Introduction
It is the greatest grace and privilege of my life to have known and worked with Blessed Oscar Romero throughout his three years as Archbishop of San Salvador - and truly 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. Over nearly four decades he has been my inspiration and my guide offering hope in times of pressure and struggle; and in the spiritually bleaker times he has been an ever-present source of consolation.
As a short aside for your special Westminster interest: this diocese and the House of Commons are also entwined in Oscar Romero’s story. When Romero was under attack Cardinal Hume came to his aid; and in all he wrote four letters of encouragement and collegial solidarity. I carried those letters by hand and I can testify that they were hugely important to Romero. In the mid-1980s with El Salvador by now enveloped in civil war, CAFOD took a delegation to El Salvador to visit relief projects for refugees and war orphans. Here it is. And on the left is….His Eminence Cardinal Vincent Nichols, a mere Monsignor then! He and I carried an exact replica of this iconic Romero framed photograph from London to Miami and on to San Salvador where it hung in the Jesuit University. This is the same picture now. The military unit which slaughtered six Jesuits and their housekeepers in 1989, fired a bullet through Romero’s portrait as they left, and then turned a flame thrower on it. And, you may know, 116 MPs and Peers nominated Oscar Romero for the 1979 Nobel Peace Prize which provided critical support to the beleaguered Archbishop.
Today I am full of joy because I detect in so many of Pope Francis’ speeches and actions, in his teaching and his writings, a strong Romero flavour. Maybe it’s just wishful thinking but my sense is that Pope Francis is very familiar indeed with Romero and his homilies. Long ago he declared to journalists “quite simply ‘For me Romero is a man of God’.
The Jesuit theologian, Ignacio Ellacuria, himself later to join the gallery of El Salvador’s martyrs, famously said “With Monseñor Romero God passed through El Salvador.” I would add: that with Archbishop Romero God passed through the universal Church. And we have prayed and worked hard to have his sanctity recognised as a martyr of the Church.
The Beatification
But I have to tell you that there have been years of hostility to Romero’s beatification, a kind of Romero-phobia, evident in dogged obstruction to his cause from senior officials in the Vatican Curia. In Pope Francis’ own words: “The martyrdom of Archbishop Romero did not end at the moment of his death. But even afterwards, following his death it continued. He was defamed, slandered, his memory dragged through the mud, and his martyrdom continued even by his own brothers in the priesthood and in the episcopate.” In 2013 Pope Francis had dramatically ‘unblocked’ the road to Romero’s canonisation. Then in February of last year he issued a decree declaring unequivocally that Romero died a martyr, in odium fidei, out of ‘hatred of the faith’.
On May 23rd 2015, in a magnificent ceremony in San Salvador, Oscar Arnulfo Romero y Galdamez was beatified - with 100 bishops and cardinals, 1400 priests and half a million lay folk in attendance; it was the biggest non-papal beatification in history. And there, at the very moment that the declaration of martyrdom and the decree of beatification was being proclaimed, we saw the spectacular appearance of a rainbow round the sun, a rare, but apparently natural atmospheric phenomenon called a solar halo. Well, it seemed like the angels in heaven were applauding and God was demonstrating explicit approval! “This is my beloved son in whom I am well-pleased.” Even bishops and clergy at the altar pulled their mobile phones out from under their albs and chasubles to capture the moment.
The Martyrdom
Let me briefly tell you Blessed Oscar’s story – but going backwards. First his death; then his life and ministry.
We have to go back 37 years to 1980. I was awakened at 5 in the morning by a telephone call from the Jesuit Provincial’s office in El Salvador with the shocking news that on the previous evening Archbishop Romero had been killed.
It had been at 6.25pm on Monday March 24th 1980 in the capital city, San Salvador - with the country, El Salvador, on the edge of civil war. Archbishop Romero was celebrating a memorial requiem Mass in the chapel of the Divine Providence cancer hospital where he lived. His homily was a poignant reflection on St John’s gospel, chapter 12 – “The hour has come for the Son of Man to be glorified…Unless a grain of wheat falls into the earth and dies it remains just a single grain; but if it dies it yields a rich harvest”.
Romero stands and speaks at the altar. It’s not a long homily by his standards – just ten minutes. He concludes and moves to the centre of the altar to pick up the chalice and the paten, to begin the Offertory, with the words
“may this body broken and this blood shed for human beings encourage us to give our body and blood up to suffering and pain as Christ did – not for self but to bring justice and peace for our people...”
He is dedicating his life to justice and peace – no less! His epitaph.
