One more Jesuit Blessed
Different Jesuit sources give different numbers of Jesuit Saints and Blessed. Approximately there are 52 Jesuit Saints and 146 Blessed (these numbers are subject to correction. Once I get the official information from Rome, I will let you know) leaving aside a great number of Jesuit Venerables and Servants of God.
Today on 22nd January 2022, one more will be added to the list of Jesuit Blessed. Fr. Rutilio Grande (05 July 1928 – 12 March 1977) was murdered along with his 70 years old sacristan Manuel Solórzano and 15 year old Nelson Rutilio Lemus on 12th March 1977 by El Salvador Army. All three of them and the Italian Franciscan priest Cosme Spessotto (shot dead on 14th June 1980) will be beatified. Here below the life sketch of Fr. Rutilio Grande is given. It is written by Fr. Martin Maier SJ
Pratapananda Naik, SJ
A signpost for the Church by Fr. Martin Maier SJ
The beatification of Rutilio Grande in San Salvador comes at a time of transformation in the Latin American Church similar to the upheaval that followed the 1968 Medellín conference
Beatifications and canonisations can be pointers to the way the Church is moving. On 22 January 2022 in the Plaza Salvador del Mundo in El Salvador’s capital, San Salvador, the Jesuit Rutilio Grande, who along with his lay companions, Nelson Rutilio Lemus and Manuel Solórzano (murdered on 12 March 1977) and the Italian Franciscan priest, Cosme Spessotto (shot dead on 14 June 1980) – will be beatified.
They represent the new start the Church made after the Second Vatican Council. They represent a missionary Church that has gone to the social and existential peripheries. They represent a persecuted Church, which has produced numerous martyrs for faith and justice.
Rutilio was born on 5 July 1928, the youngest of seven children, into a poor family in the village of El Paisnal in El Salvador. In 1945 he joined the Jesuits. He followed the order’s normal training in philosophy and theology in Venezuela, Ecuador, Spain, France and Belgium.
Until 1972 he taught in the national ¬seminary in San Salvador, where he tried to include in formation the spirit of the Second Vatican Council and the second conference of the bishops of Latin America at Medellín in 1968, which had recognised that the level of poverty on the continent “cried out to Heaven”. In the same spirit, in 1975 the Jesuit order redefined its mission in the world as both preaching of the faith and struggling for justice. Rutilio put the preferential option for the poor at the centre of a new concept of a missionary rural ministry. His aim, Rodolfo Cardenal wrote after his death, “was to train priests who would be at the service of the people and not clerical bosses”.
Rutilio was not appointed rector of the seminary. Instead, in autumn 1972 he switched to parish work in Aguilares, a community which included his birthplace. Here, with a team of Jesuits and women Religious, Rutilio began to put his ideas into practice. The overwhelming majority of the people in the community lived in the harshest poverty. The land was in the possession of a handful of wealthy owners. Grande often said in his sermons: “God is not far away in Heaven lying in a hammock; he is in our midst. For God it matters whether the poor are in distress or not.” His approach reflected the “popular theology” developed in Argentina by Lucio Gera, a distinct position within liberation theology that was also to be a strong influence on Rutilio’s fellow Jesuit, Jorge Mario Bergoglio. Rutilio realised that popular piety needed to be freed from magical elements and evangelised. And by reviving the November maize festivities, he showed respect for the ancestral indigenous trad¬itions while inculturating Christian faith. But the heart of Rutilio’s pastoral approach was the base communities, in which laypeople read the Bible together in small groups. They connected the Word of God with people’s lives by following the three-step “See-Judge-Act” process associated with the Young Christian Workers. Rutilio trained men and women to be “delegates of the Word”, ¬messengers of the Word who in turn created new groups.
Things began to happen. When the peasants of Aguilares saw the lives they lived in the light of the Word of God, they realised that injustice and oppression are a recurring theme in the Bible, and that, through the prophets and through Jesus, God took the side of the poor. Rutilio encouraged the peasants to organise in unions and to demand their rights to a decent life and just wages. Other priests followed this example. But the shift to a preferential option for the poor taken at Medellín was far from being accepted by the whole Church in Latin America. The landowners saw these priests as a threat to their interests, and foreign priests – and Jesuits in particular – were accused of stirring up unrest and promoting Communism. At the beginning of 1977, the first priests were tortured and expelled, among them the Colombian-born Mario Bernal, the parish priest of Apopa, near Aguilares.
On 13 February 1977 there was a protest demonstration in Apopa against the expulsion of Mario Bernal. Over 6,000 people took part. At the end Rutilio celebrated Mass, and delivered a fiery sermon. “It is dangerous to be a Christian around here!” he said. “It is dangerous to be a real Catholic! It is prac¬tically illegal to be a genuine Christian in our country.” He quoted statistics to illustrate the injustice and extreme poverty in El Salvador. Then he went on: “But we dress all this up with false hypocrisy and lavish constructions. Woe to you hypocrites! You go around outwardly getting a reputation as Catholics, but within you are filthy evil! You are Cains and crucify the Lord when he goes around under the name of Manuel, under the name of Luis, under the name of Chabela, under the name of an ordinary rural worker!”
