Abstract
Christine Rody is a sister in the Vincentian Sisters of Charity order in Cincinnati, Ohio. She served on the Cleveland Latin American Mission team to El Salvador with Sr. Martha Owen and Sr. Dorothy Kazel. In this interview, she discusses her decision to enter the convent and her time in El Salvador. Sr. Christine reflects on the work she helped perform and the impact that work has had on the Salvadoran people. She also describes the situation in El Salvador both before and after the escalation of hostilities between the guerillas and the military junta in the late 1970s, including the murders of the four church women in 1980. Sr. Christine Rody was at the Thanksgiving dinner held at Ambassador Robert White's house the night before Srs. Dorothy, Ita, Maura, and Jean Donovan were killed. She also talks about the reaction and involvement of the Cleveland people in relation to El Salvador and the work of the Cleveland mission team.
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Interviewee
Rody, Christine (interviewee)
Interviewer
Randt, Naomi A. (interviewer)
Project
Protest Voices
Date
7-30-2016
Document Type
Oral History
Duration
81 minutes
Recommended Citation
"Christine Rody interview, 30 July 2016" (2016). Cleveland Regional Oral History Collection. Interview 750009.
https://engagedscholarship.csuohio.edu/crohc000/772
Transcript
Sister Christine Rody [00:00:00] Oh, and by the way, there’s something in this same room at noon, so we absolutely have to be finished. Okay.
Naomi A. Randt [00:00:06] My name is [Naomi A. Randt]. I’m with Sister Christine Rody at St. Malachi’s Convent.
Sister Christine Rody [00:00:12] Sorry.
Naomi A. Randt [00:00:13] That’s okay. It is the 30th of July 2016. Could you please state your name for the record?
Sister Christine Rody [00:00:20] I’m sister Christine Rody, R-O-D-Y.
Naomi A. Randt [00:00:27] When and where were you born?
Sister Christine Rody [00:00:30] I was born in Bedford, Ohio, September … 1942.
Naomi A. Randt [00:00:38] What was Bedford like growing up? [phone rings]
Sister Christine Rody [00:00:41] A nice little suburb, I guess you’d call it. I always, when I give my talks and so on, I use as my life history. I was born in Bedford, raised in Bedford, went to school in Bedford, entered a community in Bedford, taught in Bedford, went to Salvador to get away from Bedford. [laughs] I went other places and did other things, too, but that’s kind of a fun thing to say.
Naomi A. Randt [00:01:08] Did you have any siblings?
Sister Christine Rody [00:01:10] Yes, I’m the oldest of five. After me are two boys and then my sister and then another boy. There are three boys and two girls.
Naomi A. Randt [00:01:19] What was- What were your parents like? What did they do?
Sister Christine Rody [00:01:25] My mom and dad were very, what I define as practical Catholic people. They made their faith a part of their life. It wasn’t some tacked-on thing. And they raised us in that same tradition. My father was a crane operator on Lake Erie. He worked for Cleveland Stevedore, and my mom was a housewife. My dad kind of had us be aware of the world because of his job. And on occasion, he would take us down to the docks, and we were, if the captain of the ship was amenable to it, we would be able to see, we’d be able to walk on the ship and meet the sailors who we were fascinated because they didn’t speak English. And so he exposed us to the world scene, and our mom was very interested in anything that you could be interested in. So it was kind of a wide open experience of growing up.
Naomi A. Randt [00:02:24] Where did you go to school?
