Catholics Who Stood Behind Rebels Shape Peace in El Salvador

The wood-paneled office of the mayor of this capital city, the crowded cubicles of several members of the Legislative Assembly and the administration building of the nation’s most prestigious university have two pieces of decoration in common: the Salvadoran flag and a prominent picture of the late Archbishop Oscar Romero.

Romero’s assassination while he was celebrating Mass in 1980 was a watershed event that drove many Roman Catholics into the guerrilla movement during El Salvador’s 12-year civil war. Now, six years after the war ended, devout Catholics who say they entered public life because of Romero are making headway in the political realm.

“What has persisted as a unifying element are the teachings of Msgr. Romero,” said San Salvador Mayor Hector Silva, who is among the most visible of El Salvador’s openly devout political leaders.

While El Salvador is nominally an overwhelmingly Catholic country, most Salvadorans do not actively practice their faith, religious leaders and other observers agree. These politicians stand out because of their adherence to fundamental Catholic values such as fidelity and family.

Like many in the U.S. religious right, they say their beliefs led them into politics. But unlike the Americans’, their politics are leftist.

“In other countries, Christian socialist thought is centrist, even conservative,” said Jorge Villacorta, a member of the Legislative Assembly’s board of directors. “But in El Salvador, Christians gradually became leftists.”

Like Pope John Paul II, the religious left in El Salvador speaks out against the devastation that unfettered capitalism has brought to the poorest citizens of the country. Its members are generally skeptical about government divestitures of banks and utilities, suspecting that corruption is involved.

In the Legislative Assembly, the religious left generally--but not always--votes with the guerrillas-turned-politicians of the Farabundo Marti National Liberation Front, or FMLN. And just as by their presence the committed Catholics made a difference in the nature of El Salvador’s leftist guerrilla movement, they now influence peacetime leftist politics.

“An interesting aspect of Salvadoran history is how the faith influenced the left to seek a political solution,” said Msgr. Gregorio Rosa Chavez, assistant to the current archbishop of San Salvador.

“In the war, the Marxism had more shades of gray” than in other Central American countries, said lawmaker Ruben Zamora, a former leader of the rebels’ political arm. “There is more respect for religion, and that has brought a more humanist attitude to politics.”

But some leftists are uneasy about the private conduct of their more religious colleagues. “I just don’t know about him,” one leftist scholar confessed of a lawmaker. “He has never been in love with any woman but his wife.”

The religious left, observers say, has played the role of conciliator between El Salvador’s two major parties, the FMLN and the rightist ruling Nationalist Republican Alliance, known as Arena. In some cases, such as the federal budget, the religious left has voted with rightist parties when the FMLN refused to accept a compromise.

In the Legislative Assembly, Zamora, Villacorta and other devout deputies receive high marks, even from other political benches.

Arena lawmaker Gerardo Escalon--also a committed Catholic--is one of the few Salvadorans willing to openly oppose the canonization of Romero.

“A saint should be a saint for everybody,” Escalon said, stressing his belief that Romero divided Salvadoran Catholics. Nevertheless, he said that the late archbishop’s followers have played a positive role as legislators. He also pointed out that his party has many devout members of various religions.

Opinions differ on how much political pull the religious left has.

“The influence . . . in El Salvador is powerful,” said Carlos Sandoval, a columnist for the conservative daily newspaper El Diario de Hoy. The root of that influence, he said, is the University of Central America, a Jesuit institution.

The university conducts opinion polls, edits academic magazines with a focus on political and social issues and publishes a variety of books, ranging from history to literature to scientific studies.

“These are good analyses . . . and many leftist politicians use them as a basis for their arguments,” Sandoval said. “This has enormous influence in politics, especially leftist politics. The right does not read anything.”

But those who support the religious left bemoan its lack of influence.

“We do not have a Pat Robertson,” Mayor Silva said, referring to the conservative founder of the Christian Coalition in the U.S.

And many of those who believe most ardently in the religious left fear that it is a phenomenon of a single generation.

“We were the last of the romantics,” said one professional man, who has now retired from politics in disillusionment. “Those who came after us were more radical and joined the guerrillas. Those who came after them are more cynical.”

Others see hope in new generations.

“The solution is to get back to the roots and develop an internal dialogue based on common values that are linked to the social doctrine of the church,” said Rosa Chavez, the archbishop’s aide. “We need to remake the family.”

At Silva’s alma mater, the San Jose Day School, Jesuit educators are working in their own way to create a new generation of Catholics committed to public service.

Privileged children are learning about poverty. For now, they are just watching videos, but later this year they will visit an orphanage and a school in a poor neighborhood.

This is the first year that grade-school children will be involved in such social awareness programs, said school Supt. Anibal Meza, although older students at the school have performed social services in poor neighborhoods since the 1970s.

Meza emphasized that the school’s interest in public service is nonpartisan. President Armando Calderon Sol, of the Arena party, and prominent businessman Archie Baldocchi are also graduates, he said.

He noted, however, that “many wealthy people took their children out of school because of these changes in teaching methods.”

That reflects attitudes that many in the religious left say drove them into politics long ago.

“The right . . . does not know the social doctrine of the church, so they sincerely believe that justice is something ideological,” Rosa Chavez said. “So the values they defend are not the values that the church’s social doctrine proposes.”