Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
Salvador's rich to give their children a safe and conservative environment
for a higher education. It's run by Jesuits with the mission of giving students
skills to make the world a better place.
Father Sobrino, who is on the faculty, told us the Jesuits' mission today:
to create liberation architects, liberation mathematicians, and liberation teach-
ers. UCA gets no money from the government and is no longer supported by
the local elites. It relies on international aid. Because of their liberal teaching
spirit, the Christmas packages from the wealthy to the professors stopped
coming long ago...and the campus has been bombed 25 times.
Along with Sobrino, the school's six leading Jesuit professors were the
intellectual leaders of Liberation h
eology in the 1980s. h
at's why they
were considered leaders
of the revolution. And
that's why, in 1989, they
were murdered. (Only
Sobrino, who happened
to be out of the country,
survived.) We walked
to a memorial garden
where they were killed
and heard the story.
Early one morning,
the Jesuits were taken
from their humble quar-
ters and dragged into the
garden. One by one they
were shot in the brains
with exploding bullets
because they were the “brains of the people's movement.” Before the govern-
ment death squad left, they took time to shoot a bullet through the heart of
a photo of Romero hanging on the wall…still trying to kill him nine years
after his death.
Roses grow in a garden marking the place the six Jesuits were killed. h e
tomb of the six reads: “What it means to be a Jesuit in our time: to commit
yourself to take risks in the crucial struggle of our age—the struggle for faith
and the struggle for justice which that same faith demands. We will not work
for the promotion of justice without paying a price.”
