Priest and Martyr (1939–1979)
In the violence preceding the civil war in El Salvador, June 1979 was a typical month: 123 people were killed by death squads, including 30 teachers, assorted labor leaders, and peasants, whose mutilated bodies were left by the side of the road. One of the victims was a priest, forty-year-old Rafael Palacios, who had worked with grassroots communities in Santa Tecla, and who had recently taken over a parish after its previous pastor had been killed.
His work with the poor had marked him as a subversive. Several days before his death, the White Warriors Union, a right-wing death squad whose motto was “Be a patriot, kill a priest,” had painted a threat on his car. On June 20 he was shot in the street in Santa Tecla.
Archbishop Oscar Romero preached at his funeral and called on the authorities to control “these forces of hell and murder.” Of Fr. Rafael and other martyred priests, he said, “It would be sad if, in a country where murder is being committed so horribly, we were not to find priests also among the victims. They are the testimony of a church incarnated in the problems of its people.”
“In [Rafael Palacios] we see the new man and the zeal he had to fashion those new human beings that Latin America needs today—not just by changing structures but above all by changing hearts. It is the voice of conversion, the voice of genuine evangelization.”
—St. Oscar Romero