Sister Christine Rody [00:02:25] I went the first six years of my educational life at St. Mary’s in Bedford, and then St. Mary’s Parish got too large and was split. And I was part, we geographically lived in the area that was part of St. Pius X. So then I finished 7th and 8th grade at St. Pius X, and then I went to Hoban Dominican High School for my freshman and sophomore year. And then I decided when I was in the 8th grade, I thought I really wanted to be a sister. And my best friend entered the community at the time, and I wanted to go then, but my parents said I wasn’t old enough and wasn’t, didn’t have enough life experience to make that decision. So when I was finished my sophomore year, I said to them, I really want to be a sister. And when you’re a junior, this is back in 1958. So I said to them that I really want to be a sister. And most of your junior, senior year are spent. That time is spent looking for a boyfriend or planning for a career or, you know, that kind of thing. I’m not interested in that. I want to be a sister. Why can’t I get started? So they said yes. And so then I entered the community, and I finished my education in high school at Marymount, which is now Trinity High School. I did my junior, senior year together in that school year and the summer, and then I became what’s called a canonical novice, which is the year that religious study, the life of the community and the rule and all that sort of thing. And you don’t go to school or, you know, you just kind of concentrate on becoming a sister. And then when that year was finished, when I was a second year novice, I started at St. John College in Cleveland to get ready to be a teacher. And then I had two full years of college. And at that time, the cadet program was still in place in the state of Ohio, and so we could start teaching and then finish our college work in summers and Saturdays. And so I finished in four more years of summers and Saturdays and got my bachelor’s degree in 1966. And then I taught grade school at St. Mary’s in Bedford for a year, and then I was at St. Barnabas in Northfield for six years. And then they asked me to teach at the high school, Lumen Cordium High School. So then I prepared for that in summers while I was teaching. And I taught religion full-time at Lumen Cordium, but I carried a certificate for state certification in mathematics, and I got all those credits at John Carroll. And to do the religion teaching, I started a summer program at St. John’s University and Collegeville, Minnesota, and got a master’s degree in theology there. And then I taught. The summer that I got my master’s degree, that was 1975, I got my master’s degree. Well, I finished all the work in 75. That summer, I left the country to go study Spanish in Bolivia so that I could go to the missions. And the push there was at the time, there was an age limit on being a missionary, and you had to do it under the age of 35, and I was 33 at the time. So I thought, oh, gosh, I better get cracking on this too, if I’m really going to do this. So then I asked my religious community about becoming a missionary. They said, well, investigate it. So I did, and I went to Salvador to see what I was getting into. Holy Week, I think it was holy week of 1976. No, it was 1975. And then I left the country in August of ’75 to go to Bolivia. And then I went to Salvador in February of ’76. Now, the point of becoming, I mean, of going to be a missionary wasn’t. At the time, I wasn’t focused on being a missionary. I was focused on helping the kids at Lumen Cordium High School understand the world situation and that the church was interested. The church was a world organization out for the world, and I wanted to make that real to the girls I was teaching. And so I was teaching sophomores and seniors and the sophomores. This was in the sophomore course on the church. And again, this was in the seventies, right after the Second Vatican Council. And the textbooks weren’t very well written at the time, and it was kind of chaotic in the realm of religion teaching. So I reflected on how did I as a child, have a world sense? And part of it was my father’s job. The other part of it was I had a pen pal in India. And so anything that happened in India was very much important to me. So I thought, oh, if these girls knew somebody in a foreign country, they would be at least interested in that country. So I was thinking, okay, if I go to the missions- And at the time, the commitment for the mission was three years upfront and then a possible two years renewal. I thought, well, if I go to the missions, those kids that are freshmen will still be in school, so they would know me, and then I can connect them with at least El Salvador. So that was my motivation for going to the missions. And then once I was there, I arranged my vacations to be during school time. And then I would go and I would come back to Lumen and to all of our grades. We had 14 grade schools at the time. The community sponsored or, you know, we taught at 14 grade schools. So I made the rounds and did, you know, a dog and pony show, basically with slides. And I taught them a simple Spanish song. And so that all the kids that we as a congregation were connected with had a sense of the mission in El Salvador that the diocese had. So that’s how all that fits together. That’s probably much more than you wanted to hear.
Naomi A. Randt [00:08:21] That’s really perfect. I wonder if I could just back up a little bit. What was your underlying motivation to enter the convent? Why did you want to be a sister so-?
