Attacks on Workers Called ‘Lot of the Church’

In the long view, it is not uncommon for Christian workers to be arrested, imprisoned or killed for upholding the rights of the poor and weak.

“It’s not an aberration, but the regular lot of the church,” an internationally recognized church researcher said, referring to the persecution of church workers in El Salvador.

“If seen in the historical context, this is something that has gone on since the beginning of Christianity,” said the Rev. David B. Barrett, who has been compiling statistics on repression of church workers. “It’s always been that way.

“Only the means and location are unpredictable. It’s just like lightning; you can’t be sure where it’s going to strike next. It’s like cancer; you can’t stop it.

“The church can’t minister without this risk. Whenever Christians take seriously their commission to witness to the faith, it’s going to cost a lot.”

Barrett, a British Anglican priest who edits the broadest available compilation of church statistics, the World Christian Encyclopedia, is now doing research in Richmond, Va., for the Southern Baptist Foreign Mission Board.

Of the current surge of church persecutions in El Salvador, including the killing of six Roman Catholic priests and the arrests of several Episcopal Church workers, he said:

“This just happens to be the latest case in a long-term pattern in the world. Nearly every country has had its share of it over the last 2,000 years. Now it’s mainly in Third World countries in conditions of instability.

“The main church pattern today is pursuing ministries to aid the poor, the dispossessed and marginalized persons of society. In many countries, if you do that, you are a marked man with right-wing people.

“The moment you start taking the Christian commitment seriously in those situations, you or your friends are likely to be picked up or shot.”

Church missions officials say about 50 religious professionals, Protestant and Roman Catholic, have been killed in Central America alone in the last decade, including 20 priests and nuns in El Salvador and 15 in Guatemala.

Many other clergy have been arrested or expelled and sometimes whole dioceses and church institutions have been temporarily evacuated because of military harassment.

El Salvador’s Archbishop Arturo Rivera y Damas, whose predecessor, Oscar Romero, was assassinated in 1980, blames the recent killings on the country’s armed forces or its adjuncts. A Salvadoran official has recommended that bishops leave the country.

“I hate to think it, but this type of thing is becoming more and more common,” said the Rev. Matthew Roche of the Jesuit Missions Bureau.

Father Donald Doherty of the Maryknoll Fathers said: “It’s actually nothing new, but a reversion back to the military’s collusion with death squads. There are a lot of threats and a lot of actual murders.”

In the world at large, Barrett’s figures show an average of 1,000 church-employed workers killed annually in modern times for their faith, including about 300 Protestant and Catholic clergy and 300 nuns.

“Only a fraction of them gets into media,” he said. “It’s the tip of the iceberg. Most cases are not uncovered until too late to be a media story, and sometimes word of them doesn’t get out for three or five years.

“Scattered reports come from all around in letters and reports of mission boards and from the Vatican.”

The assaults on church personnel seem to come in waves, such as those in the last decade that swept Ethiopia, Uganda, Cambodia, Argentina and Chile and still beset some Latin American countries and Africa’s Sudan.

Among the century’s worst cases were the Nazi crushing of opposing Christians as well as Jews, the Stalinist murders of thousands of ministers, the slaughter of Armenian Christians and the killings of Jesuit priests in the Spanish civil war.

“People knew what they stood for,” Barrett said. “They stood for justice, freedom, rights of the underprivileged, things that dictators can’t understand. There’s a long history of that.”