Influence of the Church in El Salvador
For many years in El Salvador, as depicted in the book, One Day of Life, by Manlio Argueta, the peasants were oppressed, exploited, and kept ignorant by the wealthy landowners and the paramilitary group, the Guard. Furthermore, the influential Church in El Salvador was unwilling to teach the peasants to better themselves or to teach them about equality. Three forces, the landowners, the Guard, and the Church worked to keep the peasants uninformed, and to make use of their ignorance. However, by the mid twentieth-century, the Church began to change. ... The difference between the old and the new priests had a profound influence on the lives and knowledge of the peasants. Historically, in El Salvador, church rituals have always been very important to the culture, including baptisms, confirmations, celebrations of patron saints and compadrazgo, or the selection of godparents for children. In the mid-1930’s, a strain of Catholicism called social Christianity arose in El Salvador, as a result of the hardships. ... The effect of the Vatican Council II and Pope John Paul XXIII in the mid-1960’s was the formation of Christian Base Communities (CEB’s) in El Salvador to work toward social justice. ... However, the existing Guard in El Salvador disliked the CEB’s, and by the late 1970’s, right-wing groups began harassing the CEB’s. ... Romero once said that the people of El Salvador always knew the fate of the poor, “to be taken away, to be tortured, to be jailed, to be killed …” Violence continued in El Salvador, and many CEB’s were either forced underground, or forced out of El Salvador completely. ... There was a definite power and alliance movement in El Salvador. The very rich landowners were allied with the Guards and the Church. The landowners were very wealthy and it was only a matter of course to give money to both the Guards and the Church, thereby creating a sense of loyalty.