Sister Christine Rody [00:08:35] Strongly? Passionately? I think because I wanted to help people and I wanted to- I think that’s basically it. I wanted to help people. I truly wasn’t interested in getting married at that age and stage of life. This is going to sound awful, but I thought it was too confining. You know, once you got married, you had responsibilities to your husband, you had responsibilities to your children. You were extremely focused on a very nugget kind of situation, and that didn’t interest me. I wanted this bigger perception. In fact, when I started high school, everybody at Hoban had to take Latin, and I was fascinated with another language. I thought, isn’t this amazing that you can rearrange the letters of the alphabet in a different way and it’s a language and it speaks just like English does. I mean, I was a kid, so I was talking to my mother one day about this, and she said, well, maybe you could be a translator for the United Nations. Well, it was something I had never dreamt of as an ambition. And I thought, gee, that might be an interesting occupation. So from the time I was a child, my vision was focused bigger than the requirements at the time for women. You could be a wife, a mother, a secretary or a teacher at that time, in the fifties. And maybe I’m a late bloomer, too. So all that women’s rights and all that sort of stuff that began in the fifties was not part of my focus at that time. So I wanted a bigger scene. And in order to do that, I didn’t think you could be married because it would compromise your, I mean, it certainly is able, look at the candidate for president, it is possible, but at that time, I didn’t think that way. So for this bigger work, that was, I think, why I wanted to be a sister.
Naomi A. Randt [00:10:41] And your parents were ultimately supportive of that?
Sister Christine Rody [00:10:43] Oh, yes, they were always supportive of that. My mother, when she was a child, thought about becoming a sister, and as it turned out, we used to laugh and tease her because she didn’t become a sister, but her two daughters did. [laughs] And it wasn’t something that she pushed down our throats or anything. It was just something that happened, under God’s grace, I suppose.
Naomi A. Randt [00:11:11] What was the connection with El Salvador? Why was that sort of like the country that-?
Sister Christine Rody [00:11:16] Well, the connection with El Salvador was I was in a religious community from the Diocese of Cleveland. And in the sixties, the Pope asked for- He asked for help with the- He said if Europe would take care of Africa and North America would take care of South America, then we would be able to get the gospel out in. In a better way. Well, the diocese of Cleveland in the early sixties took this on as a commitment and said, well, where can we go? What can we do? And it was Bishop Whalen who did the investigation, and he helped Archbishop Hoban, at the time, focus on El Salvador for a couple of reasons. One, there was only one language to learn, and that was Spanish. There were Indian dialects in Salvador, but because of the. The war situation, prior to that, people would not speak their Indian dialect in public. So as a church, the only language we would have to, you know, learn would be Spanish. That was one reason, another reason it was close enough that you could. You could get there and back without a whole lot of trouble. Actually, it’s closer, Salvador is closer to Cleveland than some of the places in California, you know, so it was close. It was practical. We also had a cooperative bishop in Salvador who was looking for some assistance. So the sixties decision of Cleveland to choose El Salvador influenced my decision, because I was not looking to be a full time lifetime missionary as my career. I was looking at it as a temporary thing to help the kids at Lumen Cordium High School. And it was something. The commitment was short. It was not for life, like a religious congregation dedicated to missionary work would be, and my community would not be responsible for my replacement. That was a big concern for me, too. The diocese sponsored the mission, not the community. So we just assisted with the community, with the diocese service in El Salvador. And as you know, the mission in El Salvador was staffed by diocesan priests and religious from the Ursuline, the Ursuline Humility of Mary Vincentians, Sisters of Charity of St. Augustine. You know, a whole bunch of people who are centered in Cleveland took on this responsibility. Now, I think part of the reason that it was so vivid in the minds of the Clevelanders was the fact that from Salvador, every week in the diocesan newspaper at the time, the Universe Bulletin that came out weekly, the people in Salvador would write a letter, and it was called Dear Folks Back Home. You can track all of those letters, and they were very interesting. The people who were on the mission team at that time were good writers and were very committed to helping the people of Cleveland understand why we were in El Salvador. And so those Dear Folks Back Home letters I read as a kid, you know, and I would say, oh, isn’t this interesting? You know, like, we couldn’t get to the mission because the cows were in the street, and you know, all kinds of. All kinds of interesting little remarks that the missionaries made. So it kept it alive in the minds of Clevelanders. And that’s probably why when the nuns were murdered, the outpouring of love and support and so on was so strong, because it was our mission, the diocese, and I think it still is in the minds of a lot of people. The Diocese of Cleveland is in El Salvador because the people of Cleveland support it, and it’s Cleveland’s way of being committed to the world church.
