Rutilio Grande García (5 July 1928, El Paisnal - 12 March 1977, Aguilares) was a Jesuit priest in El Salvador and a promoter of liberation theology. He was assassinated in 1977, along with two other Salvadorans. He was a close friend of Archbishop Óscar Arnulfo Romero. After his death, the Archbishop changed his stance toward the government and urged the government to investigate the murder.
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Grande was recruited into the priesthood by Archbishop Luis Chávez y González. Grande was trained at the seminary of San José de la Montaña, where he became friends with Romero, a fellow student. Grande was ordained a priest in 1959, and went on to study abroad, mainly in Spain.[1] He returned to El Salvador in 1965 and was appointed director of social action projects at the seminary in San Salvador, a position he held for nine years.[2] From 1965 to 1970 he was also prefect of discipline and professor of pastoral theology in the diocesan seminary.[3] Grande was master of ceremonies at Romero’s installation as bishop of Santiago de María in 1975.[4]
He began to serve in the parish of Aguilares in 1972. Grande was responsible, along with many other Jesuits, for establishing Christian base communities (CEBs, in Spanish) and training Delegates of the Word to lead them.[5] Local landowners saw the organization of the peasants as a threat to their power.
Father Grande also challenged the government in its response to actions he saw as attempts to harass and silence Salvadoran priests. Father Mario Bernal Londono, a Colombian priest serving in El Salvador, had been kidnapped January 28, 1977 — allegedly by guerrillas — in front of the Apopa church near San Salvador, together with a parishioner who was safely released.[6] He later was cast out of the country by the Salvadoran government. On February 13, 1977, Grande preached a sermon that came to be called "the Apopa sermon," denouncing the government's expulsion of Father Bernal, an action that some later believed helped to provoke Grande's murder:
On Saturday, March 12, 1977, the priest, accompanied by Manuel Solorzano, 72, and Nelson Rutilio Lemus, 16, was driving through the sugar fields near the village of El Paisnal in the Aguilares parish on their way to evening Mass, when all three were slaughtered by machine gun fire.[7][8]
Upon learning of the murders, the archbishop went to the church where the three bodies had been laid and celebrated Mass. Afterward, he spent hours listening to stories of suffering local peasant farmers, and hours in prayer. The next morning, after meeting with his priests and advisers, Romero announced that he would not attend any state occasions nor meet with the president — both traditional activities for his longtime predecessor — until the death was investigated. As no investigation ever was conducted, this decision meant that Romero attended no state occasions whatsoever in his three years as Archbishop.[9]
On Monday, March 14, 1977, the Archbishop's office published a bulletin specifically directed at refuting claims made in the two major national newspapers, El Diario de Hoy and La Prensa Gráfica. The bulletin denied assertions in the papers repeating official claims by a medical examiner as to the bodies of the three men, and also put forth a detailed account of Romero's views on the murders:
The following Sunday, in protest of the killings of Grande and his companions, newly-appointed Archbishop Romero canceled Masses throughout the archdiocese, in favor of one single Mass in the cathedral in San Salvador. The move drew criticism from church officials, but more than 150 priests joined the Mass as celebrants and over 100,000 people came to the cathedral to hear Romero's address, which called for an end to the violence.[9][10]
The film biography Romero (1989) depicts Grande's friendship with Romero, his community work and activism, and his assassination. (Grande was played by American actor Richard Jordan.) In the film, Grande's death becomes a major motivation in Romero's shift toward an activist role within the church and the nation. This view is supported in various biographies of Romero.[9][11]