People Helping the Poor in El Salvador Often Wind Up as Victims Themselves : Persecution: Being a religious worker in the beleaguered nation, easing misery, assisting battle-area refugees, is a lethal pursuit.

Ten years ago, on March 24, 1980, Oscar A. Romero, the archbishop of San Salvador, was mortally wounded by an assassin while preaching to the people at Mass.

Last November six Jesuit priests at the Jesuit university in San Salvador, along with a cook and her daughter, were brutally murdered by army troops in the middle of the night.

For those who help the poor and oppressed in El Salvador, it has not been a decade of progress.

In Romero’s three years as archbishop, six priests had been assassinated in El Salvador; he was the seventh. Four more died in similar fashion before 1980 ended. So did four women church workers, all from the United States, three of them nuns. Many more Salvadorans who were associated with the church as catechists or pastoral workers met death in similar fashion. Many others experienced arrest, torture and other harassment. In church terms: persecution.

During the period from Nov. 11 to Dec. 15, 1989, about 50 church workers were arrested--including the pastor of the Episcopal church and two Catholic priests; there were 61 distinct searches in a total of 47 different church buildings--chapels, clinics, residences; the Lutheran bishop and at least three other church workers besides the Jesuits received death threats.

The army radio, the only one to be heard at the time, had carried attacks on the Jesuits for several days before their murder. Both military and civilian authorities publicly accused church officials and institutions of assisting the guerrilla forces that had occupied large sections of the capital city.

The upsurge in persecution was apparently a response to the fear and frustration that the guerrilla offensive, begun on Nov. 11, roused in the military and the government. Labor leaders, teachers, church workers--anyone who criticized the misery in which El Salvador has kept most of its people--was a potential victim, especially those working directly with the poor or assisting refugees from the fighting.

The latest persecution has struck Protestants as well as Catholics. The Lutheran Bishop, Medardo Gomez, had to flee the country under threat of death; armed security forces raided his church. Troops surrounded the Episcopal church, which was sheltering refugees, and arrested 20 people, including the pastor, Luis Serrano. The army ordered other refugees out of Emmanuel Baptist Church. Security troops raided the offices and staff residence of the Mennonite Church.

A number of Catholic parishes received the same treatment. The troops who assassinated the Jesuits at the university shot up and torched offices and automobiles and made off with money. Portraits of Archbishop Romero and of others venerated as martyrs by Salvadorans were deliberately damaged or destroyed. Except for the new involvement of the Protestant churches, the same things were also happening 10 years ago.

Just as in Romero’s time, government and military authorities deny that the church is persecuted. Some church authorities agree with them.

“Categorically, there is no persecution of any religion in our country,” President Alfredo Cristiani told journalists here last December. Bishop Romeo Tovar of Zacatecoluca was quoted as calling the reports of persecution “lies” and saying that the members of the Presbyterian, Lutheran and Baptist churches had committed “acts of terrorism.”

One newspaper quoted a North American resident of San Salvador: “The only persons persecuted are those who advocate the government’s overthrow by violent means.”

That is basically the same accusation made against Archbishop Romero by government partisans of his time, as well as against all the priests who have been murdered then and since, and against just about anyone who sided with the poor of El Salvador against the hunger and humiliation that have afflicted them for generations.

The accusation is patently false. Romero’s Sunday homilies are preserved on tape and in print; it is clear that his denunciations of injustice, torture, murder and other sins were joined to constant appeals for reconciliation and peace. It is also amply clear that he dedicated much effort to speaking with all sides in order to bring about peace among them.

What was true of him has also been true of those who sought the same goals as he and who have often paid for their actions with their lives. The six Jesuits killed in November had long advocated a negotiated settlement of El Salvador’s civil war, an advocacy that in the minds of El Salvador’s far right made them allies or members of the guerrilla army.

Sometimes the accusation takes a more subtle form: church people who have compassion for the poor, it goes, have become politicized, have forgotten the spiritual nature of Christianity and meddled in the political order, and so have suffered for their deviation. According to this line, the persecuted have suffered not for their religious but for their political activity. Their murders are unfortunate, say the accusers, but after all, the church should not get involved in politics.

But what Romero did and taught had deep and clear roots in his church’s teaching--the Second Vatican Council, official documents approved by the bishops of Latin America and the written teachings of recent Popes.

Romero saw that Christian faith cannot be divorced from life--and therefore not from public life. And he saw that all of us, including the Christian church, are always involved in public life and in political issues, whether by acting or by failing to act.

Christians must side with justice against injustice, with the oppressed against the oppression, with love against hatred and indifference. If we are silent about injustice, if we do nothing, then we are like the priest and the Levite who passed by the wounded man on the road to Jericho in the gospel parable.

The gospel of Jesus demands a faith that is expressed in action on behalf of the neighbor. To Oscar Romero, to the Jesuits of San Salvador, to countless others, the poor of El Salvador are like the man beaten and stripped and left by the side of the road. Like the Good Samaritan, they stopped and helped. That is why they have been persecuted.