Naomi A. Randt [00:15:01] Was there a lot of, for people who weren’t part of the Catholic Diocese in Cleveland, was that sort of that connection to El Salvador there for them to open? Did they know about that as well?
Sister Christine Rody [00:15:15] I think that depended on the people in Cleveland, how well they publicized what was going on in El Salvador to the bigger church. Until Salvador became a national issue, I think Clevelanders in general knew about what the diocese was doing because the people in Cleveland were talking about it, and other people than Catholics read the Universe Bulletin, you know. So, yes, it was a wider issue than just the Cleveland commitment, but the commitment was from the diocese. Yeah. If you’re not careful, I’m gonna fill the gap. [laughs]
Naomi A. Randt [00:16:06] I have a question for you. So when did you go down to El Salvador? That was 1976?
Sister Christine Rody [00:16:19] Well, I started work in Salvador in 1970- February of 1976. Yeah, that’s when I began work. I went to Salvador, the Holy Week of ’75, just to see what I was getting into. I also wanted to see, can I sustain the heat? I was a little concerned about that, but it was not a problem. And then I came back, finished teaching, finished my last graduate paper for my theology degree 12 hours before I left the country to go to Salvador, I mean to Bolivia, to study Spanish. I mean, crazy, but in your thirties, you got lots of energy, and you could do this. So, in fact, I didn’t even finish typing the paper. I gave it to my friend who finished the typing, and I said, take care of it. If there are any corrections to be made, would you please make them and send them back and so on. And the interesting thing, when I was home in 76 for my first vacation in the spring, my degree from Collegeville came in the mail, and I thought, boy, was this a different part of my life. [laughs] So then I left August of ’75 to go to language school. I spent five months in Bolivia, in Cochabamba, studying Spanish at the Maryknoll Language School, which is a highly intense program. It’s one on one with a tutor every- And you can sign up for at least four hours of tutoring. Fifty minutes of every hour was with this tutorial. The next hour you got a new tutor who would pick up where the last tutor left off and continue. And one of the things I learned the very first day I was there is if you are so well prepared that you know the lesson, they’ll go to the next lesson. So I prepared for my. Well, at that time, the first two weeks, you can take two, two hours of Spanish grammar and then two hours of face-to-face Spanish study. And the grammar teacher spoke English so you could ask questions in English. The tutor did not- They deliberately chose people who didn’t speak English because it forced you to put everything in Spanish, even your questions. So it was a real pressure cooker situation. So I figured, two classes, I’ll prepare the first three lessons. That ought to do it. Well, I had the two classes of grammar, then I had the two one on ones. Well, I had prepared those first three lessons so well that the first tutor went through the first three lessons, told the next tutor that I was ready for the fourth lesson, which I hadn’t even looked at. So I didn’t even know where the words began or ended. I remember the title of the lesson was “Me a pria ta mucho los zapatos,” which means “My shoes are too tight.” I didn’t know where the words were. And the first part of the lesson was the teacher would ask you about the lesson. There was like a little paragraph at the beginning, and then they developed the vocabulary and so on and so forth. Every lesson was the same. So I think that’s why they chose the method. It was the ALM method of Spanish study back in ’75, whatever that was at the time. So when he started the, it was the most agonizing hour of my life because I had no idea what he was asking. I had no idea what the words were. Finally, when he opened the book, then at least I could see where the words began and ended. So I thought, oh, my goodness, this is not- I mean, I could really, you know, I could zip through this book in no time if I could make my brain hold all this information. So anyway, that’s my little side story. [laughs]
Naomi A. Randt [00:20:02] Did you find that your latin background from-?
