Who would have imagined on Feb. 23, 1977, the day of his appointment as Archbishop of San Salvador, that the highly conservative Oscar Romero - who was suspicious of the Catholic Church's involvement in political activism - would die a martyr's death for courageously defending his people against the murderous assaults of the Salvadoran government, military and right-wing death squads?

Romero's appointment was welcomed by the government, but many priests were not happy. They suspected their new archbishop would insist they cut all ties to liberation theology's defence of the poor.

One of the priests who worked with Romero, Father Inocencio Alas, recalled key moments leading to the archbishop's dramatic conversion.

According to Alas, the archbishop began realizing that the poor laborers waiting for work at the coffee plantations were sleeping on the sidewalks.

"What can be done"? Romero asked. Alas replied, "Look at that big house where the school used to be. Open it up!" And Romero did.

Next, he started talking with those poor workers, and began to understand their problems.

But Romero had difficulty believing Alas' claim that plantation owners treated workers unjustly. Alas said, "Why don't you go to the plantation of this friend of yours … Go find out for yourself."

After visiting the plantation, Romero said to Alas, "You were right Father, but how is so much injustice possible"? Alas replied, "This world so full of injustices is exactly what they [the Latin American bishops at their famous meeting in Medellin Columbia] were talking about in Medellin."

But the most important event affecting Romero's decision to wholeheartedly stand with the poor and oppressed was the assassination of his close friend Jesuit Father Rutilio Grande; who was promoting land reform, worker unions, and organising communities to have a greater voice regarding their own lives.

Romero, who was deeply inspired by Grande said, "When I looked at Rutilio lying there dead I thought, ‘if they have killed him for doing what he did, then I too have to walk the same path.' "

A shameful chapter in American history reveals the U.S. government supplied the brutal Salvadoran military with millions, and later, billions of dollars in weapons and training.

In a letter to U.S. President Jimmy Carter, Romero warned continued U.S. aid to the government of El Salvador "will surely increase injustices here and sharpen the repression." Romero asked Carter to stop all military assistance to the Salvadoran government.

Carter ignored Romero. And later, President Ronald Reagan greatly increased military aid.

During his March 23, 1980 Sunday national radio homily, Romero said, "I would like to make an appeal in a special way to the men of the army … You kill your own campesino brothers and sisters … The law of God must prevail that says: Thou shalt not kill! No soldier is obliged to obey an order against the law of God … In the name of God, and in the name of this suffering people … I beg you … I order you in the name of God: Stop the repression!"

The next day while presiding at Mass in the chapel of the hospital compound where he lived, Romero's loving heart was pierced with an assassin's bullet.

On May 23, the holy archbishop of San Salvador will henceforth be known as Blessed Oscar Romero. But for the people of Central America, especially the poor and oppressed, he is already known as Saint Oscar Romero.

• Tony Magliano is an internationally syndicated columnist from the U.S. who covers a wide range of social justice and peace issues. This article is his first contribution to CathNews NZ Pacific.

Romero gave his life as a good shepherd for his flock in a time of persecution. He modeled what a bishop looks like in a church committed to justice for the poor.

Romero's death and the baptism of blood endured by the people of El Salvador during its 12-year civil war (1980-92) inevitably have larger implications for the universal church, and for us in North America.

Pope Francis' determination to advance Romero's cause for sainthood recognizes this witness.

It also reveals the influence Romero is having on Francis' own goal as pope — to move the global church closer to the kind of church that emerged in El Salvador under Romero, whose story is a road map to such a church.

This article explores some of its characteristics: a church faithful to the reforms of the Second Vatican Council, fully engaged in the modern world and its economic and social struggles; a pastoral church reaching out to the suffering and neglected people at the margins of society; a more vocal and prophetic church challenging global systems that oppress and exploit the poor; and an evangelizing church that practices what it preaches and lives what it prays.

A Vatican II church

Archbishop Vincenzo Paglia, chief advocate for Romero's cause, called him "a martyr of the church of the Second Vatican Council."

Romero's choice to "live with the poor and defend them from oppression" flowed from the documents of Vatican II and of the 1968 meeting of Latin American bishops at Medellin, Colombia.

It was at Medellin that the phrase "God's option for the poor" first entered official church language, a major shift at a time when the Catholic hierarchy in Latin America was seen by many as aligned with the rich and powerful. Continue reading

Sources

• National Catholic Reporter
• Image: Opus Dei

It's an event 35 years in the making, and it's hard to imagine anyone with a more remarkable tale to tell.

At the outset of a bloody civil war in El Salvador in the late 1970s, Romero was the country's most important voice for the poor and victims of human rights abuses.

His stance obviously threatened the power structure, because in a scene straight out of T.S. Eliot's "Murder in the Cathedral," Romero was shot to death while saying Mass on March 24, 1980.

