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."