The Salvadoran Jesuit priest Rutilio Grande and the Italian Franciscan Cosme Spessotto, murdered by the military in the prelude to the civil war (1980-1992) in El Salvador, will be beatified this Saturday (22), together with two lay people, for their martyrdom in defense of the poor. and persecuted in the country.
At least 6,000 faithful are expected in the Divino Salvador del Mundo square for the ceremony, which will be presided over by Salvadoran Cardinal Gregorio Rosa Chávez, representative of Pope Francis.
A large pavilion with a roof of palm trees, as a symbol of simplicity, was erected for the ceremony in which all present were invited to wear a mask to prevent Covid-19 infections.
“The fact that the Church officially accepts them as martyrs is that their life was correct, they took risks to help the poor and they were faithful to a call (to service) that cost them their lives,” Rosa Chavez told AFP.
At the height of the Cold War, when El Salvador was experiencing social unrest repressed by the military, Grande kept “an energetic and questioning word” and Spessotto the value of “burying” the dead that the military left as a warning in the streets, recalls the cardinal.
For Doris Yanira Barahona, 63, a fervent Catholic, their beatification represents “the deserved recognition of two men who were much loved for their work in difficult times, and were men who gave themselves to the defense of the most dispossessed”.
Grande was murdered on March 12, 1977, while crossing a highway in El Paisnal, 40 km north of San Salvador. The sacristan Manuel Solórzano (72) and Nelson Rutilio Lemus (16) also died, who will also be beatified and buried next to him.
The fatal attack on Grande was the beginning of the persecution of the Salvadoran clergy who denounced the prevailing social injustice.
Fray Cosme Spessotto, in turn, was murdered on June 14, 1980 inside the church of San Juan Nonualco, 54 km southeast of the capital and where he was parish priest for 27 years.
– Killers identified –
In El Salvador, in addition to the Archbishop of San Salvador, Óscar Arnulfo Romero, canonized in 2018, military bishop Joaquín Ramos, twenty priests and thousands of lay people were murdered. The vast majority of crimes remain unpunished.
“In both cases it was state agents (the killers); in the case of Father Cosme, from the Finance Police, and Rutilio, from the National Guard. It has been fully proven”, explains Rosa Chávez.
“I saw a letter from the assassin guards. When they were in Mariona (prison), they sent a letter asking for forgiveness, asking for mercy”, he recalls.
With the end of the civil war in 1992, the Guarda and the Police of the Farm were declared proscribed for multiple human rights violations.
“How is it possible that a country of Christians has killed 20 priests?” asks the cardinal.
The Jesuit priest Rodolfo Cardenal, biographer of Rutilio Grande, points out that he left a “double legacy”: on the one hand, he was a “defender of the poor and exploited peasants of the sugarcane fields”.
While at the ecclesial level, he “promoted the reform of the Church of El Salvador” from the point of view of bringing it closer to the people and making a commitment to improve the situation of the poor, denouncing situations that caused misery.
Grande’s murder moved Archbishop Romero to the point of forcing him to come out in defense of those oppressed by state security forces and the fateful death squads.
Cardenal recalls that during a meeting with the Salvadoran Church in 2015, Pope Francis told him that “the great miracle of Rutilio Grande was Monsignor Romero”.
In this sense, “Monsignor Romero is not understood in the pastoral work in the Salvadoran church, in the archdiocese (in the capital), above all, without the work of Rutilio Grande and other martyr priests”, explains Cardenal.
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