No one has ever been prosecuted for the assassination, though it's widely believed the killers were linked to a right-wing death squad. Gunmen also attacked a massive crowd at Romero's funeral six days later, leaving dozens dead.

Following a US-backed coup in October 1979, a military regime took power, and Romero emerged as its nemesis.

A month before his death, he wrote US President Jimmy Carter to ask him to suspend military and economic aid to the government, insisting the new rulers "know only how to repress the people and defend the interests of the Salvadoran oligarchy."

Just a day before he was shot, Romero begged, even ordered, soldiers and members of security forces not to fire on citizens.

From the moment he died, Romero has been popularly revered as a martyr and saint. The formal pursuit of canonization, however, was held up for decades.

In part, the block was due to conservative Latin American prelates who felt that awarding a halo to Romero would be seen as an endorsement of left-wing Marxist politics.

Pope Benedict XVI reopened Romero's case, and Pope Francis seems determined to finish it.

Back in 2007, then-Cardinal Jorge Mario Bergoglio of Argentina reportedly told a Salvadoran priest that "to me [Romero] is a saint and a martyr … If I were pope, I would have already canonized him." Continue reading

• John L. Allen Jr in Crux

John L. Allen Jr., associate editor of Crux, specializes in coverage of the Vatican.

In a country where the major media refused to report on the unbridled military violence, Romero refused to be censored.

He refused to be silent — despite getting daily death threats and having his archdiocesan radio station bombed.

Through his homilies, radio broadcasts and reports in the archdiocesan newspaper, every week Romero detailed the tortures, murders and disappearances, making sure that truth would not be the first casualty of war.

The archbishop was not only the most trusted, but frequently the sole source of news about what was happening in the country.

His often hourslong homilies, broadcast every Sunday by the archdiocesan radio station YSAX, were the most popular program in the country, with nearly 75 percent of the rural population and 50 percent of the urban population listening in — along with the U.S. Embassy.

That made the station, which also broadcast information from the homilies later in the week, a recurring target of the military, which jammed its signal and bombed its offices.

Romero's courage in reporting on the atrocities while living inside the war zone stands in sharp contrast not only to the Salvadoran media of his day, but to the U.S. media today — from the self-aggrandizing falsehoods spouted by NBC anchor Brian Williams and FOX News commentator Bill O'Reilly, to the mainstream media's failure to pursue the Bush administration's lies about weapons of mass destruction and their refusal to use the word torture to describe torture. Continue reading

Source & Image

• National Catholic Reporter

But much less attention was given to another of the pope's actions, one that underscores a significant shift inside the Vatican under the first Latin American pope in the history of the Roman Catholic Church.

Archbishop Romero was assassinated after speaking out in favor of the poor during an era when right-wing death squads stalked El Salvador under an American-backed, military-led government in the 1970s and '80s.

For three decades Rome blocked his path to sainthood for fear that it would give succor to the proponents of liberation theology, the revolutionary movement that insists that the Catholic Church should work to bring economic and social — as well as spiritual — liberation to the poor.

Under Pope Francis that obstacle has been removed.

The pope now says it is important that Archbishop Romero's beatification — the precursor to becoming a saint — "be done quickly."

Conservative Catholics have tried to minimize the political significance of the pope's stance by asserting that the archbishop, though a champion of the poor, never fully embraced liberation theology.

But another move by Pope Francis undermines such revisionism.

This month he also lifted a ban from saying Mass imposed nearly 30 years ago upon Rev. Miguel d'Escoto Brockmann, who had been suspended as a priest for serving as foreign minister in Nicaragua's revolutionary Sandinista government in the same era.

There is no ambiguity about the position on liberation theology of Father d'Escoto, who once called President Ronald Reagan a "butcher" and an "international outlaw."

Later, as president of the United Nations General Assembly, Father d'Escoto condemned American "acts of aggression" in Iraq and Afghanistan. Continue reading

Source

• Paul Vallely in The New York Times

Paul Vallely is a director of The Tablet and the author of "Pope Francis: Untying the Knots."

These were the carefully-chosen words of Cardinal Basil Hume in a tribute to Archbishop Romero at a memorial service in Westminster Cathedral the week after his assassination in March 1980. Thirty three years later, after many inexplicable delays, Oscar Romero is undoubtedly moving towards sainthood.

The cause for his canonisation was reportedly ‘unblocked' by Pope Francis in May and is now progressing quickly; and the Prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith has said that there are no doctrinal obstacles to the cause.

A formal certification of Romero's martyrdom and then his beatification seems to be on the cards for 2014 or 2015, well before the centenary of his birth in 2017. Nevertheless we should remember that the Christian communities, the People of God in Latin America, long ago ‘canonised' their beloved pastor in their hearts as Saint Romero of the Americas.

