new vision of Christianity. “It was a tremendous thing for a campesino to speak and be listened to, to see that his neighbors valued and responded to what he said. And more than that! When it ended, the mission left behind a formed community and the Delegates of the World were elected by democratic vote.” After their eyes were opened reading the Bible, he said, the campesinos all came to the same big question: “If our poverty is not what God wants, what are we going to do about it?”

  • For two years, starting in 1973, adult literacy classes were held in the Aguilares parish center, using Freire’s methods. The process and its consequences are reminiscent of the 1960s civil rights movement in the southern United States. An immediate result was increased fear (on both sides) and repression against the poor; some of the newly-literate campesinos were threatened with losing their jobs or worse. “The patrones trembled with fear just at seeing us united,” said one observer.

Father Tilo’s homilies came more and more to preview the future ministry of Oscar Romero. He denied “the claims of some to possess a God who permits them to abuse the poor and exploit the majority of the people. Let them read the Bible carefully. They will see how subversive it is! Above all they will meet there the subversive Jesus of Nazareth…” Finally on February 13, 1977 came the “sermon of Apopa,” when Grande told his congregation “It is dangerous to be a Christian in our times! … Brothers and Sisters, I fear that soon the Bible and the Gospel will not be able to enter our country. Only the cover will be allowed in, because all the pages are subversive… If Jesus returned he would be arrested, imprisoned; they would crucify him again! … They want a God in the clouds… not a God who demands ‘Cain, what have you done with your brother Abel?’”

This sermon, protesting the government’s expulsion of a popular Spanish priest, may have solidified the authorities' intention to silence Rutilo’s voice. He and two campesino companions were ambushed and shot to death on March 12, 1977, while driving toward El Paisnal to perform mass. In spite of President Molina’s repeated promise of an exhaustive investigation, and although at least one of the killers was well known in Aguilares, no one was ever charged with the crime. Years later ex-Coronel Roberto Santibáñez explained in a Washington, D.C. press conference that the assassination had been organized by Salvadoran military intelligence officers including himself and ex-Major Roberto D’Aubuisson.

The murder of Rutilio Grande became a symbol both for stepped-up repression in the Salvadoran countryside, and for renewed organizing and resistance. Father Tilo was commemorated by a single mass in San Salvador’s Cathedral, jointly celebrated by some 150 priests of the archdiocese and attended by 100,000 people. Grande’s death greatly influenced Archbishop Romero’s “conversion,” as Chencho Alas has movingly described. This consequence alone had a huge impact on the Salvadoran people and society.

Grande’s biographer Rudolfo Cardenal wrote, “Throughout his life Tilo always struggled to be of service to the people.” From the perspective of thirty years, it is clear that he succeeded in that aim.

 

"John Lamperti is a retired professor of mathematics. His latest book is a biography of El Salvador's Enrique Alvarez Córdova (1930-1980)."