Kevin Kelly/Key photo Jesuit Father Tim McMahon speaks of the lie that led to the murders of eight people, including six Jesuit priests, on Nov. 16, 1989.

Ramos had just learned how to bake cakes. She was scrimping and saving from her earnings as cook and housekeeper to six Jesuit priests to buy her own electric oven so that she may earn a better life for herself and her 15-year-old daughter, Cecilia.

“That dream died on Nov. 16, 1989,” Father McMahon, former provincial of the Missouri Province of the Society of Jesus and former pastor of St. Francis Xavier Parish told Rockhurst University students Oct. 22.

On that night nearly 20 years ago, Julia and Cecilia were shot in their beds as they slept, simply because they and five other Jesuits murdered that night, were there when a military death squad came to murder Father Ignacio Ellacuria, rector of the University of Central America.

The world might call them martyrs and saints, but the Jesuits slain that night would be horrified by it, Father McMahon said.

And the young Irish-American priest said he knew them better than to call them saints.

Father Arnando Lopez would fall asleep in an easy chair watching horrid Hong Kong martial arts movies. Father Juan Ramon Moreno was the single most boring teacher Father McMahon ever had.

Ordained in 1987, Father McMahon was sent to the university in San Salvador to continue his studies while living with his Jesuit brothers for two years. He defended his thesis and earned his master’s in theology in the summer of 1989, just months before the murders which shocked the world.

Father McMahon recalled that he was teaching a biology class at DeSmet High School in St. Louis on the morning of Nov. 16 when he was summoned to the school office for a phone call from his provincial who knew that Father McMahon had studied at the university where the murders were committed.

“He said, ‘I don’t know if you knew any of them,’ and he began reading the names,” Father McMahon recalled. “They were the Jesuits I had studied with, worked with and lived with. It stunned me.”

That night, Father McMahon watched as ABC’s late-night “Nightline” devoted its entire program to the murders. Then the anchor, Ted Koppel, said something that remains with Father McMahon to this day: “It’s a sad fact of life,” Koppel said, “that some people’s lives are worth more than others.”

By that night in 1989, some 75,000 people had been killed in the decade-long civil war in El Salvador. But it took the murders of the six prominent priests to gain the world’s attention and apply the pressure for, if not peace, then an end to the fighting.

That sad fact, he said, would also have appalled his Jesuit brothers.

“Entire villages had been massacred and wiped from the face of the earth,” Father McMahon said. “Thousands of ordinary folks had been killed. Finally, when the military ordered the murders of six priests, the world got shocked.”

The Jesuits themselves lived their lives exactly the opposite of thinking their lives were more valuable in the eyes of God than anyone else’s, Father McMahon said.

They would teach all week at the university, then on weekends, they would go to the countryside to minister to El Salvador’s poorest of the poor, who, in the final analysis, they defended with their lives.

“The real cause of the civil war was unbridled selfishness and greed, and brutal oppression,” Father McMahon said.

“Ted Koppel was right. It was the lie that drove the war — the lie that some people’s lives are worth more than others,” he said.

After peace was brokered, the truth emerged about the murders of the priests, their housekeeper and her daughter emerged.

The target was Father Ellacuria, the most prominent of the six Jesuits. The rest of the Jesuits and the two women were killed merely because of orders to leave no witnesses.

Since the assassination of Archbishop Oscar Romero in 1980, Father Ellacuria had been the nation’s most outspoken defender of the poor, taking both the Salvadorian military and the rebel FMLN to task for atrocities committed in that long, suffering decade.

“He had been hated by them since the very beginning of the war,” Father McMahon said. “He picked up the role of Romero, and kept demanding a just peace,” he said. “They couldn’t shut him up or disprove him, so he had to be wiped out.”

Father Ellacuria’s name was put on a death list at a meeting of top Salvadoran military leaders just days earlier.

Three days before the murders, soldiers burst into the Jesuits’ residence looking for evidence of a trumped-up charge that they were aiding the rebel FMLN. Then as quickly as they came, the soldiers left, seizing no item nor arresting any person.

In hindsight, Father McMahon said, it was a reconnaissance mission simply to check out the residence and see where everybody slept.

At about 2 a.m. on Nov. 16, the soldiers came again. They rounded up Fathers Ellacuria, Moreno and Lopez, as well as Fathers Ignacio Martin-Bario and Father Segundo Montes into a courtyard and shot each, execution-style, in the back of the head.

Father Joaquin Lopez y Lopez was then shot in the doorway of his room, and Julia and Cecilia Ramos were shot in their beds.

“They were human beings like you and me,” Father McMahon said. “They were ordinary folks called to make an extraordinary sacrifice.

“But they were called by God to be instruments of peace, to be instruments of not sacrificing people’s lives in service to a lie,” he said.

The lie that some lives are worth more than others requires fear and death to sustain it, Father McMahon said.

“The only way this lie can sustain itself is to take life from someone else,” he said. “These lies always demand offerings, and they are always human sacrifices.”

And only when all life is not held as sacred, when the lives of a self-proclaimed wealthy elite can be valued above the lives of the poor, can the false gods of greed and selfishness be served, Father McMahon said.

“No life can be sacrified to some ideology,” he said.

“There is only one true God, and he is the one who made himself the sacrifice. He is the one who says, ‘I will be the victim that ends all victims.’ It is the only real truth because it will not accept human sacrifices.”

The young priest said he also came to a deeper understanding of what it meant to be a Jesuit in the wake of the murders of his eight friends.

Immediately as news of the murders spread, Jesuits from around the world volunteered to take the place of their murdered brothers with the war still raging and the outcome still uncertain. If it cost them their lives to teach at the University of Central America, so be it. More Jesuits would take their place, and more after that.

“I knew I would always be a Jesuit,” Father McMahon said. “I couldn’t imagine not being their companion in this world.”

END