They were not strangers to the neighborhood; they were its fabric. Alfredo Leaden, 57, was the regional delegate of the Ireland-based Pallottines, a man absorbed in the quiet work of liturgy. Pedro Duffau, 67, the eldest, had built and run a school in Belgrano for the children of domestic workers, families with little money and few champions. Alfredo Kelly, 43, was a beloved preacher whose homilies drew crowds. The two seminarians were younger still: Salvador Barbeito, 29, born in Spain, taught philosophy and led another parish school, and Emilio Barletti was just 23. They lived together in the parish house and, in the end, they died together. Before they were victims of anything, they were teachers, pastors, and neighbors who had given their lives to the people around them.

Argentina in July 1976 was barely three months into a military dictatorship that would murder and disappear thousands of its own citizens, the period now remembered as the Dirty War. The Pallottines of San Patricio were not guerrillas, but they moved in a current the regime feared: a strand of the church concerned with poverty and social justice, associated with the Movement of Priests for the Third World. Two days before the killings, the Montoneros guerrilla group had bombed the dining room of the federal police headquarters, killing 23 people. In the regime's logic of reprisal and terror, priests who preached for the poor could be cast as enemies. The killers left chalked messages at the scene tying the murders to that bombing and to the priests' supposed sympathies, a crude attempt to disguise a state crime as something else. They even left a satirical Mafalda cartoon on one of the bodies, mocking the very idea of dissent.

For years the crime went officially unexplained, as so many did under the dictatorship. The truth surfaced only after democracy returned. In 1984, testimony before CONADEP, the national commission investigating the disappearances, established that the San Patricio murders had been carried out by members of the Argentine navy. They had acted, the testimony indicated, on the orders of Rear Admiral Ruben Chamorro, head of the notorious ESMA, the Navy Petty-Officers School of Mechanics, which had become one of the regime's most infamous clandestine torture and detention centers. The men who locked the doors of that church were not avenging anything. They were agents of the state that was supposed to protect the people inside.

The memory of the five did not fade. Within their order they came to be honored as martyrs, men killed for their faith and their care for the poor. In 2005 the archbishop of Buenos Aires, Cardinal Jorge Bergoglio, authorized the opening of a cause for their beatification, the first formal step toward sainthood. Eight years later that same archbishop became Pope Francis, the first pontiff from the Americas, and the case he had championed gained a powerful advocate at the very top of the church. Every year on the anniversary, people gather at St. Patrick's to remember Leaden, Kelly, Duffau, Barbeito, and Barletti, not as a tragedy frozen in 1976, but as five lives whose meaning their killers could not erase.