Santa Clara University

Faculty/Staff Immersions

 

When the heart is touched by direct experience, the mind may be challenged to change. Personal involvement with innocent suffering, with the injustice others suffer, is the catalyst for solidarity, which then gives rise to intellectual inquiry and moral reflection.

 

Fr Kolvenbach spoke these words in an address at the 2000 Justice Conference at SCU. He was drawing on a long Jesuit tradition, one that was evident in the 16th century, when Jesuit education was already distinguished by a special concern for the poor, and an emphasis on character formation, in a network that was international but involved in outreach to local situations of poverty.

 

The Challenge

Each year Santa Clara University lives out this challenge in one way by continuing the decades long tradition of sending to El Salvador a delegation of ten faculty and staff members. Delegation members are selected from among the university faculty and staff leaders based on the criteria that they will have a leavening effect on campus when they return from the immersion experience.

 

The History of Faculty/Staff Immersions at SCU

The history of these immersions reaches back to 1988, during the civil war in El Salvador, when a group of California Province Jesuits was invited by a Salvadoran priest, Jon Cortina, S.J., to join refugees in Desperar, who felt safer when they were being observed by American and Europeans who could bear witness to their plight to the outside world. In 1989, immediately following the murders of Ignacio Ellacuria,S.J., five other Jesuits and two co-workers at the University of Central America in San Salvador, Eastside Project founders Steve Privett, S.J., and Sonny Manuel, S.J., traveled to El Salvador. All Jesuits there were in hiding, so Privett and Manuel disguised themselves as Coldwell Banker executives, and smuggled out videotapes of the murder victims. In March 1990, then-academic vice-president Paul Locatelli, S.J., led a delegation of faculty, regents, and friends of the University to tour refugee camps and to participate in ceremonies marking the tenth anniversary of the martyrdom of Bishop Oscar Romero. They brought with them Jon Sobrino, S.J., a UCA professor who had escaped assassination, in order to ensure his safe re-entry into El Salvador. Throughout this tense time, SCU’s Eastside Project, with Jesuit Refugee Services, was operating a human rights advocacy network whereby telegrams demanding to know the whereabouts of missing people were signed by University officials and sent to the highest U.S. and Salvadoran officials.

In 1999 Sonny Manuel, S.J., then recently appointed vice-provost, directed Bill Spohn from the Bannan Center and Catherine Wolff from the Eastside Project to review the status and usefulness of immersion experiences, with the intention of establishing them as a permanent University-sponsored program and a collaborative effort between the two entities....The review showed clearly that the immersion experience had caused (past immersion participants) to become leaven to the University and the wider community, that the education and personal transformation they had undergone had great potential for bringing about change at home, whether through academic, civic, or personal efforts.

 

Why El Salvador?

There was a deliberate return in the 1990s to El Salvador as the permanent site for faculty/staff immersions. Politically and socially, it constitutes a microcosm of human conditions, and our rich common history has resulted in a network of relationships with individuals and groups working in El Salvador who mediate for visitors their experience of working with the poor and sharing in the history of Romero, the Jesuit martyrs, and the Salvadoran people. Dean Brackley, S.J., an American Jesuit who went to work in El Salvador in response to the order’s call to replace the murdered UCA professors, speaks of our being part of a “middle-class tribe” that is mistaken, and trapped, in a belief in our own centrality, and of the necessity for us to allow those who are poor and suffering to break apart our world. It is in allowing this to happen that we can be reconciled with the poor majority of people, and be taught by them about God’s transforming work in the world.

(The history contained herein is excerpted in part from a longer article by Catherine Wolff and Sonny Manuel, "Showering Down Like Blessings," explore Magazine, spring 2006, Vol. 9, No. 2. pp. 5-11.)