Religious Digital
In the New Testament text of the Gospel of John, the Lord Jesus affirmed that “the truth will make us free” (Cfr. Jn 8,32). In this perspective the Jesuit priest Ignacio Ellacuría, in his work “Philosophy for what”, maintains that “the evangelical saying that the truth will make us free has a unique application to philosophy: it is the search for and announcement of the truth in the face of what prevents it, which will bring to men and to peoples freedom. An operative truth, but a truth. It is true that our peoples need transformation, but transformation full of truth; otherwise, we are not going toward human liberation, but toward alienation”. Now we can say that the evangelical saying has meaning and application in our reality, in which the empire of the lie coerces.
Normalizing the lie is not only un-Christian, it is also inhumane. But the reader will ask himself how does the lie dehumanize? or rather when does the lie dehumanize? To give an approach to the answer, dehumanization manifests itself in history in the apparent transformations accompanied by lies, which hide reality as such. Said in the words of Ellacuría, when in transformations the truth is absent, human liberation is not achieved, but rather alienation. According to the definition of the Royal Spanish Academy, alienation is “transformation of conscience […] by external causes, that leads an individual or a collectivity to lose its identity or to be in contradiction with it”. Thus, from that definition, it can be inferred that dehumanization born of alienation leads societies to lose not only sanity, but precisely the human face and the awareness of being all brothers and in believing words, of being children of a God who is father and who wants us to have life in abundance (Cfr. Jn 10,10).
Now then, the lie which is antagonistic in relation to the truth, has a father. In that framework, Jesus turned to those who historicized the lie in his time, telling them: “you are of your father the devil and want to carry out the desires of your father. This one was a murderer from the beginning, and did not remain in the truth, because there is no truth in him; when he tells the lie, he says what comes from inside him, because he is a liar and father of the lie” (Jn 8,44). In this regard, it is fitting to bring to memory an excerpt from a homily of Monsignor Romero that Alvaro Artiga has highlighted in his book “The True Church of Jesus Christ, according to the ecclesiology of San Oscar Arnulfo Romero”, the fragment reads thus: “Our Church must work to tear from the face of the country all that empire of iniquity, the empire of Satan, that empire of hell that reigns, unfortunately, under very diverse forms and that is taking the place from the only one who must reign in time: the Lord, the God of history” (31/12/1979). It is evident that the empire of the lie is synonymous with the empire of Satan.
Lying is not merely a trivial human invention. In this brief reflection one wants to apply the lie at the economic, political, social or religious level, since it is that which disfigures humanity, covers up the truth of things and alienates the human being. Hence, we Christians must take seriously the words of Monsignor Romero to tear from the face of our homeland the infernal empire of Satan, the father of the lie and murderer par excellence. Already in the Old Testament, in the book of Tobit truth is related to the practice of justice, with which one can conclude that practicing the lie is the beginning of injustice (cfr. Tob 4,6). At this point the lie and the truth become res, non verba (realities, not words).
The anti-kingdom of the lie becomes reality in the empire of social and economic injustice, in the destruction of our common home under the pretext of development of a society. To the above Pope Francis pointed out that “From here one easily passes to the idea of infinite or unlimited growth, which has so much enthused economists, financiers and technologists. It supposes the lie of infinite availability of the goods of the planet, which leads to ‘squeezing it’ to the limit and beyond the limit” (Laudato si, n° 106). In that same spirit already in 1967, the Pope Paul VI in the Populorum Progressio postulated that “development is not reduced to simple economic growth. To be authentic, it must be integral, that is, to promote all men and the whole man” (n° 14). Therefore, injustice is anchored in the lie, in a dynamic of respectivity, as is said in the first letter of John: “if someone says: ‘I love God’, and hates his brother, he is a liar; if he does not love his brother, whom he sees, he cannot love God whom he does not see” (1 Jn 19,20). That love for the brother must be translated in our time into love for those who suffer, for the victims and for mother earth who suffers under the yoke of inhuman destruction. This is historicized in a preferential option for the poor accompanying their struggles for liberation from all oppression and in the preferential option for our common home fighting for its protection from all destruction and depredation of flora and fauna.
Finally, it must be said that the lie becomes latent in these days in at least two things, although there can be and are many more. The first, to affirm “that we are no longer violent”, or at least that the country is no longer the most violent in the hemisphere, but it is enough to take a look at social networks and all the hatred that drips in wrathful and idolatrous comments. Upon carrying out that exercise briefly, one can discover what Francis already expressed in Fratelli Tutti: “social aggressiveness finds in mobile devices and computers a space of social amplification” (n° 44), namely, misogyny, homophobia, racism, aporophobia, xenophobia etc. All the above are genuine expressions of violence, of not loving the brother and sister, which have as root the lie that leads to fanaticism and idolatry of persons that want to usurp the lordship of God, giving way to the anti-kingdom, without more to the empire of the lie of Satan.
The second lie, is that “El Espino” farm is not being destroyed, when already photos circulate that evidence the devastation of the place, worse still that the lie is sustained with treachery making construction work nocturnal in the place. Nocturnality is usually used as temporality to exercise violence and death. For example, the murder of Elba and Celina, along with six Jesuits inside their residence at the José Simeon Cañas Central American University was perpetrated on November 16 in the darkness of early morning. Thus also, two centuries ago the arrest of Jesus of Nazareth was carried out at night to which, according to the Lukan account, he expressed: “I was with you all day in the Temple and you did not lay hands on me; but this is your hour and the power of darkness” (Lc 22,53). At night they murder our common home, and lay a destructive hand on it, it is the hour of Satan and darkness in current history.
The call becomes urgent for Christians followers of Jesus of Nazareth, one cannot serve two masters, God or the Devil. It is necessary to fight to eradicate from the face of our El Salvador the power of darkness, the lying empire of Satan father of all lies and injustice. A Church is thus necessary that truly lives its Passover of the kingdom of God and thus preserve the life of the poorest and our common home in all its levels. The way was traced 46 years ago by the martyr bishop Monsignor Romero, to such a degree that on March 24, the day of his assassination, the UN proclaimed it in December 2010 “International Day of the Right to Truth in relation to Grave Violations of Human Rights and Dignity of Victims”, in honor of his commitment to the crucified people of El Salvador.
It is time to put hand to the plow and fight for the construction of the kingdom of God in the history of our country. It is the time to make salvation present in history. Nevertheless, institutionalized lies has as objective the alienation of society, we find ourselves before what Monsignor Arturo Rivera Damas already described in 1977, that is, “the bewildering frivolity of some who have made themselves loudspeaker of the governmental thesis”, to which we must add: denying the destruction of our common home and the slow death of the poorest.