Oscar Romero
On the
24th March, which this year is Palm Sunday, the Church of England’s
calendar of instructs us to remember a martyr.
Nothing particularly out of the ordinary, perhaps, except that this
martyr was the Archbishop of San Salvador who was martyred only in 1980. Oscar Romero is commemorated in the Church of
England’s calendar, and stands together with other twentieth century Christian
martyrs, on the west front of Westminster Abbey. In El Salvador, Romero is
known as San Romero (Saint Romero). But
Romero is not formally commemorated by his own Roman Catholic Church.
Oscar Arnulfo Romero was born on 15th
August 1917 in Ciudad Barrios, a mountain town in eastern El
Salvador accessible only on foot or by animal. The second of seven children,
his family grew some crops and his father worked at the local telegraph
office. After the maximum three years
at state school, he had a tutor and was also apprenticed to learn carpentry. As a child he loved to play at processions,
and pretending to be a priest. So it was
not too much of a surprise that at the age of 13 he entered the seminary,
despite his father’s objections. He
studied there and later in Rome and was ordained in Rome in 1942. Because of the war, his parents and family
could not be there to witness his ordination.
Returning home, via a Cuban internment camp (since he had been in
Mussolini’s Italy), Romero became a parish priest. After only a few months, however, he became
secretary to the diocese. This was a
post in which his fantastic energy could be harnessed. Romero completed the construction of the
cathedral, built a reputation as a preacher, and was often heard on the radio.
He visited in the countryside and prisons, organized catechism classes and
first communions, and set up a huge number of groups - the Legion of Mary, the Knights of the Holy
Sepulchre, Alcoholics Anonymous, Catholic Action, the Cursillos de Cristiandad,
the Apostleship of Prayer, the Guardians of the Blessed Sacrament, the Holy
Rosary Association, the Third Order of St Francis, and a diocesan branch of
Caritas. I list these, both to show
Romero’s energy and also to show how traditional a Catholic he was. Romero held the post of Secretary to the
Diocese for 23 years.
Marked for
promotion within the hierarchy of the church, Romero first became Rector of the
seminary then secretary to the Bishops’ Conference. Finally in 1970 he was consecrated bishop,
first as an auxiliary or assistant bishop and then in 1975 Bishop of Santiago
de Maria. On 23rd February
1977 he was appointed Archbishop of San Salvador, the leading bishop of El
Salvador. This appointment was welcomed
by the government, but met with dismay among many priests in El Salvador. “Damn, we’re ruined” was the cry of
seminarians. “Now we’ll have to go back
to the days of the catacombs” was another reaction. Some of the most significant lay leaders, who
taught the faith and led prayers in the absence of a priest, said of Romero’s
appointment “This is really going to mess things up for us”. Another lay woman described Romero as “just
one more in a long line of sell outs”.[1]
To
understand why Romero’s appointment was so controversial we need to know a
little more about El Salvador and the Catholic Church there in the 1970s. El Salvador was a deeply divided
country. Thirteen families owned nearly
40% of the land. The extremes of wealth
were held at the expense of extremes of poverty. When Salvatore Allende was elected president
of Chile the poor and the peasantry felt they had some hope of reform, but this
was killed when in 1970 Pinochet’s coup overthrew Allende and installed a
brutal military rule. A similar pattern
could be found all over Latin America.
In El Salvador the army ruled, and assassination, torture and
destruction were regular tools used by the regime. In June 1975, soldiers raided a hamlet called
Tres Calles, hacking five peasants to death and ransacking houses. Oppression and naked violence were common
place.
Alongside
this, the Catholic Church was changing.
Vatican II had urged an openness to learning from the social sciences
and had deepened the social teaching of the church to include more structural
approaches to poverty and suffering. In
Latin America, and in El Salvador, the church was doing pastoral work among the
rural poor, and developing what were known as ‘Base Communities’, places where
people would come together above all to read and reflect on the Bible. The combination of the teaching of Vatican II
and the use of Marxism as a social science to interpret the way in which
oppression worked sparked a whole theological approach, often called liberation
theology.
Liberation
theology begins from a commitment to living and acting in the world as people
of faith. It is a committed theology,
not just a series of propositions and arguments. Liberation theology begins by being with the
poor, living and working with them. It
then starts to ask why people are poor, using all the insights of the social
sciences. To this question it brings the
insights of the Bible and Christian faith.
