Prof Keogh brought history to life on the pages of 'Romero: El Salvador’s Martyr'

The houses we passed were built with sticks, mud and cardboard. The primitive accommodation — like a furnace in summer and a sieve in the wet, winter season — stands in marked contrast to the obscenely modern automatic weapons in the possession of the security forces who are everywhere, the best that American money can buy and supply.

The cathedral of San Salvador in the heart of the city showed all the signs of continued siege. There was evidence of bombing while the larger department stores —air conditioned of course — have long since bricked up all their large display windows.

In the midst of gloom stands the cathedral, crowned with a huge dome and looking as if it had never quite been finished, a symbol or relic of a concept of the church as an institution that has faded from fashion in Central America. Inside, sunlight streams through the many bullet holes over the huge front door.

The furnishings were rather simple. A few benches, a number of side altars, a picture of Our Lady of Guadalupe, and a baroque statue of the Sacred Heart. There were two other large entrances at either side of the main altar behind which gaudy electric light bulbs lit up in the shape of a cross.

In such surroundings Archbishop Romero used to preach his famous sermon each Sunday, that is, when the cathedral was not being occupied by one popular organisation or another.

That Friday, the murdered archbishop lay before the high altar in a glass-topped coffin surrounded by lighted candles. Outside there were no police or military in sight, an unusual occurrence in a national security state such as Salvador. It was as if a small republic had been declared in the very heart of the capital. Boy scouts were on crowd-control duty.

Hundreds of people had come from the country to pay their last respects to the archbishop. Two lines formed in the blazing sun — men on one side, women on the other — waiting their turn to file past the coffin. Security was particularly tight: And youths, who seemed to know their job, searched everyone going into the cathedral. It was explained to me that they were trying to prevent bombs or explosives from being planted inside.

As people walked by the coffin, many stopped to touch it or press a picture of Romero to the glass, as if such a relic might be called upon in the near future to provide protection for the owner from danger….

On Sunday, the sun shone brilliantly on a beautifully clear day.

At the Basilica of Sagrada Corazon, the church where some weeks earlier 70 sticks of gelignite had been found, primed to blow up during the sermon of the archbishop, an impressive number of bishops, priests, and nuns were gathering to vest and walk in procession to the cathedral about half a mile away.

It was Palm Sunday.

The streets were surprisingly deserted. Although we did not realise it at the time, fear was keeping the ordinary people inside. 

They would not even come out to look at the procession of visiting dignitaries from all over the world.

Bishop Casey and the Foreign Minister of Nicaragua, Fr Miguel D’Escoto, headed the procession. The bishop was dressed entirely in red. He spoke animatedly to his priest politician partner. Many of the dignitaries carried palm.

At that moment, the capital was divided into those who supported Romero, and those who did not. There were no detached or casual observers except for the press.

The cathedral’s 10-foot-high iron railing gates were closed and locked.

It was intended to place the coffin of the murdered archbishop between the altar and the iron gates before the start of the Mass. A choir, conducted by a very fat and popular composer, sang enthusiastically. There was a flurry of activity on the steps around the altar as a nervous master of ceremonies made sure that everything was ready.

There was no obvious sense of danger as people busied themselves straightening the celebrant’s chair and smoothing the altar linen.

In the square before the altar, about 100,000 people had gathered to form a huge congregation of Salvadorean poor. They clasped pictures of Romero, pieces of palm, radios and umbrellas which were used to protect the owners from the sweltering sun.

An hour before the Mass began, the crush was particularly dangerous. There were no crowd barriers in the square. There were no policemen present to maintain order. That task was left to boy scouts who manfully tried to prevent the congregation from bursting through the single rope that separated the crowds from the thin strip of pavement before the cathedral railings.

Children were fainting in the heat and were being passed over the heads of the crowd to the boy scouts in front followed by frantic parents who elbowed and jostled their way through the throngs so that they would not be separated from their families.

In the ordinary course of events, it would have been difficult to maintain order. But if anything should happen to cause panic… For no clear reason, I made my way around the side to the door of the cathedral where the procession was just entering. Inside, hundreds of nuns dressed in white stood along the main altar area. They had been there for hours. And they prayed and sang and wept.

The catafalque was surrounded by candles. I was introduced to the parents of Fr Ortiz, the priest who had been murdered just before Archbishop Romero had set out for Puebla.

