All tagged San Alfonso

El Salvador: Day 3

Rob Crothers
Pilgrimages

Br Cesair telling the pilgrims about the assassination of Oscar Romero.This is the altar at which Oscar Romero was saying mass when he was shot.

An outside view of the church.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Today began for many of us with a return visit to San Alfonso, the school that adjoins the Retreat Centre. The students and staff had been so generous with us the day before and were keen for some more visitors to their English classes. This visit was then followed by an excursion to the Church where Archbishop Romero was assassinated. It was quite moving to stand in that Church and look upon the altar behind which Romero was standing when he was killed. The beauty of the fronds from the trees that surround the church, and are incorporated in the architecture of the building through large windows, formed a poignant backdrop as we imagined Romero celebrating Mass and dying in this place.

Visiting El Salvador: Day 1 & 2

Rob Crothers
Pilgrimages, El Salvador

Yesterday we bid extremely fond farewells to Br Edgardo – his humour, compassion and sense of fun were gifts to us – and made our way to El Salvador. As we crossed the border, we noticed that while the Guatemalan officials wrote out our passport details by hand, the El Salvadoran migration officials had computers. The border crossing also brought us better roads and thus our first impression of this place, new to us, was that it seems to have much better infrastructure than its neighbour. After lunching at a Marist school in Santa Ana (the second largest city in this densely populated country), we then visited a shopping mall and a petrol station – El Salvador was starting to look a great deal more like a place that we could recognize…