Salvador’s Left, Right Attend Rites for Priests : Central America: Two Catholic bishops are warned to leave the country. Fighting subsides in the capital.

SAN SALVADOR —  A funeral Mass for six slain priests Sunday brought together rightists and leftists, hunted politicians and even some people suspected of links to paramilitary death squads.

Army helicopters circled overhead and the sound of gunfire rang out in the distance during the service at the Central American University, where the Jesuits were killed last Thursday by gunmen. Witnesses said the attackers wore military uniforms.

More than 3,000 mourners packed the auditorium and spilled outside during the service, an emotion-filled encounter of political adversaries in a conflict that has brought intense warfare to the capital.

Leftist leader Ruben Zamora emerged from a week of hiding and strode into the auditorium to bow before each closed wooden casket. Wearing a bulletproof vest under his suit, Zamora served as a pallbearer for Father Ignacio Ellacuria, the slain rector of the university.

President Alfredo Cristiani attended the funeral with his wife, who wore black. He has vowed to prosecute the murderers “no matter who they might be” but made no additional comment on the case Sunday.

During the service, however, Cristiani’s attorney general held a press conference across town and issued thinly veiled threats against Msgr. Arturo Rivera y Damas, archbishop of San Salvador, and Msgr. Gregorio Rosa Chavez, his auxiliary bishop.

Atty. Gen. Francisco Eduardo Colorado called on the two church leaders to leave El Salvador “for the security of themselves and the country in general.”

He claimed to have information, which he did not detail, that the leftist Farabundo Marti National Liberation Front (FMLN) rebels would try to kill the church leaders.

“It is very difficult for me personally to protect these dignitaries from this Communist avalanche, because in a church or public place, anything can happen,” Colorado said.

“Msgr. Rosa Chavez has had a participation, and his brother is known by everyone to belong to the guerrillas,” Colorado said. “Msgr. Rivera y Damas has had very controversial opinions and that puts him in grave danger.”

It was not known whether Colorado’s comments were approved by Cristiani. But he is the second Cabinet member in the past week to take a hard line, in contrast to the president’s more moderate public stance. The divergence may reflect differences within the right-wing government or even Cristiani’s lack of control over how to confront the nine-day-old rebel offensive.

The attorney general’s comments are particularly ominous because Rivera’s predecessor, Msgr. Oscar Arnulfo Romero, was gunned down while saying Mass in March, 1980. Rightists at the time blamed the rebels for his murder.

Rosa Chavez is considered a conservative by the rebels and is not known to sympathize with them.

The bishops said they have no plans to abandon the country. But two American missionaries and one from Spain have decided to leave or have left in recent days.

Father James Barnett, a Catholic priest from Sioux Falls, S.D., said he will leave today because of a telephoned death threat against him and Lutheran pastor William Dexheimer, who went home last Thursday.

In his homily Sunday at an earlier Mass, Rivera said: “Although the voice of the church seems lost in the desert, we will keep shouting, with the Gospel in our hands and the daily suffering of our people in our hearts, that the violence of the left and the right can never produce fruits of peace.”

He denounced a rebel urban offensive as “useless and unjustifiable” and the reaction of the armed forces as “excessive.” More than 1,000 people have been killed in the fighting, he said.

“There is a vehement presumption,” he asserted, “that the assassins of the priests are elements of the armed forces or intimately linked to them.” And he warned of further clandestine violence once the combat stops.

“We must not forget what could come next: a terrible wave of revenge, unfounded denunciations, death threats . . . the consequent repression and witch-hunt that could be unleashed when calm returns.”

Even such declarations have been dangerous in El Salvador. Romero was killed shortly after he issued a public call to soldiers to “disobey orders” and cease repression.

The nine-year-old murder case has never been solved. Roberto d’Aubuisson, a founder of the ruling Nationalist Republican Alliance, has been accused of masterminding the killing. D’Aubuisson has denied the charge and all allegations that he ran right-wing death squads.

One of D’Aubuisson’s early allies, Deputy Foreign Minister Ricardo Valdivieso, was among the thousands of mourners at the Jesuits’ funeral Sunday.

In 1982 interviews with The Times, associates of Valdivieso said they had carried out attacks against the Jesuits, whom they considered subversives. The sources, who refused to be identified, said they had machine-gunned church doors, bombed the Central American University and left death threats for Ellacuria and his colleagues.

Two other Jesuits reportedly targeted by the group in the early attacks, Segundo Montes and Ignacio Martin-Baro, were among the priests killed with Ellacuria. All were advocates of negotiations between the government and rebel troops to end El Salvador’s 10-year civil war.

The other murdered priests were Amado Lopez, Juan Ramon Moreno and Joaquin Lopez y Lopez. Their cook and her 15-year-old daughter were also killed.

The priests were killed and their library was bombed while a dusk-to-dawn curfew was in effect in a neighborhood occupied by the army. Before their deaths, they had been denounced by supposedly independent callers on government-controlled radio.

U.S. Ambassador William Walker also attended the funeral for the priests, whom he described as “men who died in the cause of peace.”

He made a public show of shaking hands with Zamora. The leftist leader, who also has been denounced on government radio, went into hiding when the rebel offensive began Nov. 11 and sent his family out of the country Sunday.

More than 20,000 people have been pushed out of their homes by the fighting and, under a government-declared state of siege, security forces have sacked churches, homes and offices of opposition political leaders. Dozens of Salvadoran and foreign church workers have been detained.

Under pressure of aerial strafing and ground attacks, the guerrillas withdrew most of their forces Saturday from the neighborhoods of Mejicanos and Soyapango, their last two strongholds in the capital.

Scattered firing was heard in the morning in Soyapango, where at least 10 rebels were holed up in a school. Later, the air force began rocketing the neighborhood again.

A cease-fire appeal from Pope John Paul II was read at the Jesuits’ funeral, in which he implored “that the sacrifices not be in vain but a seed of fraternal love and peace in that martyred country.”

Rosa Chavez said the government and the guerrillas have accepted church mediation but without agreeing on a truce or new talks. Joao Baena Soares, secretary general of the Organization of American States, arrived here Sunday to join the mediation effort.

Humberto Centeno, a leftist union leader, whispered to a reporter at the funeral that this might be the place to start.

“We’re all here--the ambassador, Cristiani, there must be someone here from the FMLN,” Centeno said. “We could build peace right here.”