LOLOTIQUE, El Salvador — 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.
The April 1 funeral Mass for Father Walter Vasquez Jimenez, a
priest of the Diocese of Santiago de Maria in eastern El Salvador, was offered 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," said his cousin, Jose Diaz Vasquez,
who 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."