El Paisnal (El Salvador) (AFP) – Rutilio Grande and Cosme Spessotto, two religious assassinated by the Salvadoran military at the dawn of the civil war, who will be beatified on Saturday, are remembered among the peasants for their defense of the poor. This is the story.
Both witnessed the difficult political, economic and social conditions that prevailed in El Salvador during the Cold War and the years prior to the armed conflict that devastated the country between 1980 and 1992.
Grande lived it as a parish priest in Aguilares (north of San Salvador), but he also experienced it in neighboring El Paisnal, where he was born in 1928 and where he also gave mass.
“He got along with everyone because he even played with the bugs,” the affectionate way Angela Chavez, 91, who washed the priest’s clothes, known as “Father Tilo,” refers to the children.
El Paisnal is a quiet and small town about 40 km from the capital surrounded by cattle ranches and sugar cane crops, with brick houses mixed with other picturesque earth walls.
“What they did to him was cruel, he came to give mass, I couldn’t go see him when they killed him,” Chavez told AFP, after describing the Jesuit as a man with a “serious” countenance.
Delivered to the peasants
Grande was appointed parish priest of Aguilares on September 24, 1972, and began to receive complaints from those who worked on the cane plantations, who claimed to be victims of abuse.
María Vicenta González, 63, accompanied him many times on these visits to the field.
“He was for the poor,” he says. “I am happy because they are going to make him a saint because he deserves it.”
In the masses, González says, Grande denounced the injustices that were committed against the peasants, such as low wages and long working hours.
According to the Archdiocese of San Salvador, “many accusations were left over” against the priest.
“The intention was to justify his murder, which they tried to color with overtones of ideology,” summarizes this institution in a brief biography of Grande, whose remains are buried in front of the main altar in the church of El Paisnal.
On March 12, 1977, while driving down a highway in El Paisnal, Grande was shot and killed in an ambush by members of the outlawed National Guard. The sacristan Manuel Solórzano (72 years old) and Nelson Rutilio Lemus (16) also died, who will also be beatified and who are buried next to him.
That fact was the beginning of the repression of the then military government and the right-wing death squads against members of the Church who denounced the prevailing social injustice.
Grande’s assassination marked a profound change in the Archbishop of San Salvador, Óscar Arnulfo Romero, who from then on assumed as a banner the denunciation of injustice against the poor of his country.
With these beatifications, approved by the pope in 2020, Francis wants to pay tribute to the Latin American church that has committed itself to defending the poor and fighting social injustice.
During his trip to Panama in 2019, Francisco told a group of Jesuits that at the entrance to his room he has a frame with a piece of cloth with blood on Romero, canonized on October 14, 2018, and the notes of a catechesis of Rutilio, indirectly acknowledging that they have guided him in his pontificate.
“I love Rutilio very much,” he confessed on that occasion.
The defending Franciscan
Franciscan Cosme Spessotto will be beatified in the same ceremony on Saturday, which will take place in a plaza in western San Salvador and will be officiated by the auxiliary bishop of San Salvador, Cardinal Gregorio Rosa Chávez.
Spessotto arrived in El Salvador on April 4, 1950, and on October 18, 1953, he became the parish priest of the city of San Juan Nonualco, 54 km southeast of San Salvador.
His face on small posters is proudly displayed in many businesses in that city.
At the beginning of 1980, Spessotto had received death threats for his defense and denunciation work. On June 14 of that year he was assassinated “out of hatred for the faith,” according to the Church.
Domitila Moscote went to the parish so that the Franciscan would give her green grapes that he himself grew.
“Most of the people here are very devoted to him. He was a very happy man (…), who forgave those who killed him,” says this woman who is now 50 years old.
The remains of Spessotto, ordained on June 27, 1948 in Venice, rest in a gray marble mausoleum in a room next to the main altar of the church, at whose feet members of the extinct Treasury Police shot him dead.
In a pillar in front of the altar, the hole of a bullet that did not end up in the body of the religious marks the place of his death.
“He used to defend all the people who were in danger,” says Miriam Marroquín, who met him and traveled more than 100 km from the city of Santa Ana (west), where he lives, to visit his grave. “In his spiritual testament he said that he foresaw his death.”
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