Sister Christine Rody [00:20:05] From high school? It got in the way. I had. I also had had, when I was going into the 9th grade, a friend of mine was going to the Case Western Reserve summer language school for high school students, and she invited me to join her because she didn’t want to go alone. I mean, we were 14-year-old kids, and it was French the study of French. And I remember the, the professor’s name was Mademoiselle Rogoff, and she started the very first part of the class. She spoke to us in English, and then she said, I’m going to talk to you in French and you’re going to have to pay strict attention. And this is the best way to learn French. So when I was studying Spanish, my French and my Latin got in the way because it was the other than English language that I knew, which came more quickly to my brain than the Spanish I was studying. So at the beginning it was getting rid of the Spanish, I mean, getting rid of the Latin and the French so that I could concentrate on the Spanish. So it was- But in terms of grammar and word formation and so on, the Latin really helped later on, once I had cleared away the, you know, your first response was Latin and French.
Naomi A. Randt [00:21:17] Did you feel very prepared to go into El Salvador, those five minutes of language?
Sister Christine Rody [00:21:23] Did I feel very prepared? No, I did not. I felt like, well, I guess I have enough to get started. And once I got to the mission, people there assured me that for the whole first year, you’re gonna feel like you don’t know a thing, just put up with it. After the year, you’ll have enough practice, you’ll have enough security, you’ll be fine. And don’t worry about the grammar because the people don’t care about the grammar. They just want, they want to be friends with you and learn about the church and learn about things and be helped and so on. So don’t worry about it. So I didn’t. And I ended up speaking in the progressive tense rather than the straightforward present tense for the most part, because it was the easier form to form, because the verb is star is the thing that changes, and then the ending piece just stays the same. I, to this day, speak in the progressive tense, which is hardly- They don’t use it in Spanish, so they know I’m a gringa [laughs], but I made myself understood. And people are very, very kind. You find around the world people are very kind in the sense that if you’re trying to speak their language, they’ll put up with a whole lot of stuff because they want you to, to speak their language if you can, you know. So I was not embarrassed or hard-pressed. I, you know, some, there were days when I thought, boy, I’m really making progress in this language. And then there were other days like, I don’t understand a word they said today. So it fluctuated.
Naomi A. Randt [00:23:00] What was your impression of the Salvadoran people?
Sister Christine Rody [00:23:03] Oh, they’re wonderful. The Salvadoran people are great. First of all, we worked in- The Diocese of Cleveland at that time had three parishes, which they do today, but they’re different. At the time, we were in La Unión, La Libertad, and Chirilagua. Those were the three areas. And I spent two and a half years in La Unión and then two and a half years in the Zaragoza piece of the La Libertad Parish. And so we’re talking about people who are common people that was not upper-class people who had permanent jobs and so on. These were people who were either farmers or storekeepers or street vendors, you know, people trying to eke out a living and raise their families and so on. That was the kind of clientele that we worked with, the average Salvadoran person. And they were very kind and very- I’ve said to people many, many times, I have never felt so appreciated for doing so little in my whole life. All you had to do was show up, and they were glad.
Naomi A. Randt [00:24:12] What was some of the work that you did with them?
