Praise the Left and Pass the Ammunition

The disappearance of 42-year-old Maryknoll Father Roy Bourgeois in El Salvador on April 26 touched off widespread fears that he had been kidnapped or killed. As reported by the major news organizations, it was assumed that the priest, who vanished for 11 days after leaving his hotel in the capital city of San Salvador, had fallen victim to what might be called renegade elements of the Salvadoran government’s security forces—the notorious “death squads.”

A conspicuous catalyst of this assumption was Fr. Bourgeois’s own Maryknoll order, which scrambled to lay his disappearance at the doorstep of the embattled Salvadoran junta held together by President José Napoleon Duarte. “We ask for prayers for Fr. Bourgeois and his family and we ask especially for the people of El Salvador who are being tortured and murdered daily by forces aligned with their own government,” intoned the Superior General, Father James P. Noonan, in a statement issued from Maryknoll headquarters on April 28. Fr. Noonan subsequently hastened to El Salvador to investigate the situation himself, maintaining that he was “as certain as one can be that he [Fr. Bourgeois] didn’t disappear of his own free will. This would be utterly contrary to his mode of action. He would not do this to Maryknoll.”

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Richard T. Reed

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The disappearance of 42-year-old Maryknoll Father Roy Bourgeois in El Salvador on April 26 touched off widespread fears that he had been kidnapped or killed. As reported by the major news organizations, it was assumed that the priest, who vanished for 11 days after leaving his hotel in the capital city of San Salvador, had fallen victim to what might be called renegade elements of the Salvadoran government’s security forces—the notorious “death squads.”

A conspicuous catalyst of this assumption was Fr. Bourgeois’s own Maryknoll order, which scrambled to lay his disappearance at the doorstep of the embattled Salvadoran junta held together by President José Napoleon Duarte. “We ask for prayers for Fr. Bourgeois and his family and we ask especially for the people of El Salvador who are being tortured and murdered daily by forces aligned with their own government,” intoned the Superior General, Father James P. Noonan, in a statement issued from Maryknoll headquarters on April 28. Fr. Noonan subsequently hastened to El Salvador to investigate the situation himself, maintaining that he was “as certain as one can be that he [Fr. Bourgeois] didn’t disappear of his own free will. This would be utterly contrary to his mode of action. He would not do this to Maryknoll.”