It’s certain that at that moment he saw the assassin take aim through the open door of the chapel. He’d known he was going to die and he’d prepared himself for the moment. He didn’t shout out fearing that those around him in the congregation would be killed too. But he flinched, the body’s natural reflex action; and we know from examining his martyrdom clothing that a great cold sweat poured out of his body. The marksman fired and the single bullet entered his body just above the heart. He slumped to the floor at the foot of a huge crucifix with blood pouring from his mouth, nostrils and ears. Lamentations and pandemonium followed.
Amazingly a nun on the front bench had a micro cassette tape recorder. And so this evening, here in London, we are in a position to press the button and to re-play the martyrdom of Oscar Romero. Listen carefully to these 40 seconds. They are the virtually inaudible last words of Archbishop Romero and then the execution shot.
It brought to an abrupt end three dramatic years of Romero’s ministry in San Salvador, what we might perhaps call his ‘public ministry’. But much more than that. In one of the most Catholic countries in the world, dedicated to Christ the Saviour, the metropolitan archbishop of the capital city was shot dead in the middle of the Eucharistic celebration. Such choreography would have been beyond even Hollywood’s imagination.
The execution, and that is what it was, of this devoted disciple of Jesus Christ was met with disbelief; it stunned the world and the Church. Carried out by a death squad linked to the country’s armed forces, close ally of the Pentagon in Washington, it was planned, approved and financed (not by atheists or communists or Islamist fanatics) but by wealthy and powerful members of the Catholic and evangelical Christian oligarchy and their military.
A Eucharistic Martyr
Archbishop Romero had sensed his death was imminent. On the afternoon before his killing he’d unexpectedly visited his confessor, Fr Azcue, saying “I want to feel clean before God.” He overcame his deep-seated fears. He accepted it with great equanimity. He prepared himself and he went like a lamb to the slaughter. It was a given-life – a free gift with consequences – not a taken-life with fearfulness of victimhood. And so we could say he died ‘Eucharistically’, imitating the Eucharistic sacrifice, and in the middle of the celebration of the Eucharist - an unfinished Eucharist. Six days later, on Palm Sunday, I was present, together with Westminster Bishop Jim O’Brien, at Romero’s funeral which became yet another unfinished Eucharist after bombs were thrown from the national palace into the massed crowd of mourners in front of the Cathedral. The ensuing stampede and gunfire brought pure terror. Over forty people lost their lives in this farewell massacre.
The First 50 Years
At first sight Oscar Romero, born on August 15 1917, was an unlikely martyr. A devout boy of humble origins, the second of eight children, I think we would probably describe him as a bit nerdy; at 13 he entered junior seminary with the Claretians; he completed his studies for the priesthood at the Gregorian University in Rome and was ordained there in 1942.
There followed 25 years dedicated and exemplary service to the rural diocese of San Miguel. (What we might call the ‘hidden years’). He was a zealous and energetic pastor; he became Chancellor of the diocese, Cathedral Administrator, Guardian of the shrine of Our Lady Queen of Peace, a respected preacher, radio journalist and editor of the diocesan newspaper. He lived a simple and austere life. He used a discipline at that time. And it seems he had a quick temper for the failings and transgressions of his fellow clergy. He was a deeply prayerful man; he wore the Carmelite scapular and had a lifelong dedication to the rosary and to the Sacred Heart of Jesus. He promoted the local equivalents of the SVP, the Legion of Mary, and alcoholics anonymous; and he used to organise a regular breakfast for the shoeshine boys. He was a pastoral priest, loyal and orthodox, the very best of his vintage. He was a pillar of the diocese. He was close to the people and the people loved him. They called him a ‘gran Migueleño’.
In 1967 he celebrated his silver jubilee of priesthood, was made a Monsignor, and appointed to be Secretary of the Bishops Conference of El Salvador in the capital city.
Mid-Life Crisis
There followed seven years of pastoral famine. As an ecclesiastical bureaucrat Romero was like a fish out of water. He had few friends in San Salvador. By all accounts he was sullen, awkward, uncommunicative and pedantic. It sounds like a mid-life or mid-ministry crisis. He had absorbed Vatican II happily but the practical applications got him jumpy and he was perplexed by Medellin, the 1968 LA Bishops’ Council meeting. Appointed an auxiliary bishop in 1970, he rarely attended the senate of priests; as editor of the archdiocesan newspaper he removed its social thrust and he was responsible for some full-frontal attacks on progressive ideas - with the Jesuit High School accused of disseminating Marxist propaganda dressed up as liberating education. He was very visible now. And by his actions, his words and his silences, he was seen to be stubbornly at odds with the social commitment of the clergy and basic Christian communities and the pastoral line of the archdiocese in responding to the exploitation, suffering and hunger in the countryside. His reputation as a reactionary conservative stems from this period.
