As often occurs in periods of deep crisis which require bold decisions, we are tempted to think that what is happening is not entirely clear . . . Such evasiveness serves as a license to carrying on with our present lifestyles and models of production and consumption. This is the way human beings contrive to feed their self-destructive vices: trying not to see them, trying not to acknowledge them, delaying the important decisions and pretending that nothing will happen.
Pope Francis, Laudato Si’: On Care for Our Common Home(May 24, 2015), 59.Robert Lassalle-Klein's book is timely. Blood and Ink commemorates the twenty-fifth anniversary of the Salvadoran military's murder of six Jesuit scholars, Elba Ramos, and her daughter Celina at the University of Central America “Jose Simeon Canas” (UCA). The book also introduces Jesuit Ignacio Ellacuria's Philosophy of Historical Reality, which has relevance in contemporary society where, as Pope Francis suggests, people obfuscate reality to justify their destructive practices. The book highlights the cost of encountering, analyzing, and acting according to what the Jesuits identified as God's will by denouncing unjust social structures. The title, Blood and Ink, refers to Jurgen Moltmann's, The Crucified God, which fell from Sobrino's bookshelf next to the body of Jesuit Juan Ramon Moreno, where the blood of the Jesuits mixed with the ink of scholarship that defined their praxis.
Lassalle-Klein takes the reader step-by-step through the process by which Jesuits Ignacio Ellacuria and Jon Sobrino developed their theology. The first half of the book focuses on the social reality the Jesuits encountered, while the second analyzes the philosophical and theological sources that defined their theology. Although the account focuses on the theology and praxis of these priest-scholars, it reveals the essential role of institutions and collaboration among people of faith.
Indeed, the book is largely about the efforts by Ellacuria and other leaders of the UCA to create a university that responded to the signs of the times. The process of transformation started in 1969 at a Jesuit provincial meeting facilitated by Ellacuria and Jesuit novice master, Miguel Elizondo to introduce CELAM's Preferential Option for the Poor. At this meeting, Ellacuria concluded that “the Third World is the Optimal place for the Christian to live the [Ignatian Spiritual] Exercises” and that “the upside-down logic of the Exercises is leading the Jesuits of Central America to the unexpected conclusion that ‘Christ is in the poor,’ and that, ‘It is not us who have to save the poor, but the poor who are going to save us'” (46; 193). These premises led the UCA to identify its “mission . . . to respond to the historical reality of Central America.” Ellacuria believed that historical reality “is not only the arena in which the university must fulfill its various functions in secular society, but also the locus theologicus for its encounter with God” (59).
The Jesuits enacted the UCA mission by creating structures. They opened small communities, including one in the poor rural community of Aguilares led by Father Rutilio Grande, who would be murdered by El Salvador's military in 1977 (63). Ellacuria founded the Center for Theological Reflection in 1974 (88). Segundo Montes introduced the Human Rights Institute of the UCA (1985). Ignacio Martin-Baro created the University Institute for Public Opinion (1986); Ellacuria established “The Chair for National Reality” in 1984 (158–161) and directed Estudios centroamericanos (ECA), making it “the most authoritative magazine on the reality of the country” (89).
Lassalle-Klein shows that the university provided an institutional structure, but Archbishop Oscar Romero became the guide teaching Ellacuria and the UCA to “Trust the Common people” (155). The UCA Jesuits' conversion evolved from the appeal of CELAM's preferential option for the poor; Romero's conversion grew from direct encounter with El Salvador's poor. Bishop Rosa Chavez recounted, “Before being named archbishop he was bishop in a poor rural area where he met many campesinos, while always questioning, ‘What is God asking of me?’ On the other hand, he was very close friends with Rutilio Grande, and Fr. Grande's death affected him deeply. They were very similar as pastors” (110).
Through Grande's death, Romero lived the three stages of Ellacuria's “‘confronting oneself with real things as real’: (1) grasping what is at stake in reality; (2) assuming responsibility for reality; and (3) taking charge of, or transforming reality” (94; 221). First, Romero grasped what was at stake in Father Grande's ministry to poor farmworkers. Second, he assumed public responsibility as archbishop for accompanying and defending El Salvador's peasants. Third, he became “an exemplary” disciple of Jesus, inspiring others to follow (253). Ellacuria concluded from Romero's example and martyrdom that UCA must have “a commitment to do in our university way what he did in his pastoral way” (156; 185).
The first half of Lassalle-Klein's book focuses on “historical reality,” the second offers a parallel account of the philosophical and theological foundations that informed Ellacuria's theology. The Jesuit Spiritual Exercises, Xavier Zubiri's philosophy, and Karl Rahner's theology (all deeply personal influences) gave Ellacuria the tools to transform reality into theology and praxis. Lassalle-Klein's microscopic (and at times repetitive) examination of Ellacuria's effort to interpret social reality as theology affirms theologian Gustavo Gutierrez's recounting, “There is nothing more practical than a good theory” (227).
The silences in Blood and Ink hint at limits imposed by the hierarchical, patriarchal structures of the Catholic Church. Women religious are nearly absent from the book (109, 115, 309). Yet, “The Committee of Mothers of Persons Who Were Captured, Disappeared or in Prison” (112–113) offers one of few concrete examples of poor people's influence on Romero and society. Although the “crucified poor” are the focus of the salvation account, they appear in the book infrequently, sometimes literally parenthetically as historical agents (109).
This silence is disconcerting in light of Lasalle-Klein's recounting of Jesuit Jon Sobrino's conclusion that “God's ‘justice was done to the crucified Jesus . . . so the course of action called for is [for us] to take the crucified people down from the cross . . . This is action on behalf of the victims of those crucified in history, that tries in a small way—with of course no hubris—to do what God himself does: to take the victim Jesus down from the cross'” (329). Ellacuria's “unexpected conclusion” that “it is not us who have to save the poor, but the poor who are going to save us” (46; 193) seems reversed. The poor appear as Christ-like victims, whose sacrifice offers “hope” (328), while “we” (undefined) become God-like saviors.
This is an important book for anyone with an interest in Liberation Theology, the Jesuit Martyrs, Archbishop Romero, and the politics of El Salvador. But it is more than that. By focusing on Ellacuria's “Philosophy of Historical Reality,” Lassalle-Klein offers a model for addressing contemporary realities like those Pope Francis denounces in Laudato Si. The silences in the book offer implicit cautions about reproducing inequalities even as people of goodwill seek to address them.