Sister Christine Rody [00:24:15] The work of the women on the mission team primarily was support work, like we had- We trained catechists. Everybody trained catechists because every parish of the three had at least 50 villages attached to it. And people would, for the most part, stay in their village. They would only come to the main church for big fiestas, big celebrations. So part of the Cleveland plan was to go to the villages and help these people understand about their faith. And so in order for that to happen, we had to train people of the village who could do that. So one of our first jobs was to find people who could read and write. And then, at the time, there was a program that the Cleveland team instituted for training catechists, and the center was called El Castaño. It was a cement building that, very plain, very simple, that we would draw people who could read and write, who were interested in helping their neighbors learn the faith. And then we would bring them together so that they could learn about the faith, learn how to teach about the faith, and then go back to their village. The other side effect of that was they learned about people in other villages who had that same interest and intent and so on. So that’s why it became dangerous to the government, because what it was doing is creating a base of people to share. And that’s why we got labeled subversives. It had nothing to do with what we were teaching. We were not teaching anything about the government. In fact, we purposely stayed away from anything like that because we felt- Not that we were trying to avoid it or were cowardly, but we felt that political things were the work of the people themselves. It had nothing to do with us. So we were teaching people how to teach about the faith, how to teach reading and writing to adults who hadn’t gone to school. We also had programs for food assistance for pregnant and nursing mothers and children under five. It was a combination of the government of El Salvador with the Caritas program. And so we would be- The women primarily did work with those Caritas groups, like in Zaragoza. I think we had, like 27 of these different caritas groups around the area. And one of our jobs was to go and to train the women of the directiva, the coordinating group, about something so that they could teach the women. So in order for the women to receive the food assistance, they had to come to a class. And then it cost them 75 centavos for the food. And it was milk and a wheat soy blend of flour and oil and powdered milk and tree gore. I think there were, like, five things- Oil. There were five different things that we would. And then they would get those on a monthly basis. And it was our job to make sure that the food got to the village and, you know, all that kind of stuff. And then we also taught- We did a lot of the teaching of the people to teach how to read and write. We used the program developed in Costa Rica called Alphalet. And it was a way of teaching adults how to read in Spanish. And we use that as our text. So that kind of was the work that we did. And then before the war got real serious, we would go to these different villages on a weekly basis. We would go, like, in the evening for a week to a village. And we had, like, a theme. One time it was the sacraments. Another time it was the laws of the commandments. Another time it was liturgy. Depending on what we thought the people needed, we would go there in the evening for a set of classes. And then we would have the classes en masse at that village.
Naomi A. Randt [00:28:07] What was your favorite part about all that work?
Sister Christine Rody [00:28:10] Oh, gosh, my favorite part. It was all fun. It was all a favorite part. I think when I first got to La Unión, one of the things I did was tutor a lady in Alphalet so that I would learn and be able to explain things. And I remember that at that point was my favorite because I felt useful. You know, I was doing something that had meaning and so on. So that was good. And then later on, I think just that ability to go to these villages and meet with these people and people who are so committed to their faith. It was wonderful to watch these people walk around with the Bible and the document from the bishops of Latin America that came out tucked under their arm. And we’re talking about campesino people, you know, who maybe had a 6th grade education or maybe didn’t even have that. And maybe, de vez en cuando, once in a while, somebody who had a high school education walking around with these official documents that they were studying. That to me was a marvelous thing, you know, that it mattered to them what their church said on these issues. That’s why it got so dangerous.
Naomi A. Randt [00:29:20] What kind of things were in those official documents?
Sister Christine Rody [00:29:23] Well, you know, that people have dignity, that everybody has a right to speak. Everybody has a right to be listened to. Whether you agree with them or not, that’s your choice, but that you should hear them, you know. I’ll never forget this. One catechist from a village came to us, the nuns. I don’t know why we were there to check on Caritas or something. He came up to us and he was so excited. He said he had just come back from Castaño and he said, you know what, Sisters? He said, I learned something. My wife is equal to me, you know, we share a partnership. And that was an exciting revelation to him that she wasn’t less than he was, which kind of is the macho perception. And of course, he didn’t have any education, so where would he have learned that? So anyway, it was fun. It was fun to see that. The fun part for me was to see how people can develop if you help them.