He did suffer from scrupulosity and it seems at this time also from an obsessive compulsive cycle of behaviour - OCD. But he took counselling with cognitive therapy, and with subtle shifts in his self-understanding and his theology, he overcame it. Romero’s spirituality gradually evolved away from one which saw holiness equated with perfection and rigid observance of spiritual and ascetic practices - to a dynamic, faithful searching for what God was really asking of him as he gradually began to identify the God of Jesus who lived in the suffering people of El Salvador.
Santiago de Maria
At the end of 1974, he was sent off to the countryside as Bishop of Santiago de Maria. Back amongst the people he inserted himself once more into grassroots pastoral activity with a punishing schedule of preaching and visitations. Meeting the people, he was astonished to discover that the legal minimum wage for the coffee pickers and day labourers was a fiction even on the plantations of distinguished mass-going Catholics. A terrible massacre of peasants in the diocese at Tres Calles shocked him. ‘I began to see things differently’ he said as his eyes were slowly opened to the appalling plight of the campesinos.
El Salvador Background
PICTURE Perhaps now a brief word about El Salvador - a tiny country in Central America not much bigger than Wales. When Romero was archbishop, it had just over 4 million people. El Salvador lived from agricultural exports, mainly coffee, sugar cane and cotton grown on a plantation system. It had one of the worst land distributions in Latin America. Much of the country was owned by only 14 families and in fact 2% of the population actually owned 60% of the land – and it was the best and most fertile land. There were masses of landless peasants who survived as best they could as exploited seasonal day labourers often forced to move from one end of the country to the other in search of work. In three decades of impressive economic growth, there had been increasing poverty and ever more widespread hunger and malnutrition in the countryside to which I myself was a witness, living in Central America at that time. Inequality grew and grew.
Since 1932 the country had been run by the army in alliance with the wealthy land-owning elite. Every attempt at the most minimal land reform was scuppered as ‘communist’. Rural trade unions were banned illegal organisations. Political change was prevented by massive electoral fraud – the opposition regularly won the elections but they always lost the count! Fraud led to protests and public demonstrations. Demonstrations led to killings and exile. Instead of land reform and social development, the response to the explosive social situation in the rural areas was military crackdown and repression. Rural militias were set up to counter the organised peasant associations. Atrocities and death squads followed – and then in response there began to emerge armed guerrilla organisations of the far left. An escalating spiral of deadly violence - that was 1977 El Salvador when, against all the odds, Romero was named the new archbishop of San Salvador.
His appointment brought dismay and consternation to the clergy. But it was to the delight of the military and the wealthy landowning class who wanted to see the Church back in the sacristy and an end to the Medellin-inspired social and pastoral programmes, that the outgoing Archbishop Chavez had initiated and which gave heart and encouragement to the landless poor.
But the shy, retiring, conservative Romero, the man they thought would cause no waves, had changed and was changing - and in the end that was because he allowed himself to be changed.
Rutilio Grande’s Assassination and the ‘Misa Unica’
Romero’s installation as archbishop, in February 1977, coincided with a massive presidential electoral fraud, followed by killings and unprecedented national tension. Romero had scarcely moved in when his friend, the Jesuit priest Rutilio Grande, was murdered by a death squad, as he drove to celebrate Mass in an outlying hamlet. His body was riddled with bullets – police bullets. Romero drove out to the parish and spent most of the night praying beside Rutilio’s body. He was tearful and filled with compassion. In this Gethsemane moment he saw in his mind’s eye where it would inevitably lead him if he followed this through - and he assented. His initial disbelief became prophetic determination. In a sense it crystallised the change and the conversion that he was going through. Rutilio, known personally, by the way, to the then Fr Jorge Bergoglio, is often described as Romero’s John the Baptist. Now, as Pope Francis, he has said that one cannot understand Romero without Rutilio.
Bishop Rivera Damas, Romero’s successor, said of that night of prayer and discernment:-
“One martyr gave life to another martyr. Kneeling before the body of Fr Rutilio Grande, Monseñor Romero, on his 20th day as archbishop, felt the call from Christ to overcome his natural human timidity and to be filled with apostolic courage. From that moment on Monseñor Romero left behind the pagan lands of Tyre and Sidon and marched boldly towards Jerusalem.”