As we talked, the cathedral began to fill with hundreds of priests dressed in white. They filled the rows of seats which had been turned to face out onto the square behind the open-air altar.

The bishops took their places on the steps around Cardinal Corripio from Mexico, who was to be the celebrant. The coffin was carried out and laid on the steps before the altar. The Mass began at around 11 o’clock.

When the sermon began I stood behind the altar and to the left of the cardinals chair. In an effort to hear what was being said I began to ease my way through the bishops and priests onto the steps. Suddenly there was a huge explosion in the far, right-hand corner of the square.

For a split second, there was the feeling of sitting in a theatre. What was happening in the square was too grotesque, too horrible to be reality. 

That corner of the square was ablaze and, as shots began to ring out, 100,000 people stampeded. Worst of all was the terrible crush. Some of the more agile clambered over the high, locked railings in front of the altar. But the children and many poor, overweight middle-aged women were being crushed against bars.

In the square, people screamed and prayed as they ran clinging to their children. Inevitably families were separated in the panic and the terror was magnified for those campesinos who had to either continue on their own or double back for the elderly and the young. Glimpsing the early seconds of the tragedy, I was terrified.

Most distressing of all was the moment of lucidity simultaneously with the first explosion when there was the collective realisation that people were going to be killed. And then people actually were being killed, many of them from heart attacks or trampled underfoot.

The coffin was taken inside. The celebrant’s chair was set aside. The gates were opened and a huge mass of humanity tumbled through and clambered up the steps. Anyone who fell (and many did) would be trampled, some to death.

I was swept inside in the first tide of people and took refuge behind a pillar. A young girl beside me was shivering with terror; she said that her elderly parents had been trampled down as they scrambled into the cathedral. She was sure they were dead.

Outside more bombs were going off and shots were being fired. I was told that the attack had come from the Palacio Nacional.

My young companion and I moved to a seat where we were ordered to put our hands over our heads and keep very low. Rumours that people in the cathedral had been shot through the head increased the panic. I was quite certain that I was going to die. Beside me an over-weight pregnant woman in her late 30s went unconscious. Efforts were made to fan her back to life. They failed. The little girl had regained her composure but kept sobbing about her parents. All one could do was hold her hand tightly.

Words of consolation or reassurance were quite superfluous. And as I looked at this little girl, old beyond her years, I was reminded that I might never see my own wife and children again.

As in all tragedy, there were instances of black humour. Behind me, two ladies sat praying fervently. When they heard me speak, they realised that I was not Salvadorean; and immediately dropped their assault on heaven to reassure me that what I was experiencing was not the real Salvador. I should not mind those out there.

Within minutes, I was sure that armed men would walk up the cathedral steps 10 yards away and murder as many people as they had bullets and bombs.

“Where are the police and army,” I asked with all the indignation of one who had lived in a democracy all his life. “Outside shooting in at us,” was the laconic reply from an old man who found it pathetic that anyone could ask such a naïve question. This was a lesson in the philosophy of national security.

A chorus of praying and singing could be heard over the sound of bullets and bombs. On the other side of the cathedral, Bishop Casey stood by the door.

Afterwards, he explained: “People were coming up frightened and terrified. They grabbed you. They embraced you, just to feel the sense of security that things were alright.” Bishop Casey had no Spanish, but that did not seem to hamper communications: “I might have been an El Salvadorean myself. You hugged them, you prayed with them, you prayed for them, they just wanted to feel secure … and language did not make any difference. You do not need language at a time like that … there was a tremendous at-oneness of the Church with the people because the people who counted were the poor and the oppressed. The rest can look after themselves.

There was no standing on ceremony in the cathedral. It was a time when heroes were made. Bishops and priests stood together with the people. In Latin America, the violence that Sunday was the inevitable outcome of the option for the poor.

There was no sense of hierarchy, only Christians facing a common danger. The Church was being attacked: and the main target of the violence was the ordinary people.

Bishop Casey saw 12 bodies at one point lined along the cathedral side wall. “They were the most inoffensive people that the Lord God ever made. Of the 12 I saw together at one stage, 11 of them were women. Most of them in their fifties… simple, honest, genuine people to whom Archbishop Romero had been a light in the darkness.”

The heat inside the cathedral was overwhelming. Bodies lay on the floor and it was impossible to tell whether they were dead or had just fainted. But one row of elderly women I saw were obviously dead. They had been trampled on, a Red Cross worker told me.

