Jesuit Journeys
Fall 2005

By Fr. Gregory F. Lucey, SJ

On November 16, 1989 I was busy about my routine activities as Marquette University rector when a phone call changed my life. Fr. Mike McNulty, SJ was on the line telling me that six Jesuits in El Salvador had been killed along with their cook and her daughter.

One of the Jesuits, Fr. Juan Ramón Moreno, SJ, had been my theology classmate during our training to be priests. Within minutes there was another call from Alice Linsmeier, a young woman who happened to be visiting her parents in Milwaukee. Alice was working with the Jesuit Refugee Service at the time assisting Salvadoran refugees driven from their homes into neighboring Honduras to return and re-establish their communities.

Knowing embarrassingly little about the situation in El Salvador, I invited Mike and Alice to come by that afternoon and enlighten me. I have since traveled to El Salvador twice for memorial celebrations and visited several communities in rural El Salvador, including the one where Alice had worked.

For more years than I know, a delegation from Spring Hill College has participated in the annual Ignatian Family Teach-In. Although my sentiments were with them, I did not make the trip until 2004 when something told me it was time to go – partly out of curiosity and partly out of my growing conviction that, while too often we resort to violence in our homes, on our streets, and among nations, violence is never a solution.

My experience last year at the teach-in was about more than the death of my classmate and his Jesuit companions. It was about violence in all its forms; it was about the basic dignity of the human person that is so fundamental to the Gospel message and so central to the legacy of Pope John Paul II.

For me the liturgy was the highpoint of the teach-in. Standing with more than 4,000 men and women – young and old, representing all of our Jesuit colleges and universities as well as many other Jesuit ministries across this nation – was a profoundly religious experience. I have never before sensed so deeply in a liturgy the truth that justice is integral to this relationship with God that we call faith.

I was moved as well as I stood with 15,000 people at the gates of Fort Benning, listening to the names of those hundreds of people who are victims of the violence fostered inside at a training center for Latin American military personnel – the same center that trained the troops who killed Fr. Moreno and the others.

Placing at the gates a small white cross with the name “Juan Moreno” inscribed on it was a meaningful way for me to let go peacefully of the anger I have carried these many years and to make a statement to myself, if to no one else, that violence is not the answer.

Fr. Gregory F. Lucey, SJ is president of Spring Hill College.

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