Romero’s compassion was transformed into action. He suspended all formal relations with the government until the assassins would be brought to justice. He opened a diocesan legal aid centre to document all the killings and disappearances, the rapes and the assaults and to give pastoral support to the families and communities affected. But crucially, the following Sunday, he decreed that the churches of the diocese be closed and all the masses cancelled. He called the faithful to attend a single Mass which he would celebrate in front of the Cathedral. He preached eloquently about Fr Rutilio to a crowd of over 100,000 – a passionate witness to the ugly truth. ‘Anyone who touches one of my priests touches me.’
After the ‘misa unica’, the anger of the wealthy Catholics from the land-owning and commercial class, was palpable and, as in the case of Jesus early in his ministry, they began to plot against him. The Nuncio, Maltese Archbishop Emanuele Gerada, scolded him like a naughty child, describing his action as ill-advised and irresponsible. For his part PICTURE Romero visited dozens of different communities and parishes and heard their stories, their joys and their sorrows. People queued up to see him in his office and he listened till late into the night.
His Homilies and His Charisma
You may know Romero’s preaching and teaching ministry was centred on his weekly homily within the Sunday morning Mass in his Cathedral. For me and many others Romero was the evangeliser par excellence. He was a self-effacing man with a special gift from God; and that was his spectacular talent as a preacher. The homilies were legendary – and the whole country listened by radio. There, before he broke the bread, he broke open the Word of God. In the first part he explained the scriptural texts with biblical exegesis and catechetical skill; but beyond that, with genuine theological depth, he grounded it - and situated concepts such as salvation and history, the Church and God’s kingdom, transcendence and eschatology in (and for) the reality of El Salvador and its people.
In the second part he applied that Word of God to the specific and complex circumstances of the time, looking back over the most important events of the week and giving a prophetic judgement on them. He became the voice of the voiceless, mellifluous and didactic, a word that accuses and brings hope, seeking reconciliation, inviting a change of heart, a faithful witness to truth in a society of cover-up and lies - but he spoke that truth from his ‘cathedra’, his episcopal seat, and within the Eucharistic liturgy.
I have sat through hour-long sermons in his cathedral; the packed congregation was focused on his every word - the only interruption being their applause, the people’s Amen, you might say. He unpacked the Gospel and presented it as truly good news to his people, to his poor; and then, and this is absolutely crucial, he set about making that good news a reality in their lives through the pastoral and social programmes of the diocese. Compassion and words of hope were translated into deeds. It was unmistakably a faith that does justice – in the style of Evangelii Gaudium. It was a beautiful blend of orthodoxy (right teaching) and orthopraxis (right pastoral action). A certain Joseph Ratzinger has said that orthodoxy without orthopraxis is empty and void; whilst orthopraxis without orthodoxy is blind. Romero was the man of the synthesis.
Which brings me to the essence of Romero: he reflected all week long on the Word of God, he absorbed and he inhabited the Word of God - and then he allowed himself to be inhabited by that Word of God – it was in his pores; simultaneously he listened to the poor, he sensed and he truly inhabited the world of the poor; and he was also inhabited by that world of the poor. It had got under his skin too. Here was the core of Romero’s charisma. He inhabited, and was inhabited by, the Word of God and the world of the poor. It’s not a clever play on words. They were the basis of his prophetic witness, his teaching and his action.
“We would be false to our mission as shepherds, he said, if we were to reduce evangelisation to mere practices of piety and disincarnate sacramentalism”
Romero’s theology is best-described as the theology of the beatitudes. Romero contended that only if we put the Beatitudes into practice can we begin to build that civilisation of love, of which Pope St JP2 spoke so often and to which we all aspire. He said:
A civilisation of love is not sentimentality, it is justice and truth. A civilisation of love that did not demand justice for people would not be true civilisation…..Because of this, it is only a caricature of love when we try to patch up with charity what is owed in justice, when we cover with an appearance of benevolence what we are failing in social justice. True love means demanding what is just.
Colossal Challenges
‘Demanding what is just!’ Let’s just think for a moment about what Archbishop Romero had to confront over those three years as archbishop. I’ve made a list of 15 colossal challenges. He faced and sought to respond to
• pervasive and extreme poverty;
• paramilitary killings of community leaders;
• peasant massacres and the indiscriminate shooting of urban demonstrators by the army and police;
• the torture and disappearance of political prisoners;
• the decapitation and mutilation of death squad victims;
• PICTURE the assassination of six of his priests and dozens of catechists;
• the deportation of foreign clergy;
• the desecration of churches and their tabernacles;
• the public threat from a death squad to exterminate all the Jesuits in the country;
• the bombings of the diocesan radio station and printing press;
• the discovery of a suitcase of dynamite placed behind the altar at his Sunday mass;
• the kidnapping and execution by armed leftist groups of businessmen, and government ministers;
• the occupations of churches and the cathedral by popular movements;
• PICTURE continuous campaigns of slander and defamation in the press;
• and death threats from both the right and the left
He preached and he spoke out trying to find the words to convey the horror of what was happening in a deeply Catholic country which he said had come to resemble the dominion of hell.
