Fr. Ellacuría, murdered in El Salvador in 1989
These days, in the midst of the avalanche of information about the development of the Covid19 pandemic, some media—both secular and Catholic—have made reference to another current piece of news: the beginning, in Spain, of Inocente Orlando Montano’s trial. He is a former colonel from El Salvador, accused of the murder of the Jesuits in the Universidad Centroamericana (UCA). On November 16, 1989, during the civil war that was then devastating that country, a platoon of the government’s armed forces entered into the university’s residence and murdered in cold blood the Jesuit priests Ignacio Ellacuría, Ignacio Martín Baró, Segundo Montes, Amando López, Juan Ramón Moreno and Joaquín López, together with Elba Julia Ramos, the person who tended to the residence, and her fifteen year old daughter Celina. The Jesuits had gained notoriety for their intellectual positions sympathetic to Liberation Theology, which the more conservative sectors in the country viewed as a sign that they were supportive of the Frente Farabundo Martí para la Liberación Nacional (FMLN), the leftist guerrilla that fought against the government. The main target of the killers was the rector of the UCA, Fr. Ellacuría. Colonel René Emilio Ponce, the person in charge of the group which committed the crime, had declared, expeditious and sinister: «Ellacuría must be eliminated, and I want no witnesses left».
The trial gives us the opportunity to remember one of Ellacuría’s most popular sentences, one that perhaps has been repeated often because, with the passing of time, it has become ever more relevant. We are talking about his observation that, in view of the inequalities that exist in the world, the only path left to humanity is what he called the road of shared austerity.
Thirty years after the murder of Ellacuría and his companions, inequality in the world and the bridge between the rich and the poor have continued to grow [1]; at the same time, the environmental crisis hurting the planet has become the main threat to humanity’s future. Today it would just be impossible for everyone to live in the same way that the wealthiest among us conduct their lives. The available resources in our battered planet would not permit it. In fact, the dire poverty that suffer the most disadvantaged is the exact price that humanity is paying for the wealth that others enjoy. If every human being on Earth (we are getting close to 8.000 billion) was to use the same living space and energetic resources that today uses the average American, we would need five planets such as ours. What is the problem with that? That we only have one Earth. If everyone wants to survive, we only have one path left ahead of us: the civilization of shared austerity proposed by Ellacuría.
None of this is new. Here we would only like to underline something, quite simple, about the spiritual dimension of these issues: the belief that to embrace this call to austerity would not only be very good news for those who, as a result, would be able to move away from their current material poverty. The acceptance of austerity would also be a gift for those of us who live using more resources than we should—and who must learn how to live with less. Why? Because this learning of austerity is the only thing that will free us from the slavery to which we are subjected when we live in the civilization of insane spending.
¿Slavery? Is not that, perhaps, too strong of a word? Not at all.
It is slavery for someone to live thinking at all times about the need to acquire the latest model of smartphone available in the market. It is slavery for someone to force himself to wear only clothes produced by certain popular and expensive brands. It is slavery to live changing my vehicle every few years, even if the old one was still taking me to places without any trouble. It is slavery to live watching the neighbor with apprehension, fearing that his financial success might undermine mine. The fixation with success is also a form of enslavement. As it is the nightmare of having turned life into a permanent competition for profit. It is slavery to have made a god out of money.
Perhaps someone will read the preceding paragraph and say, with a disdainful smile in his or her lips: «Well, that was a rather simplistic and shallow picture of the “consumerist” person: no one really lives like that». True, perhaps no one is like that all the time. Perhaps nobody is the exact image of this rough caricature of the “homo consumericus”. And yet, many of us have one of his traits, or several. And this is reason enough to ask ourselves what we are going to do with Ellacurías’s warning. Will we ignore it, performing an act of irresponsibility and selfishness that, on top of hurting the poor, will enslave ourselves? Or will we begin to think that this issue of shared austerity is a serious one that, indeed, has a lot to do with each one of us?
[1] Noah Yuval Harari reminded us in his 21 lessons for the 21st Century (2018) that we are moving towards the most unequal society of all times.
