While many books have addressed the Jesuit martyrs of El Salvador, few have focused enough attention on the university they shaped, the University of Central America (or UCA) in San Salvador. Robert Lassalle-Klein, a theologian and scholar of liberation theology, provides us with an historical-theological case study of how an ecclesial and educational institution can embody liberation theology's call for the preferential option for the poor. After a dramatic account of the brutal murder of the UCA Jesuits and their housekeeper and her daughter, the book proceeds in three sections. The first chronicles the rocky development of the UCA between 1965 and 1989. This section shapes the story according to the methodology of the UCA Jesuits' leader, Ignacio Ellacuría, tracing how the UCA grasped the historical reality of the impoverished and oppressed “crucified people” of El Salvador; how the UCA took responsibility for that reality; and how it helped to transform that reality through its “university-style role in taking them down from the cross” (347)—that is, through teaching, research, and activism. Lassalle-Klein gives the North American reader necessary historical context, though he omits what an undergraduate reader might require in order to appreciate the dramatic reversal of liberation theology—that is, some history of the alliance of the church and the powerful in Latin America.

The second section of the book explains how Ellacuría's fundamental theology of Christian historical realism arose from four sources. Two are existential—the Ignatian spiritual exercises and the conversion, pastoral commitment, and martyrdom of Oscar Romero. Each led the Jesuits to concretize (“historicize”) their commitment to the poor. The other two sources are scholars. Ellacuría's mentor, the Spanish philosopher Xavier Zubiri, gave him a critical account of human intelligence that pushed him beyond European epistemologies to focus theological attention on how “historical reality” confronts us—in his case, through the poverty and oppression that had enveloped his adopted country. The fundamental theology of Karl Rahner—his metaphysics of being, hylomorphism, theology of symbol, and theology of grace—was transformed by Ellacuría (his student) into a complex, philosophically dense Latin American fundamental theology that privileged the claims of the poor—that is, the “crucified people” that Christians are called to take down from the cross. The last section describes this distinct Salvadoran liberation theology of the crucified people that emerged at the UCA, first in the fundamental theology of Ellacuría and then in the Christology of his confrere Jon Sobrino. The density of these last two sections will hopefully put to long-needed rest any criticism of the Latin American schools of liberation theology as philosophically unsophisticated or (worse) recycled Marxism, but they may also make the book tough going for theologically inexperienced undergraduates. The book concludes with a Trinitarian spirituality of the UCA martyrs.

Magisterial works like this can prove repetitive; here the author summarizes his points over and over throughout, making the book easy to follow but dozens of pages longer than it needs to be. Lassalle-Klein is devoted to Ellacuría in particular; the labor of love that results will educate and move the reader, but it occasionally proves uncritical, as when, for example, the other Jesuits and the lay leadership at the UCA receive relatively little attention in comparison to the gigantic figure of Ellacuría. But what makes this book important is its treatment of what a university can become when guided by a commitment to the poor. Theologians who read this book will be forced to reexamine their own regimen of teaching, research, and service to see if we really attend to the “crucified people” of our own contexts. In the light of the story of the UCA, we shall surely find our own institutions badly in need of conversion, but perhaps we might also find the courage to take a “university-style role” in taking the crucified people down from the cross.