IMAGE: CNS photo/Rhina Guidos
By Rhina Guidos
LOLOTIQUE, El Salvador (CNS) —
On Easter, as thousands of Salvadorans from around the country packed into the
rural town of Lolotique, Catholic Church officials laid to rest a 36-year-old
priest violently killed during Holy Week — the latest victim of an unending
wave of violence that plagues the country.
Officials held the April 1
funeral Mass for Father Walter Vasquez Jimenez, a priest of the Diocese of
Santiago de Maria in eastern El Salvador, in his native Lolotique, a
picturesque town with indigenous roots. Surrounded by the sounds of drums and
marimbas, with a circle full of flower petals on the floor in front of the
altar at Lolotique’s Holy Trinity Church, Father Vasquez’s casket was surrounded by his
mother, friends, parishioners, the country’s only cardinal and four bishops.
“He was headed to Mass,
which he won’t celebrate now, but he will celebrate in the presence of
God,” his cousin, Jose Diaz Vasquez, told Catholic News Service. He was
one of the thousands packed into the town square in front of the church to
remember the priest.
Father Vasquez was headed to
celebrate a Holy Thursday Mass in the department of San Miguel March 29, hours
after renewing his vows as a priest at a chrism Mass, when a group of heavily
armed men wearing masks stopped the car he and parishioners were traveling in.
The passengers were robbed at gunpoint and the priest was fatally shot.
The killing has shaken Catholic
Church officials, who say they still do not know what led to the assassination
or what it means for the church. Many believe gang members killed the priest,
but details of what led to the killing are unknown, and church authorities are
calling for answers, not just in the priest’s killing but in the rampant crimes
the poor in the country suffer daily. Many of these crimes are never prosecuted.
“We condemn all the acts of
violence that are committed daily against our people and that lead to
homicides, such as the one committed against Father Walter Vasquez,” said a
March 30 statement by Fathers Estefan Turcios Carpano and Luciano Ernesto Reyes
Garcia, director and adjunct director for the Archdiocese of San Salvador’s
human rights office, Tutela Legal de Derechos Humanos.
The office demanded that
authorities investigate, capture and prosecute those responsible for the murder
of Father Vasquez, and those responsible for the general violence that El
Salvador suffers.
Priests, as well as bishops, have
repeatedly condemned the country’s rampant violence.
Father Turcios, who serves in
Soyapango, a city near San Salvador that suffers from gang violence, said there
is much that is not yet known in Father Vasquez’s case, but he has spoken in
the past about unequal economic situations that have led to war and now to a
culture of violence in El Salvador’s poor areas, such as the one where he
serves.
The Holy Week killing of Father
Vasquez harkened memories for Father Turcios of the violence surrounding the
1977 killing of Jesuit Father Rutilio Grande, the first Catholic priest killed
prior to the country’s civil war. And it did the same for some of Father
Turcios’ parishioners, who initially worried about participating in outdoor
religious activities during Holy Week following news of Father Vasquez’s
killing.
Salvadoran Cardinal Gregorio
Rosa Chavez asked those gathered at the priest’s funeral to think about the
killing. “What is it trying to say to us as a country?” he asked.
“In this country, life means
nothing,” he said tersely. “Let’s respect life … let’s defeat our
fears.”
He asked the crowd to work to
“protect youth so they’re not in the clutches of the vice of
violence.”
San Salvador Archbishop Jose
Luis Escobar Alas marched near the slain priest’s coffin, decorated on the top
with a bouquet of purple flowers, as it was carried up to the church, while
bands played and the crowd sang hymns and popular songs.
In 2016, the archbishop penned a
terse pastoral letter about the country’s escalating violence. The church,
through its programs, has tried to engage the country’s youth, particularly
boys who could become victims or inducted into gangs, to seek a path of peace.
Church officials such as Father
Turcios and Archbishop Escobar blame a history of economic injustice in the
country for its latest episode of large-scale violence manifested by gangs, a
period that began shortly after the country’s 12-year civil war ended in 1992.
Rampant violence has ravaged the
Central American nation — considered one of the most dangerous countries not
at war — since the 1990s.
A group from Father Vasquez’s
St. Bonaventure Parish, in the department of Usulutan, where Father Vasquez
last served, said they believed the crime was random, and he suffered as many
others suffer in the country.
“He didn’t have
enemies,” said parishioner Jose Gilberto Aranda Ascorcio. “He
transmitted happiness.”
Even in a country where tension
exists between Catholics and some Protestants, Father Vasquez was a person
respected by people from a variety of faiths, Aranda said.
Several women dressed with
clothing associated with Evangelical groups in El Salvador — long skirts and
heads covered with white lace or a white cloth — lined the path toward the
cemetery.
Some of his parishioners wore
T-shirts with his face on them, which they say they wore to the Easter Vigil as
a sign that they would carry on his work and his spirit, that he would keep
living through them.
“He was simple,
humble,” said parishioner Liliana Carolina Perez Ramirez, who added he
appealed to anyone who came into contact with him.
When the group showed up to the
vigil wearing the shirts with his image, it represented their belief in the
Resurrection, which includes now Father Vasquez’s, Perez said.
During Mass, Cardinal Rosa
Chavez said it did not matter who killed Father Vasquez or why, but the
violence had to stop.
“We can’t continue like
this,” he said. “The world is watching us … We defeated the war.
Why can’t we defeat this other type of war?”
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