About half an hour after the first explosion, the Red Cross had appeared, and youths wearing that familiar international sign had been rushing out into the square to pick up the injured, the wounded and the dead.

I saw one young woman on the floor of the cathedral shot in the leg and in the chest. She received no attention. There was no time and no expertise. Meanwhile, thousands milled around above here.

“I just want to make this point very clearly,” Bishop Casey told me in San Salvador, “they were killed by those who started the stampede as clearly and as directly as if they shot them or by whoever planted the bomb. They knew exactly what would happen. And to me, it was an act of savagery.” As the shooting began to die down, it was possible to try to reconstruct the events leading to the carnage. Just before the Mass had begun, the Nicaraguan Foreign Minister, Fr. Miguel D’Escoto, had been handed a note from his Sandinista security men who had travelled with that government’s cabinet to the funeral. It read that there were snipers positioned on the roofs around and that an attack was feared. But it was decided to go ahead with the funeral service.

Then as the cardinal began to speak, the Popular Organisations had marched peacefully into the square behind the red banner which I saw being prepared to block away. They marched along the side of the square past the Palacio Nacional and a wreath was passed over the railings and placed beside the coffin.

Shortly after that, the first bomb exploded. According to eye-witnesses, it was thrown from the Palacio Nacional at a section of the Popular Organisations. That incident gave rise to the panic, the stampede, and a pitched battle.

Youths had come to the square armed, and they returned fire immediately. Cars were overturned and set on fire to provide a smokescreen for the fleeing congregation. Thousands had found refuge in the cathedral itself. However, the majority had scattered into the sidestreets. They were led in files by armed youths who went ahead of the people and fired shots into the air to signal that the way was clear of snipers.

Back in the square, youths had taken up firing positions behind the low cathedral wall. Most of the attention was turned on the Palacio Nacional from where it was claimed that the first bomb had been thrown, followed by rifle and automatic fire. There was little doubt in the cathedral that morning where the violence had begun. The bomb had been thrown from the Palacio, and snipers had been seen on the second floor.

At about half-past one, it was decided that bishops and religious would line up on either side of the laity and walk in file, hand above head, into the now deserted streets as protection, for the snipers were still in the Palacio Nacional.

That idea was abandoned when members of the Popular Organisation counselled that it was relatively safe for people to leave alone. Then the long procession began. Nuns walked out through the side door hands held high, a humiliating act of surrender undertaken to placate the trigger-happy snipers.

Inside the cathedral, a small group of bishops and clergy gathered around the crypt where Archbishop Romero was to be buried. The funeral service was not hurried.

The funeral service was not just for the murdered archbishop; about 50 had been killed that day and 500 had been taken to hospital. Even those horrifying statistics did not reflect the true extent of the day’s violence. 

Many country people refused to go to hospital. They wanted to get out of the capital as quickly as possible.

But, as I left the cathedral with my hands above my head, I was not aware of the full extent of the violence. I walked down sidestreets not quite knowing where I was going.

The thought kept going through my mind that perhaps a sniper would fire. In the cathedral square, I saw hundreds of abandoned umbrellas, hats and piles of shoes. People had literally taken to their heels.

As I walked, I remembered the wounded lying on the floor of the cathedral, alone and twisting in agony; and the dead, those ordinary, simple compesino women, with the final expression of horror, terror and agony felt at the moment of the first bomb recorded on their still faces.

There were no shots. There was no gunman waiting in a doorway. But people were now at their doors peering out at the stream of people walking away from the cathedral at an undignified pace as if by remote control. I made my way back to the house where we had left the car. It was not so much a house as a tenement where each room housed an extended family.

There, I became conscious of my shocked condition, I tried to phone Ireland, but all the lines were down. And people began to give me tea, coke and other drinks. They did not consider what had just happened anything unusual. It was normal for El Salvador. Is that possible? One final bid to get through to Dublin without success.

As I was on the phone, a beautiful little girl came over to me with a crumpled piece of paper.

“That’s our Monsignor”, she said showing me a picture of Archbishop Romero which she had carefully torn from a magazine.

“Did you know him?” I asked.

“Of course,” she said, “he was in our local church.” “Did you understand what he said?” “Not all,” she gestured with her hand.

“But did you speak to him?” “Certainly,” she said, “the Monsignor speaks with everyone.”

At that, she folded her treasured piece of paper carefully and walked away.