Liberation theology speaks of the Bible’s ‘preferential option for the poor’. God is not indifferent, waiting quietly while
people die. Rather God himself is
committed to the freedom of the oppressed and to care for the poor. Finally, liberation theology issues in action
– the point is not to write a book or to make a clever argument. Rather the point is to act in a way that
changes the situation, bringing freedom, liberation and life (all of which, the
liberation theologians would be keen to point out, are theological and Biblical
terms).
There
is a powerful and attractive simplicity about liberation theology. Its grounding in commitment to the poor, its
willingness to ask questions about the causes of oppression and poverty, its
use above all of the Bible as something that speaks powerfully to the world in
which we live, and its end in transformative action make it an easily
comprehended and used method of theological and pastoral practice. Beneath that simplicity lie more complex
insights. The most profound of these is
that all theology is rooted in commitments, they may be commitments to tackling
poverty, or commitments to maintaining a comfortable statues quo. The claim of neutrality is too often a cover
for a commitment to the way things are.
For me, liberation theology is not about a particular branch or method
of theology. It has a far more ambitious claim, which is that all thinking about
God must be in the context of where we are, who we are with; and that all
thinking about God should result in transformative action. Theology, thinking and talking about God,
should make a difference. I have learnt
that from liberation theology. But I
first learned it from evangelical Bible study!
What
I cannot stress strongly enough is how controversial liberation theology
was. Anything which spoke positively of
Marxism in the 1970s and 1980s, when the cold war was at its height, could be
nothing else. In fact, in Latin America
the war was hot rather than cold.
American money, arms and even troops propped up repressive regimes, in
El Salvador and elsewhere. Resistance
was often from Marxists, themselves funded by the USSR. Somewhere in all of that the injustices and
the poverty of the majority were lost.
The Vatican itself reacted fiercely against liberation theology. Pope John Paul II, coming from oppression by
Marxism in Poland, was understandably suspicious of Marxism being used by
theologians elsewhere.
Oscar
Romero was a theological and political conservative. As secretary to the Bishops conference, he
became close to Opus Dei – a very conservative and secretive Catholic
organization – and was frequently critical of the politicization of the
clergy. He accused the Jesuit high
school of Marxism and demagogy. But
Romero was not a simple conservative reactionary. He had lamented that plantation owners, whom
he thought of as good people, paid less that the legal minimum wage. He was critical of individual acts of
violence. But he regarded these as blips
on an otherwise basically sound society and government. That was why his appointment was greeted with
such dismay by those influenced by liberation theology and working for the
liberation of the poor of El Salvador.
But
Romero changed, and some have spoken of this as a conversion. Only a few weeks after he had become
Archbishop, a priest well known to Romero, Father Rutilio Grande was shot as he
said mass. The Salvadorean Jesuit and
liberation theologian said that ‘as Archbishop Romero stood gazing at the
mortal remains of Rutilio Grande the scales fell from his eyes’.[2] Romero
cancelled all of the services in the Archdiocese on the Sunday after Rutilio
Grande’s funeral and made a very public statement of his support for all the
priests of his diocese: ‘Whoever touches one of my priests, touches me’. The applause that followed showed that Romero
was connected to both his clergy and his people.
Romero
established a distinctive pattern of work as archbishop. He spent much of his time visiting rural and
poor areas of the diocese. His office in
San Salvador usually had a queue of people outside it waiting to speak with
him. Romero began to use his sermons,
always broadcast on the radio, to defend human rights, to denounce those who
committed acts of violence and to commit himself and the church to the poor of
El Salvador. He used the Diocesean
newspaper to report on human rights, alongside the news of the church. Romero’s eight o’clock mass became obligatory
for foreign journalists, not because of the sacrament but because Romero’s
homily was one of the very few places to learn of the reality of El Salvador
without government censorship. A church
commission investigated a conflict to the north of the capital and published a
report which contradicted the government report in many ways. Preaching and pastoring, connecting and
informing, that was the stuff of Romero’s ministry as Archbishop.
