Rutilio Grande - Life and Work

Life and Work

Grande was recruited into the priesthood by Archbishop Luis Chávez y González. Grande was trained at the seminary of San José de la Montaña, where he became friends with Romero, a fellow student. Grande was ordained a priest in 1959, and went on to study abroad, mainly in Spain. He returned to El Salvador in 1965 and was appointed director of social action projects at the seminary in San Salvador, a position he held for nine years. From 1965 to 1970 he was also prefect of discipline and professor of pastoral theology in the diocesan seminary. Grande was master of ceremonies at Romero’s installation as bishop of Santiago de María in 1975.

He began to serve in the parish of Aguilares in 1972. Grande was responsible, along with many other Jesuits, for establishing Christian base communities (CEBs, in Spanish) and training Delegates of the Word to lead them. Local landowners saw the organization of the peasants as a threat to their power.

Father Grande also challenged the government in its response to actions he saw as attempts to harass and silence Salvadoran priests. Father Mario Bernal Londono, a Colombian priest serving in El Salvador, had been kidnapped January 28, 1977 — allegedly by guerrillas — in front of the Apopa church near San Salvador, together with a parishioner who was safely released. He later was cast out of the country by the Salvadoran government. On February 13, 1977, Grande preached a sermon that came to be called "the Apopa sermon," denouncing the government's expulsion of Father Bernal, an action that some later believed helped to provoke Grande's murder:

I am fully aware that 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—against sin, it is said. 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 an agitator, of being a Jewish foreigner, who confuses the people with exotic and foreign ideas, anti-democratic ideas, and i.e., against the minorities. Ideas against God, because this is a clan of Cain’s. Brothers, they would undoubtedly crucify him again. And they have said so.