Oscar Romero, whom Pope Francis canonised, has become increasingly a man for our times. He lived in a violent land trapped in civil war and speaks to people caught in the war and destruction in Gaza and Ukraine, as well as to the victims of civil war in Myanmar, Sudan and in totalitarian regimes. He also lived in a time of injustice in which the wealthy slandered and killed the poor to maintain their wealth and power, mirroring the gap between the wealthy ad poor today and the helplessness of those without resources.
His world echoes the challenges facing the world today of global warming, discrimination, violence against refugees and immigrants, and the power for evil of social media. These are issues in which we may be torn between powerlessness and the desire to make a difference. He was a timid man who reluctantly accepted public responsibility in the Catholic Church, an inward man of prayer called on to speak out publicly and eventually to share the fate of the poor people whose cause he represented. He speaks to us in our self-doubt and powerlessness today.
Oscar Romero grew up in a large family in a small town and would have ordinarily learned a trade. His early life was uneventful. He wanted to become a priest, joined a minor seminary when twelve years old. In his parish work he was energetic and focused on the interior life and on the inner life of the church. He was shy and liable to depression.
After twenty years in parish life he was made an auxiliary Bishop in San Salvador, soon afterwards was named Bishop of a rural diocese, and then made Archbishop of San Salvador. It was a time of acute conflict in El Salvador between an autocratic and repressive government that represented landowners and the wealthy and groups that pressed for a more just society. The army and death squads murdered thousands of poor people. When he was appointed activist Catholics saw him as conservative in theology and disposition, the wealthy as a safe and timid pair of hands.
The turning point came when Rutilio Grande, a Jesuit priest and friend whom Pope Francis has also beatified, was murdered by the police in his ministry to poor workers on the coffee plantations. His death awakened Romero to the injustice afflicting poor workers and their advocates. He cancelled the Masses in his diocese so that people could attend Grande’s funeral, and subsequently called out the Government for its complicity in violence against the people and the priests and nuns who served them. He received no help from Roman authorities in his request for support. He was eventually murdered while celebrating Mass.
Romero was above all a Saint of El Salvador. He stood up for the poor in a time of civil war. It was then easy to see the war as a crusade in which Christians should be involved. Yet the end of the civil war did stop the killings but left soldiers on both sides moneyless with only guns as a source of income. Armed robbery and murder often orchestrated by criminal gangs multiplied under different regimes. The gap between the wealthy and the poor remains. The present Prime Minister has diminished the killings has built huge jails in which people from poor neighbourhoods are held without being charged.
Oscar Romero embodied Pope Francis’ call to Catholics to go beyond the Church doors into their surrounding world and to reach out to those in need and badly treated. In his life Romero showed the conversion required in moving from a faith dominated by fear and introspection to one that is proclaimed boldly. He also showed the cost of discipleship.
Fr Andrew Hamilton SJ writes for Jesuit Communications and Jesuit Social Services.
