ow
is it possible for a Catholic to kill priests?” asked a startled
non-believer on hearing the news of Archbishop Romero’s assassination.
By contrast, in the evening of the day in which Dom Romero, Archbishop of
San Salvador in El Salvador, was felled by an assassin’s bullet while
celebrating Mass in the chapel of a small cancer hospital, some young ladies,
daughters of rich families and students at a Catholic College run by religious,
applauded and rejoiced at his death!
The root of such a stunning behavior is to be found in the understanding and living of a faith which is disconnected from a sense of justice. There is an intimate relationship between the love of God and the communion among people and with nature. The crack of rifle fire that spilled Dom Romero’s blood on March 24, 1980, mingling it with consecrated wine of the Eucharist, the Blood of the Sacred victim himself, has mad the round of the world.
The 20th anniversary of that occurrence provides us with a significant moment to recall his legacy and to hear again the challenge of his words. Also to reflect that as North Americans, we cannot escape our role in what took place in El Salvador. Our government supported successive military dictatorships including those that persecuted the Church, a persecution that took the lives of priests and religious, catechists and delegates of the Word, members of Christian Base Communities, four US church women, and of Archbishop Romero, and that led to immense suffering for a simple people.
While we mourn and repent the death and destruction caused by unjust policies, we also rejoice in another history. Our people spoke another word – the word of solidarity. We gave sanctuary to refugees in our churches and homes, worked in refugee camps, visited endangered communities during the war, protested our government’s policies, brought truth to our nation and our churches. It is a solidarity and relationship that endures in this day as we struggle together for justice in the world, a sign that God is present and walks among the poor, the marginalized, the persecuted with a word and action of liberation.
On this 20 year-old journey, Oscar Romero has been our prophet, too. He spoke a word that crossed the boundaries of el Salvador, which is how he has come to be declared a Saint, Prophet and Martyr of the Americas. The day that Dom Romero is canonized officially, the Church will only be catching up with what those struggling for justice and liberation already know and have declared! Pope John Paul’s prayer at Archbishop Romero’s tomb in 1996 symbolically signified recognition of Romero’s message and martyrdom and the need for reconciliation. Romero had a word for our continent, a word that grow stronger as it comes to new generations across our continent. A living Word!
Alive, because it is authentic, because it shocks with its truth, as turning on a light switch in a room where we have grown accustomed to the dark. That word calls us to look at ourselves, at our nation, our hemisphere, our world, from the vantage point of the poor – to open our eyes as the light is switched on, even though it may take time to get used to the brightness, because then we begin to see things as they really are.
Dom Romero, symbol of all the 20th century martyrs not only of El Salvador and of the Americas, but of all the world of the oppressed, was a man of God and of the people who placed justice in the first place, “Seek first the kingdom of God and its justice…” affirms Jesus. Today a saint removed from the people is a mistake. Romero is the kind of saints people need and want as a model of faith and life.
“God passed through El Salvador in the person of Romero,” wrote Padre Ellacuria, himself assassinated together with four other Jesuits, a woman who was their cook, and her 15 year old daughter, on Nov. 22, 1989, at the hands of the same repressive regime. “The crime of those martyrs was that they were in solidarity with the poor – concludes Marcelo Barros, a Brazilian Benedictine. – They wouldn’t have been killed if their way of life had consisted only in dancing and selling religious articles.”
(From Xaverian Mission Newsletter)