Rutilio Grande: A Table for All

In Rutilio Grande: A Table for All, veteran journalist Rhina Guidos explores the inspiring life and ministry of the Salvadoran priest whose killing changed the church in El Salvador and the life of his close friend, the country's most prominent church member, Archbishop Oscar Romero. Born in a rural and poor hamlet surrounded by sugarcane fields in El Salvador, Grande went on to study in Europe and Latin America as a member of the Society of Jesus. Though he found himself in the comfort of academia, he gave it up to return to the periphery of the rural world and its people. Inspired by teachings of the Second Vatican Council and a major bishops' meeting in Medellin, Colombia, he and a team set out to teach the poor to read, to stand up for their rights, and to call out injustices perpetrated by the government.

Grande's brutal 1977 assassination in a shower of gunfire marked the first notorious killing of a Catholic Church member during El Salvador's civil conflict, but made him one in a long line of El Salvador's Catholic martyrs.

Rhina Guidos is a reporter and editor at Catholic News Service. In that capacity, she covered the 2015 apostolic visit of Pope Francis to Cuba and the United States, as well as the beatification of Archbishop Oscar Romero in her native El Salvador. She is a former crime editor and has written about Latin America, crime and courts, immigration, minority issues, and politics at North American newspapers for 20 years.