Recently, people around the world celebrated the anniversary of the birth of a truly outstanding human being. Saint Oscar Romero was born on August 16, 1917, in El Salvador. (Jesuits of Canada and the United States. Face Book post, 2021)
Bishop Oscar Romero was one of the most inspiring men in modern history. Though born and raised in privilege he grew into a “man of the people” committed to their liberation and dignity. He demonstrated amazing commitment and bravery. He demonstrated to us how to think deeply about the way we have to, and can be, open to the need for progressive, liberating change, even against the most implacable and vicious forces of evil, greed and repression. Through his life, mission and martyrdom, he called on us all, and still calls on us, to work to understand how there can be no genuine moral polity without justice, compassion and courage.
For Romero there could be no “neutrality” where social justice was concerned. He exemplified what it means to really walk with the “wretched of the earth”, to join humbly in the struggle waged by the poor and marginalized. Oscar Romero called us, Christians and all people of good will, and calls us now, to action. His work and existence bring to life the words of the Brazilian educator and philosopher of liberation, Paulo Freire, “Washing one's hands of the conflict between the powerful and the powerless means to side with the powerful, not to be neutral”. (1985)
In our years working with popular groups in El Salvador who were concerned with the environment and the cause of the country’s campesinos, particularly women), my wife and I came to learn about, and revere his life, his work with the poor, his defence of those struggling for justice and the great courage he showed in confronting the violent and corrupt government of El Salvador and its death squads, which led directly to his murder by one of those death squads. In 1980, Archbishop Romero was shot down by an assassin while celebrating mass in the Chapel at the hospital where he lived in one small room. Though no one was ever convicted for the crime, investigations by the UN-created Truth Commission for El Salvador concluded that Major Roberto D'Aubuisson, founder of the right-wing ARENA political party, had ordered the murder. (Brockett, 2005).1 And most of all we saw, and were told, how Romero remains a living presence that animates the struggle of the people. As a husband of a good friend put it to us over lunch one day.
Siempre el Monseñor vive en mi corazone. El está en las corazones de nuestra gente. Bishop Romero is always in my heart. He is in the hearts of our people.
Despite the fact that Romero consistently framed his support for the struggle of the poor and oppressed, and his condemnation of state violence, in terms of the message of Jesus Christ, conservative reactionary church functionaries, who stood against the teachings of the Second Vatican Council and the teachings of the Latin American bishops which had been promulgated in 1968 (Salai, 2021), stood for many years against the continual calls and petitions for recognizing him as a saint of the Roman Catholic Church2. Ultimately however, they were no match for the love and determination of Romero’s people. And now the Church, and the world, celebrates him as a fearless, uncompromising warrior and a martyr in the cause of peace, social justice and human dignity; a man to remember and honour.
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Resources
Brockett, CD. (2005). Political Movements and Violence in Central America. Cambridge University Press.
Freire, P. (1985). The Politics of Education: Culture, Power, and Liberation, Greenwood Publishing Group, p. 122.
Saili, S. (2021). Interview: “The life and martyrdom of Jesuit Rutilio Grande”. America, The Jesuit Journal. March.
1 By the time of his own murder Romero well understood the serious danger he faced. He had already endured the murder of one of his best friends, Fr. Rutilio Grande who, along with two of his parishioners, was the victim of a death squad assassination in 1977. He has recently been beatified by Pope Francis I, the first step in ultimate canonization of the Roman Catholic Church (Salai, 2021). 2 These conservatives had, for many years, a champion in the arch “anti-Communist” Pope John Paul II, the former Polish prelate, Karol Józef Wojtyła, and later the less fanatical but equally conservative Benedict XV, Vatican bureaucrat, the German Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger. His canonization was finally achieved thanks to the ascension of the Latin American Jesuit (from Peru), Pope Francis I, who espouses many of the same principles about the importance of service to the poor and oppressed and a commitment to social and economic justice
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