Naomi A. Randt [00:30:26] Where did they get their documents-?
Sister Christine Rody [00:30:29] They got them from us, basically, in the sense that the people would, back in the days when they were still permitted to congregate and be together, they would form, like, study clubs and, you know, like, what do we want to study? And of course, these documents were just coming out at the time. So they said, well, let’s study these. And then, of course, there’s always those Bible study booklets in any language, you know, study this passage. These are the questions, what do you come to understand? And how does this deepen your faith and all that kind of stuff. So they were interested, and we’re talking about people who at the time only had, like, if they had electricity, radios, very few people at that time- Now we’re talking the early ’70, you know, ’75 to ’80 period of time. So there weren’t that many televisions, particularly out in the villages, they wouldn’t have television. So what did they do in their evenings? So to study was, in a sense, a recreation as well. And then, of course, the bishops, Archbishop Romero broadcast his homilies. The whole mass was broadcast throughout the diocese. Well, people beyond the Diocese of San Salvador could get this radio transmission. So we used to laugh and say, you could walk down the street and not miss a word of the sermon because everybody listened to the bishop, whether you were in his diocese or not. And then when the situation got so tense, his homilies would include the events of the week. Whether they were leftist misdemeanors or government misdemeanors, it showed up in the homily. And that, of course, made him enemy number one to the government. And we all know what happened to him.
Naomi A. Randt [00:32:20] What was your impression of Archbishop Romero?
Sister Christine Rody [00:32:23] Oh, gosh. Well, the two and a half years I was in La Unión, I was in the Diocese of San Miguel, which is a different bishop. When we turned the La Unión over to the Salvadoran, back to the Salvadoran diocese, back to San Miguel, part of the reason for that was we- The parochia, the parish, was to the point where we had over 200 catechists trained. We had all kinds of, you know, people knew what they were doing in terms of the faith. We felt that it was the end of missionaries’ commitment there, that they could do it themselves. So we were in the process of changing from North American support of this parish and all of its cantons to a Salvadoran priest taking over. So we had two Salvadoran priests on the mission team with an American and then the three of us nuns, Sister Dorothy Kazel, Martha Owen, and myself. And at that point, the situation in the country got bad. So Father Miguel Montesinos lost his voice and he was going to the doctor and going to the doctor and going to the doctor. And finally the doctor told him that he would not get his voice back until he was out of the tension he was living in. So he decided that he was gonna go to Costa Rica either temporarily or whatever. At the time, I think he was thinking temporarily. So he left the mission team and went to Costa Rica, just to get away from it. Then Father Lionel Cruz, who was with Father Jim McCreight, the other Salvadoran priest. We don’t know how involved he was with the leftist activities because we didn’t want to know, because we didn’t want to be able to answer any questions. But he was a very good priest and committed to the parish and so on. What he did in his personal time was none of our business. So he was- His best friend was up in Chalatenango and he was picked up by the government. The sacristan up in his parish was able to sneak out of the town because they surrounded the town and wouldn’t let anybody in or out. They picked up Lionel’s friend and the sacristan snuck out and went to the neighboring parish where there were Franciscan priests from Ireland, I think. The priests were from Ireland and the nuns were from England or vice versa, I can’t remember. Anyway, he told the Franciscans. And then the Franciscans got the word out to the missionary community that this priest had been picked up. And, you know, it was at the time when priests were being murdered and all that sort of stuff. So we were quite concerned. And our priests then did what they could to find out where he was and what was going on. Anyway, he got released and he went back to his parish. But the people wanted to tell him how good he was and all this sort of stuff. So they wouldn’t let him alone, wouldn’t let him rest. So he came down to La Unión to be with Lionel. And then there’s a whole bunch of more details to
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