I am grieved that our people continue to be massacred merely for taking to the street to petition for justice and liberty.
What have we to show to Christ in El Salvador in Holy Week? ....Nothing but a week of bloodshed!
I do not understand Mr President how you can declare yourself before the nation, Catholic by upbringing and by conviction; and yet allow these unspeakable outrages on the part of the security forces in a country we call civilised and Christian.
My job is to go around picking up the dead bodies of the victims of the persecution of the Church.
Many things brought Romero pain and desolation but I have not the slightest doubt that the attitude of the Papal Nuncio and the open hostility of four of his brother bishops were his crown of thorns. He spoke about it to me: the bishops’ resentments, their trickery and dishonesty, their abusive language towards him, their outrageous accusations, their plotting behind his back with the military (of which I have evidence in this telephone intercept), their seeming indifference to human rights atrocities and their wilful blindness to the reality of the persecution of the Church even after six priests and dozens of catechists had been murdered.
The Last Days in 1980
As El Salvador edged towards war, the threats and insults became so intense a fever existed; Romero knew he was going to die. PICTURE
“I have frequently been threatened with death”, he said. “I am bound as a pastor by a divine command to give my life for those whom I love, and that is all Salvadorans, even those who are going to kill me. Martyrdom is a grace from God which I do not believe I deserve…But if they succeed in killing me, can you tell them that I pardon and bless those who do it. But I wish that they could realise that they’re wasting their time. A bishop may die, but the Church of God, which is the people, will never die.”
PICTURE At the Mass on Sunday March 23rd, the day before he died, in an extraordinary homily he tackled the most difficult question that was insistently being put to him - how should the ordinary soldiers respond when put under orders to kill and massacre?
"Before an order to kill that a man may give, God’s law must prevail: Thou shalt not kill! No soldier is obliged to obey an order against the law of God….It is time to obey your consciences rather than the orders of sin.... In the name of God, therefore and in the name of this suffering people, whose lamentations reach up to heaven, I beg you, I beseech you, I order you in the name of God: Stop the repression!”
Archbishop Romero had pronounced his own death sentence. And he knew it! The military high command read it as incitement to mutiny and an already-existing plan for Romero’s assassination was activated.
The Legacy and Pope Francis
They wanted to silence forever this subversive bishop. They failed dismally. Now, raised to the altars, he is acclaimed in El Salvador as ‘Spiritual Father of the Nation’ and, with apologies to Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar, he was without doubt ‘the Greatest Salvadoran of them all’. PICTURE Even the United Nations General Assembly have ‘canonised’ him in their own way!
Across the globe Blessed Oscar Romero is embraced with admiration, with affection and with pride as an icon of holiness by Catholics and Anglicans alike. He is the model of a bishop - ticking all the boxes of John Paul’s Apostolic Exhortation ‘Pastores Gregis’; but above all he is a credible witness to the resurrection of Jesus Christ for these sceptical times – as of course is Pope Francis. As they say, Romero ‘talked the talk and he walked the walk’. He was utterly orthodox and utterly radical.
He has shown us that the ‘preferential option for the poor’ is not just some meaningless glib phrase from the late 20th century. He lived it. His ministry as archbishop epitomised a poor Church for and with the poor. He was a Shepherd who smelled of the sheep. His diocesan Church was indeed a field-hospital to welcome the distressed and the broken-hearted. Romero not only loved the poor he defended the poor. And so Blessed Oscar Romero challenges us, and I believe that Pope Francis is striving to do the same. And if we truly commit ourselves, then a preferential option for the poor, in the diocese, in the parish and in our personal lives, whilst full of risks, is do-able - and is coherent in our ever more divided, unequal and materialistic world.
I am astonished at how much of Oscar Romero, his courage, his language, his praxis and commitment to the poor are visible in the words and deeds of Pope Francis. When canonisation comes as it surely will, and very soon, I believe St Romero of the Americas will take his place alongside St Francis of Assisi as a banner of this pontificate.
Blessed Oscar Romero is not a martyr because they killed him; they killed him because he was a martyr, a witness - a witness to the unpalatable truth, a witness to peace who rejected the violence of both right and left, a witness to Catholic Social Teaching, to Vatican II and to the whole Magisterium of the Church which he preached and upheld with absolute fidelity until his dying breath. The stone which the builders rejected has become the cornerstone!
Blessed Oscar Romero, defender of the poor, pray for us.