It is the greatest grace and privilege of my life to have known and worked with Archbishop Romero and to have enjoyed his friendship. There are times in life when one catches a fleeting glimpse of God at work in the world and Christ's presence amongst us. The man we all knew as ‘Monseñor' provided such a glimpse for me.

I was awakened at 5am on the morning of Tuesday 25 March 1980 by a telephone call from the Jesuit Provincial's office in San Salvador with the devastating news that Archbishop Romero had been assassinated the previous evening.

He was shot just above the heart with a single exploding bullet fired by a death squad marksman acting, according to El Salvador's current President Funes, ‘with the protection, collaboration or participation of state agents'.

He had just completed his homily and was moving to offer the bread and wine at the Mass he was celebrating in the chapel of the hospital where he lived. He fell at the foot of a huge crucifix with blood streaming from his mouth, nostrils and ears.

A nun on the front bench recorded the Mass and it is a jolting shock now to listen to the sound of that shot, the moment of martyrdom of the Archbishop of San Salvador.

Oscar Romero was an unlikely martyr. Continue reading.

Julian Filochowski is Chair of the Archbishop Romero Trust.

Source: Thinking Faith

Photo: Julian Filochowski sat next to Archbishop Romero in 1978, Archbishop Romero Trust.

A lone gunman stepped out, unhurried.

Resting his rifle on the car door, he aimed carefully down the long aisle to where El Salvador's archbishop, Oscar Arnulfo Romero, was saying mass.

A single shot rang out.

Romero staggered and fell. The blood pumped from his heart, soaking the little white disks of scattered host.

Romero's murder was to become one of the most notorious unsolved crimes of the cold war.

The motive was clear. He was the most outspoken voice against the death squad slaughter gathering steam in the US backyard.

The ranks of El Salvador's leftwing rebels were being swelled by priests who preached that the poor should seek justice in this world, not wait for the next.

Romero was the "voice of those without voice", telling soldiers not to kill.

The US vowed to make punishment of the archbishop's killers a priority. It could hardly do otherwise as President Reagan launched the largest US war effort since Vietnam to defeat the rebels. He needed support in Washington, which meant showing that crimes like shooting archbishops and nuns would not be tolerated.

The ordering of the murder was blamed on the bogeyman of the story, a military intelligence officer called Major Roberto D'Aubuisson who had, conveniently for Washington, recently left the army.

In the weeks before the murder, he was repeatedly on television using military intelligence files to denounce "guerrillas". Those he accused were often murdered. Romero was near the top of the list.

But US promises to bring justice came to nothing.

With no trigger-man, gun or witnesses, officials claimed lack of evidence.

D'Aubuisson went on to become one of El Salvador's most successful politicians before throat cancer killed him at the end of the civil war 12 years later - the revenge of God, many concluded.

However, new evidence suggests that Washington not only knew far more about the killing than it admitted - but also did nothing to investigate for fear of jeopardising its war effort.

Vital evidence was ignored.

Key witnesses, including the most likely gunman, were killed by those supposed to be investigating.

Seven years and 50,000 deaths after Romero's murder, I was feeling out of my depth as a novice reporter sitting on a park bench talking to a young deserter from Major D'Aubuisson's death squads who called himself Jorge. Continue reading

Image: Salt and Light TV

Among the welcome news coming on the heels of Pope Francis' election was an April announcement that the canonization cause of Archbishop Óscar Romero of El Salvador has been, in the words of Italian Msgr. Vincenzo Paglia, who leads the effort, "unblocked." Romero's path to official recognition as a martyr—he has long been a "popular" saint among many Catholics—officially commenced way back in 1997, 17 years after his murder by Salvadoran government agents as he led the Eucharist. His association with liberation theology has unfortunately complicated his cause, as both Pope John Paul II and Pope Benedict XVI looked unfavorably on that movement's connection to Marxism.

Romero's rehabilitation is no doubt a signal of a change in politics at the Vatican. We might also hope it calls to mind not only Romero's death but all those lost in El Salvador's civil war of the 1980s, of which Romero was only one victim. Less than a year after his March 1980 death, three religious sisters—Maura Clarke, Ita Ford, and Dorothy Kazel—along with laywoman and missionary Jean Donovan were raped and murdered in December, suffering the victimization shared by so many women in times of war.

At the end of the decade in 1989, six Jesuit priests, their housekeeper, and her daughter suffered a similar fate on the San Salvador campus of the University of Central America. The priests were killed for their activism in service of the country's poor; mother and daughter Elba Ramos and Celia Marisela Ramos were, like so many poor working people, caught in the crossfire. By the war's end in 1992, some 75,000 Salvadorans shared their fate. Continue reading

Sources

• Bryan Cones in U.S. Catholic
• Image: Maurice Broaddus

Bryan Cones is a writer living in Boston.