LITMIR.BIZ

      INTRODUCTION

      Who Was Oscar Romero?

      OSCAR ROMERO spent just three years as Archbishop of San Salvador, but by the time he was murdered in 1980 he had become a shepherd to the people of El Salvador and the outspoken advocate of its oppressed peasants. In those three years, he built an inspiring and challenging legacy for all those who seek to follow Christ today.

      Romero’s deep faith in God and his love for and trust in the church as a people committed to Christ still ring through his homilies. These weekly sermons preserve the record of atrocities committed against his people during the beginning of the Civil War in El Salvador; more importantly, they record Romero’s response to the violence in his country. Over and over, he challenged those in power to care for their countrymen; he encouraged the campesinos to pray, to counter hatred with love; he pleaded with the people to live more truly by the vision of the New Testament; and he reminded his entire audience of how Jesus came to earth in poverty, enduring the pain and humiliation of the cross before the triumph of his resurrection. Because Christ knows all the suffering on earth, Romero says, we can believe in and work for his kingdom on earth.

      BORN IN 1917, Romero was no child of privilege. With his five brothers and sisters, he slept on the floor of the small family home. The local school only offered three years of education, and though he displayed an aptitude for learning, his father began to train him as a carpenter. But when Romero was thirteen, he told his parents he wanted to study for the priesthood. He entered seminary when he was fourteen, completing his studies in Rome. In 1942, at the age of twenty-five, he was ordained as a priest, and from 1943 to 1967 he served as pastor of the cathedral parish of San Miguel, El Salvador.

      It was, in many ways, a conventional story. But the times were not conventional. In 1962, Pope John XXIII convened the Second Vatican Council to address the relationship of the Roman Catholic Church to the modern world. The council closed three years later, having enacted sweeping reforms. The council emphasized that the church is God’s people, not a human institution, and that it is God’s means to serve the world by bringing Christ’s salvation into it.

      Three years later, in 1968, the bishops of Latin America met at Medellín, Colombia, to consider how the reforms of Vatican II should be applied to their own countries. The church, affirmed the bishops, must serve society. To do so, it must understand how power is used and abused – how people are subject to systematic economic and political exploitation. And the church must bring the gospel of Jesus into these concrete realities. This Gospel is not only a message of personal salvation from sin and entrance into the eternal kingdom of God, but also the transformation of injustice in the present. The kingdom, the bishops believed, could come on earth as it is in heaven, and it was part of the proper work of the church to help bring it to reality.

      Three hundred million people under these bishops’ care in Latin America were living in poverty and experiencing the daily injustice of political oppression. Therefore, shepherding these people must include not just exhorting them to holiness and extending Christ’s offer of forgiveness, but also improving their circumstances. The extreme poverty of many in a society where a few lived in luxury was a situation that cried out for redress. And so the church must cry out too, taking what came to be called the “preferential option for the poor.”

      “Peace is not found,” wrote the Medellín bishops, “it is built. The Christian is the artisan of peace. This task … has a special character in our continent; thus, the people of God in Latin America, following the example of Christ, must resist personal and collective injustice with unselfish courage and fearlessness.”

      This recognition became the seed of liberation theology. Romero never aligned himself explicitly with the movement, but he embraced many of its radical critiques of the existing order, and certainly believed that the gospel called him to speak up for the least powerful.

      While some liberation theologians defended the use of armed force in their efforts to achieve structural change, Romero did not. He simply told the truth about what following Jesus would look like for the ruling class of El Salvador, and for the people. This was a radical message. The bishops were saying that the call of the gospel would not let them leave unjust social arrangements alone: that love for both the poor and the oligarchs demanded change. In El Salvador, and elsewhere in Latin America, many church leaders had allied themselves with the upper class. But by the 1970s, some parish priests had begun to emphasize social justice and economic reform, reflecting Christ’s concern for the poor and his call to share wealth. Some priests were also encouraging the formation of “base ecclesial communities” in which believers gathered to read and discuss Christian teaching on their own. Priests were often only irregularly available, so these communities provided spiritual encouragement for the peasants.

      The teaching discussed in these base communities often focused on the church’s social doctrine, and peasants began to talk boldly about the injustice they saw in their society. Many landowners feared these new groups, denouncing them as communist. Tensions grew as the priests carried out the recommendations of Vatican II and Medellín, giving the government excuse to expel foreign priests, who they claimed were stirring up trouble.

      THROUGHOUT THIS STORMY HISTORY, Oscar Romero had been at work. During his time as pastor of San Miguel, his parishioners had appreciated his lively preaching and the many parish activities he organized. When, in 1966, he took over as editor of the archdiocesan newspaper, they read what he had to say. But he was by no means one of the radical priests who were making so much trouble. Ordained a bishop in 1970, he was assigned to San Salvador, the capital city. Many churchmen there, including the elderly Archbishop Luis Chávez y González, had embraced the radical message of the Medellín meeting. Bishop Romero was not part of this contingent. Though increasingly troubled by what he saw, he was still attempting to walk a line. When the police massacred five peasants in his district, he protested strongly in a letter to the president but kept his public comments to a minimum.

      When

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