Meanwhile the
violence in El Salvador continued and intensified. In one month alone, December
1979, there were 281 deaths. A military
coup brought a new government. To the
displeasure of the left, Romero argued that the new regime should be given a
chance to prove itself, by halting the violence and accounting for the 275
people who had disappeared. By January
1980, the civilians in the regime resigned, convinced that they were merely
window dressing for a more repressive military government. Romero regretted but understood their decision. He continued to denounce violence from all
sides, and continued to insist that the church did not support any one
party. Romero received death threats, to
which he responded by refusing any protection, ‘why don’t you use those armoured
cars and security guards for the family members of people who have disappeared,
been killed or put in prison?’ he said to an army colonel who offered him protection.[3] Although he employed a driver, Romero began
to drive his own car to avoid putting another life in danger. On 24th March 1980, Romero was
leading mass in the chapel of the hospital where he lived. As he was placing the bread and wine on the
altar, and about to begin the Eucharistic prayer, Romero was shot in the heart. He fell onto the altar, and was rushed to an
emergency room where he died. No serious investigation was made into his
murder, and three days later an attempt was made to assassinate the judge to
whom the case would be assigned. He fled
the country. Over the next few years
many of the clergy of El Salvador were killed or forced to flee the
country. Romero was buried in his
cathedral and images of him are to be found in many homes in the country.
In the little
time remaining to me, I want to look at three themes that are worth drawing
from Romero’s life and death. The first
is about the Gospel. Romero saw himself
as a pastor and preacher of the Gospel. And his homilies are full, not of
Marxism or great social theories, but of the Bible. Romero retained his ability to speak
critically about the left as well as the right because he held to a very
traditional theology. A homily in
January 1979 says that ‘I wish to affirm that my preaching is not political. It
naturally touches on the political and touches the people’s real lives – but in
order to illuminate those realities and to tell people what it is that God
wants and what it is that he does not want.’[4]
Romero was rooted in the Bible and in living a Christian life. That has political consequences, not because
God is to be found on the left or the right of human politics, but because God
is concerned with human beings and their flourishing.
Secondly,
Romero’s ministry was based on the Gospel, and lived in commitment. His commitment to God and to the poor was
what gave Romero his distinctive ministry.
It is not enough to get the theology right. It must be lived.
Finally,
there is the nature of Romero’s martyrdom.
Romero was not killed for defending any article of faith, of for
confessing the faith of Jesus. He was killed as he went about his ministry as a
Christian priest. Romero himself saw the
image of Christ in those who were killed by the death squads, ‘where someone
can finger you and you die. This is how Christ died.’ The likeness of Christ and his death can also
be seen in Romero’s life and death. As
we approach our remembrance of the passion of Jesus, we do well to remember
those others who die after betrayal, condemnation by the jealous and the
threatened, and for the expedience of systems and the powerful. All of that we see in Oscar Romero. All of that we see in Jesus.
The last
words should be Romero’s:
I have frequently been threatened with death. I ought to say that as a Christian, I do not believe in death without resurrection. If they kill me I will rise again in the people of El Salvador. I am not boasting, I say it with the greatest humility. I am bound, as a pastor, by a divine command to give my life for those whom I live, and that is all Salvadoreans, even those who are going to kill me. If they manage to carry out their threats, from this moment I offer my blood or the redemption and resurrection of El Salvador. Martyrdom is a grace of God that I do not believe I deserve. But if God accepts the sacrifice of my life, let my blood be a seed of freedom and the sign that hope will soon be reality. Let my death, if it is accepted by god, be for my people’s freedom and a witness of hope. You may say, if they succeed in killing me, that I pardon and bless those who do it. Would, indeed, they might be convinced not to waste their time. A bishop will die, but God’s Church, which is the people, will never perish.[5]
Given as part of a series on 'A History of Christianity in 30 Characters' at Derby Cathedral, 10.3.13.
[1] All these and further negative
reactions to Romero’s appointment can be found in María López Vigil, Oscar Romero: Memories in Mosaic. Trans. Kathy Ogle, (CAFOD and DLT, 2000), pp.
82-84.
[2] Jon Sobrino, Archbishop Romero: Memories and Reflections
(Orbis, 1990).
[3] Vigil, Oscar Romero, p. 395.
[4] Oscar Romero, The Violence of Love: The Pastoral Wisdom of
Archbishop Oscar Romero. Compiled and transl. James R. Brockman, S.J.
(Collins, 1988), p. 146.
[5] From an interview with Excelsior magazine in Mexico given two
weeks before his death. In Oscar Romero
and Jon Sobrino, Romero: Martyr for
Liberation. The last two homilies of
Archbishop Oscar Romero of San Salvador with an analysis of this life and work
by Jon Sobrino S.J. (Catholic Institute for International Relations, 1982),
p. 76.
Comments