Rutilio concluded with the image of Jesus returning to El Salvador: “Very soon the Bible and the gospels will not be allowed to cross the border. All that will reach us will be the covers, since all the pages are subversive ... So that if Jesus crosses the border at Chalatenango, they will not allow him to enter. They would accuse him, the man-God … of being a revolutionary, a foreign Jew, of confusing people with exotic foreign ideas, anti-democratic ideas … ideas against God. … they would undoubtedly crucify him again.”
This sermon was Rutilio Grande’s death sentence. On 12 March 1977, as he was travelling to a liturgy with his sacristan, 70-year old Manuel Solórzano, and 15-year-old Nelson Rutilio Lemus, he was murdered in an ambush by members of the National Guard, acting in alliance with the large landowners. The three bodies were wrapped in cloth and laid in front of the altar in the church of Aguilares. Late that night the newly appointed Archbishop of San Salvador, Óscar Romero, arrived. Even though Rutilio Grande was a friend of Romero’s, Romero had been somewhat critical of his pastoral approach in Aguilares: there is a remark to this effect in one of his reports to the Pontifical Commission for Latin America in Rome. But as he stood before Rutilio Grande’s corpse, Romero was shaken to the core. He asked to see the priest’s simple room and muttered to himself, “he really lived in poverty”. He decided to celebrate a Mass in the middle of the night. He took these words as the text for his sermon: “No one has greater love than this, to lay down one’s life for one’s friends” (John 15:13).
Romero announced that he would not take part in any official government event until the crime of Rutilio’s murder was solved. He decided that on 20 March only one Mass would be celebrated across the whole archdiocese, in front of San Salvador’s cathedral. It was a tense situation. Fearing the large crowds who would attend, the military government did all it could to prevent the Mass. The papal nuncio, too, was against the idea. Romero was not to be swayed. Over 100,000 people gathered for the Mass, which was broadcast on radio. Romero thought that the murderers might be listening. “Brother criminals, we love you,” he said, “and we ask God to move your hearts to repentance, because the Church is incapable of hatred; the Church has no enemies.”
The murder of Rutilio and his companions brought about a profound change in Romero, which some have described as a “conversion”. A timid, conservative bishop became a prophetic defender of the poor. Romero himself later said: “If they killed him for what he did, then I have to follow the same path. Rutilio opened my eyes.” In popular tradition, Romero’s change of heart is described as “Rutilio’s miracle”. The beatification of Rutilio Grande is particularly important for Pope Francis, as was the canonisation of Óscar Romero in 2018. As provincial of the Argentine Jesuits, he had followed their -stories carefully. In an address to the Central American bishops during the World Youth Day events in Panama in 2019, he proposed Óscar Romero – who gave his life for his flock – as the model of a bishop. He knew the life of Rutilio Grande from the biography Rodolfo Cardenal began writing shortly after his -murder. In 2015, when he met Cardenal in Rome, Francis echoed the popular phrase: “Rutilio Grande’s greatest miracle is Archbishop Romero.”
Rutilio Grande’s beatification comes at a time of new movements and changes in the Church of Latin America and the Caribbean, comparable with the transformation of the Church that followed the historic conference in Medellín in 1968. At their fifth conference in Aparecida, Brazil, in 2007 the bishops called for a new missionary impetus. The drafting of the final document was co¬ordinated by the then Archbishop of Buenos Aires, Cardinal Jorge Mario Bergoglio. It was at Aparecida that Bergoglio first became aware of the significance of the Amazon region and its indigenous population, and the threats they faced. In 2019 the Amazon synod was held in Rome; its vision of a Church with an Amazonian face ¬suggested “new paths for the Church and an integral ecology”.
A new kind of event took place in Mexico in November 2021. A sixth general conference of Latin American and Caribbean bishops was due, but the Pope suggested instead an assembly that would include priests, Religious and laypeople, and it was preceded by a wide-ranging consultation process. The assembly showed that the old hierarchical structures in the Church may have outlived their usefulness; for the Church to survive, laity and especially women must take responsibility for the Church’s mission. Much of what is today on the renewal agenda of the Church in Latin America was anticipated by Rutilio Grande. In his rural ministry in Aguilares, he called for a new emphasis on mission, for the greater involvement of the laity, for respect for indigenous traditions, and for a prophetic contribution to political and structural change. The beatifications of Rutilio, his companions, and of Fr Spessotto are a signpost for the Church on its road to social, cultural, ecological and synodal conversion.
Martin Maier SJ worked as a country pastor in El Salvador for two years after his ordination and has taught at the University of the Jesuits (UCA) in El Salvador. He has written a number of books on liberation theology and Óscar Romero.
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