Romero still teaches 30 years after his murder

As the 30th anniversary of the assassination of Archbishop Oscar Romero approaches, South African Catholics tell MICHAIL RASSOOL what influence the Salvadoran prelate has had on the Catholic Church.

South African Catholics say that many lessons can be learnt from the example of martyred Archbishop Óscar Romero of San Salvador.

March 24 sees the 30th anniversary of the death of Archbishop Romero, who was assassinated by agents for El Salvador’s military junta for playing a courageous pastoral role promoting the cause of Christ and his kingdom in a political environment of brutal violence and injustice.

It is a courage that theologian Fr Albert Nolan admires. This courage, the Dominican said, involves honestly standing up for the cause of justice and God’s peace, despite knowing such courage could lead to one’s own death.

Being an essentially conservative man Archbishop Romero could easily have allowed himself to be reduced to silence, to lapse into a comfort zone. Instead he opted to act against his natural inclinations, which to him represents “the ideal Church leadership”, Fr Nolan said.

Fr Mathibela Sebothoma of Soshanguve, Pretoria, was engaged in the struggle against apartheid and remains outspoken on justice and peace matters.

He recalled Archbishop Romero’s conversion from broad acceptance of the status quo to attempting to be a major agent of change in a society intensely divided according to race, between rich and poor, urban and rural.

He said despite tacit agreements within the Church about the injustices, torture, secret prisons, government obstruction of violence, media lies in El Salvador of that period, the kind of transformation the archbishop called for was too radical even for many of his priests. For this reason he  made some enemies within his own Church, Fr Sebothoma said.

He said Archbishop Romero provided the ideal blueprint for the Catholic struggle for justice and peace as the Church tries to deal with issues of poverty, HIV/Aids, human trafficking, and so on.

Fr Sebothoma said he fails to understand why Archbishop Romero’s sainthood cause in Rome has stalled, 13 years after Pope John Paul II declared the archbishop a Servant of God, thereby officially opening his sainthood cause.

To mark the anniversary of his assassination, the bishops of El Salvador have written to the Vatican to request that the cause be expedited. Many Salvadoran Catholics reportedly refer to the late archbishop as San Romero.

In his last homily before his death Archbishop Romero said: “Those who surrender to the service of the poor through love of Christ, will live like the grains of wheat that die. They only apparently die. If they were not to die, there would remain a solitary grain. The harvest comes because of the grain that dies.

“We know that every effort to improve society, above all when society is so full of injustice and sin, is an effort that God blesses; that God wants; that God demands of us.”

Archbishop Romero was assassinated by right-wing gunmen as he celebrated a funeral Mass in the chapel of a local hospital, on March 24, 1980. An audio recording of the fateful Mass suggests that he was shot while elevating the chalice.

“I am bound, as a pastor, by divine command to give my life for those whom I love, and that is all Salvadorans, even those who are going to kill me,” he had written to a local newspaper two weeks before.

The archbishop evidently anticipated his brutal death because of the strong stand he was taking against El Salvador’s oligarchy — a regime controlled by a few aristocratic families with a stranglehold on the country, and its powerful military arm.

The military brutalised anyone from the mostly poverty-stricken communities, mainly peasants, who protested against the brutal methods being waged against them, in order to maintain the country’s social order, or the stark inequities that characterised Salvadoran life.

It was a situation in which the peasant death toll exceeded 3000 per month. Up to 80000 Salvadorans are known to have been killed by the regime, and 300000 disappeared, never to be seen again. A million fled their homeland, and an additional million became homeless fugitives from the military and police — all of this in a nation of only 5,5 million people.

The day before he was killed, after three years of preaching and broadcasting against a political environment of violence and injustice — which had intensified during his three years as archbishop of San Salvador — the prelate decided to use more direct measures in promoting the cause of Christ and his kingdom.

In a sermon the day before his murder, he called on soldiers to become agents of peace: “Brothers, you are from the same people. You kill your fellow peasants…No soldier is obliged to obey an order that is contrary to the will of God…In the name of God, in the name of this suffering people, I ask you, I implore you, I command you in the name of God: stop the repression!”

His words were not heeded: the next day a sniper shot the archbishop dead.

Nine years after Archbishop Romero was murdered, on November 16, 1989, an elite army hit squad assassinated six Jesuit priests and two women at the Jesuit-run Central American University.

Born on August 15, 1917 in Ciudad Barrios, a Salvadoran mountain town near the Honduran border, the second of seven children, he was ordained in Rome in 1942. His appointment as auxiliary bishop of San Salvador in 1970 and as its archbishop in 1977 was greeted with dismay by opponents of the regime because Romero was known as a cautious and conservative man.

Indeed, Bishop Romero was not impressed with the reformist initiatives of San Salvador’s Archbishop Luis Chávez (another candidate for the sainthood), and was outspoken in his opposition to the liberation theology which was taking hold in Latin America.

It was the 1977 assassination of a progressive Jesuit priest and friend, Fr Rutilio Grande, that changed Archbishop Romero’s vision and attitudes — his metanoia moment, as Fr Sebothoma described it.

Later Archbishop Romero recalled of Fr Grande’s murder: “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’.”

Fr Anthony Egan SJ of the Jesuit Institute of South Africa said that Archbishop Romero had started doing what the local Church had criticised the Jesuits for: drawing their contextual theology and praxis directly from the grassroots.

After becoming bishop of Santiago de Maria in 1974, he began paying more attention to the abject conditions in which people lived, and started employing a more direct, consultative approach with them on pastoral matters.

At this time, although he did not support it, he began to understand why a few farm workers and labourers saw armed revolution as the only viable recourse, although most of them turned to the social teachings of the Church. Sources say thousands joined Small Christian Communities which sought to reform society in the light of the Gospels.

Such activities were termed “Marxist” by the ruling classes and the military was ordered to shoot strikers, union organisers, human rights activists (particularly teachers), and even nuns and priests. The army’s efforts were supplemented by mercenary death squads roaming the countryside killing, raping and torturing with impunity, and then collecting cash bounties on each man, woman and child that was victimised.

Observation and action were fully married in Archbishop Romero after his friend and trusted aide Fr Grande was ambushed and killed, along with an old man and boy, for the work he was doing on behalf of the region’s sugar-cane workers.

Soon afterwards, death squads killed another priest he knew well, Fr Alfonso Navarro and two companions, for whom the prelate offered Mass in the house where the three had been carried. The archbishop’s diaries clearly show he believed he had been called once again.

At the heart of all his pastoral messages, speeches and homilies was the pursuit of a greater goal: transcendence and the importance of the God of Life.

Fr Egan described Archbishop Romero’s whole life, from start to finish, as a path of conversion.

Another key lesson from his life, Fr Egan said, is the moral challenge of engaging with people outside of one’s usual comfortable spheres of assumptions.

Like Archbishop Romero, Fr Egan said, they should embrace the idea of speaking to “faithful dissenters” for the sake of forming a broader perspective.