Wayward Cleric

A "vanished"priest turns up

Back home in Chicago, he was known as a political activist who strongly opposed the U.S. involvement in El Salvador. Deciding to investigate the situation on his own, he became an interpreter for a Chicago television crew--he was fluent in Spanish--and arrived in San Salvador three weeks ago. Then, after attending Mass on Sunday, Father Roy Bourgeois, 42, a Maryknoll priest, simply vanished. The initial assumption was that he had become yet another victim of the country's endemic political terrorism. "I'm as certain as I can be that he didn't disappear of his own free will," said his superior, Father James Noonan, when he arrived to look into the case.

Noonan, like everyone else, was wrong. Bourgeois was traveling around the country, walking, riding in buses, sleeping on the ground, talking endlessly with the peasants he hoped to redeem. He had planned to spend two months in the countryside, but he abandoned his journey after only eleven days when he and some companions found themselves facing a large army column in guerrilla-dominated Morazan province. A few days later, tired and dirty, Bourgeois walked into the U.S. embassy in San Salvador.

TIME has learned that the El Salvador government issued an order for Bourgeois's arrest for "subversion" and that the U.S. embassy was able to hustle him out of the country only after getting the reluctant support of Jose Napoleon Duarte, head of the ruling junta. Arriving in New York, Bourgeois said the object of his trip had been "to walk among the poor and to join their struggle for justice and peace." If the military and the right-wing death squads need any excuse for further harassing church workers in El Salvador, Bourgeois may have given them a ready-made rationale.

At week's end, the Salvadoran government confirmed reports that it had arrested six men, probably National Guardsmen, two weeks ago for the December murders of four women missionaries, including two Maryknoll nuns. The soldiers were not identified, but Salvadoran officials said the U.S. embassy knows the names. The arrests were said to have followed a telephone call from Secretary of State Alexander Haig to President Duarte demanding action. Six National Guard rifles were sent last week from El Salvador to FBI headquarters in Washington for ballistics tests. The bullets will be compared with a number taken from the scene of the murders.

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