expelled from the community in 2004. Views that got him into trouble included his conviction that women deserve the same legal and civil rights as men; that violence, especially when perpetrated in the name of religion, is an affront to all genuine religious sensibilities; and that sectarianism—or what he calls “communalism”—is a disrupter of domestic and international peace.
Engineer first became worried about sectarian violence as a youth, when murderous confrontations between Muslims and Hindus raged across India. Such cruelty perpetrated in the name of religion, he concluded, was a corruption. “Religion to me never could be a source of hatred. It always was a source of compassion and love.”
Problems arise, Engineer believes, when religion becomes politicized as a weapon wielded by special interest groups. “It is not religion but misuse of religion and politicizing of religion, which is the main culprit.” The collapse of religion into sectarianism or communalism too easily encourages adherents to see nonbelievers as less-than-human outsiders, and this in turn induces a forgetfulness of the core religious insight that each person represents the whole of humanity. When that happens, sectarian violence is just around the corner. It follows, argues Engineer, that the key to avoiding it is to keep politics and religion distinct from one another. When it comes to criminal law, human rights, civil liberties, and social entitlements, the best framework is a secular one. Religion as “a source of moral and spiritual richness” remains independent and consequently is able to serve as society’s moral and spiritual barometer. Moreover, because it’s not dragooned as an ideological weapon by any one sect, it “does not pose any challenge for a secular political set up.” Used as an “instrument of power” by sectarians, religion becomes dangerous. Embraced as a foundation for compassion and virtue, it enriches individual lives and the moral fabric of society. It honors the insight that each human contains all of humanity.
11 March
Rutilio Grande
5 July 1928—12 March 1977
Proclaiming Subversion
It didn’t take long at all. Just a few bursts from a couple of machine guns, and Jesuit father Rutilio Grande was silenced. The spray of bullets that took his life also killed an old man and a teenage boy who just happened to be passengers in the car Grande was driving when the murderers caught up with him. But in every war, there’s so-called collateral damage.
Grande was murdered because the El Salvadoran military thought him a threat to the small country’s elite class who controlled the government and most of the national wealth. Grande, a native El Salvadoran who studied in Rome, taught at the Catholic seminary in San Salvador, and served the parish of Aguilares, sought to empower hitherto voiceless peasants by giving them some control over their spiritual and material destinies. For generations, they had been stifled by a hierarchical Church on the one hand and an oppressive economic and political system on the other. Grande encouraged their liberation through the establishment of Christian base communities, self-reliant groups of peasants who regularly met to discuss the gospels and the ways in which Jesus’ message shed light upon their situation. The base communities, serving as they did to raise consciousness among the peasantry, were condemned by the authorities as dangerously seditious, and it became increasingly risky for priests like Grande to remain in El Salvador.
The beginning of the end for Grande came in early 1977. In January a meddlesomely “subversive” priest had been snatched by government authorities and thrown out of the country. Two weeks later, Grande delivered a sermon at his Aguilares church that blasted the climate of fear and oppression created by the ruling junta. “I am fully aware,” he said, “that very soon the Bible and the Gospels will not be allowed to cross the border. All that will reach us will be the covers, since all the pages are subversive—against sin, it is said. So that if Jesus crosses the border, they will not allow him to enter. They would accuse him, the man-God . . . of being an agitator. . . . Brothers, they would undoubtedly crucify him again.” This sermon was Grande’s death warrant, as he must have known it would be. A month later he was dead.
But Grande’s murder bore fruit. It energized his friend Óscar Romero, who had just been appointed archbishop of San Salvador, into active opposition to the government and solidarity with the peasantry. Romero himself would be murdered three years later. In all, seventeen priests would die at the hands of the El Salvadoran junta. But their efforts to preach the subversive good news of spiritual and material liberation helped build a society in which wealth was a little more evenly distributed and a Church better able to see Christ in the faces of the people. So the bullets that cut him down didn’t silence Grande after all.
12 March
Preah Maha Ghosananda
23 May 1929—12 March 2007
Joyful Proclaimer of Peace
In Cambodia, the new Khmer Rouge regime declared 1975, the year of its takeover, “Year Zero.” Everything was to be started over. The old would be torn down and the new would be built.
By the time the regime hit Year Four, its final one in power, it had slaughtered or starved to death an estimated one-fifth of the nation’s population, upwards of two million people. Buddhist monks and nuns—“social parasites” whom Khmer Rouge fanatics especially loathed—were driven into exile, forced at gunpoint to recant their vows, or murdered. Before the Khmer Rouge there were around sixty thousand of them in Cambodia. Afterwards, there were scarcely three thousand.
Preah Maha Ghosananda, whose name in Pali means “Joyful Proclaimer,” had missed the killing years in his native Cambodia. For over a decade, from 1965 to 1978, he lived in deep seclusion in a Buddhist monastery deep in the forests of Thailand. After earning a doctorate from an Indian university, he had gone there to practice meditation. By the time he emerged from his hermitage, the Khmer Rouge had all but eradicated the Buddhist presence in Cambodia. It had also massacred all of Ghosananda’s family.
Thousands of Cambodians had fled to refugee camps just across the Thai border. Ghosananda began visiting them, building temporary hut-temples wherever he went, blessing the people, and offering them consolation. Although a man temperamentally inclined to solitude, study, and meditation, Ghosananda threw himself into alleviating suffering in the world around him and never looked back. “We must find the courage to leave our temples,” he said, “and enter the suffering-filled temples of human experience.”
By the time the Khmer Rouge thugs were overthrown in 1979, Cambodia was in ruins, its economy and infrastructure shattered and its people demoralized. Moreover, guerrilla fighting in the Cambodian jungles between feuding factions continued, and hundreds of thousands of hidden landmines, a legacy from the years of violence, dotted the landscape. In order to inaugurate the spiritual rejuvenation of his homeland, Ghosananda undertook annual Dhammayietra, or “Pilgrimages of Truth” from one end of Cambodia to the other. Dressed in the saffron robes of a monk, he led groups of fellow Buddhists, laypersons as well as monks and nuns, on a “step-by-step” proclamation of peace and healing to some of Cambodia’s most war-torn and damaged areas. Year after year he and his companions risked landmines, guerrilla hostility, weariness, and illness to walk across the land and bring hope and reconciliation to the people they met. At the start of each pilgrimage, Ghosananda announced: “Our journey for peace begins today and every day. Each step is a prayer, each step is a meditation, each step will build a bridge.” Everywhere they went, the Pilgrims of Truth chanted: “Hate can never be appeased by hate; hate can only be appeased by love.”
13 March
Ham Sok-Hon
13 March 1901—4 February 1989
Two
